MIT Solve

Solution Overview

Solution Name:

Kimple Education

One-line solution summary:

Kimple unlocks students' potential to solve global problems through innovative classroom dynamics for teachers.

Pitch your solution.

Young people and their employment prospects are of concern today. Their lack of experience and training, added to the negative impact of the C19, makes them more fragile.

This situation is even worse for young people in vulnerable urban neighborhoods, where a higher incidence of concentrated poverty perpetuates a circle of family disinvestment in educational experiences in pursuit of these informal and precarious job opportunities.

In this context, we join the mission of bringing new tools to young people to access job opportunities through quality employment, thus empowering new generations in current technical knowledge and soft skills key to their personal, social and work development in a challenging global context.

We provide teachers with new content, methodologies and active learning experiences connected to the social and work realities to prepare students for a challenging future.

Kimple is the tool to promote innovative learning in a simple way in every classroom.

Film your elevator pitch.

What specific problem are you solving?

There is a growing gap between teachers’ skills and the ones required to teach new generations for the future. This lack of preparation directly affects student’s engagement and development. This happens in almost all countries around the world, with special focus on emerging countries:

Lack of lifelong learning and upskilling programs for teachers on a systematic basis, with special focus on emerging countries.
Limited access to different methodologies and innovative content, which are usually kept to high-income private schools that can afford teacher training as well as innovative content.
Connectivity gap that broadens inequitable access to digital learning processes.

At this early stage, we are focused on Spanish speaking countries (420M of population). Since this problem mainly affects teachers from low and medium-income schools from around the world, we estimate it currently impacts around 90% of the total schools of the region, that is, around 200.000 schools and 130M students in Spain, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Kimple is the tool to narrow these differences by improving teachers' capabilities at the same time that help students to succeed in the XXIst Century without leaving anyone behind

What is your solution?

Kimple is a digital marketplace for teachers with innovative learning dynamics based on emerging topics. Every teacher will find in Kimple an easy-to-use tool to be implemented in the classroom or remotely.

Each of these dynamics includes the 4 keys to make the transformation possible:

Guidance and professional development for teachers.
Active methodologies to develop students’ essential skills, such as critical thinking, problem solving, digital skills, creativity or teamwork.
Global content. Based on 3 categories: Computational Thinking, Global Citizenship and Entrepreneurial Spirit, we focus on contemporary subjects such as sustainability, globalization, future technologies, diversity, SDG, oracy and debate, among others.
90 % of our dynamics are designed for an offline classroom implementation, since we promote experiential learning and we make it available to rural and low-digital areas.

We are a digital marketplace with a B2B model with schools. We identify and select content from international authors and distribute it under a revenue sharing model. Our user is the teacher and our end target is their students.

Kimple supports schools in the challenge of modernizing education.We transform the educational system in a scalable and sustainable way through teachers’ empowerment at the same time we encourage students to learn for the future.

Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?

Kimple is the result of 5 years visiting and working with more than 1.000 public, private and chartered/ semi-granted schools across Latam in rural and vulnerable environments. During that time, we shared visions and challenges with teachers, pedagogical leads and school boards.

Throughout this journey we have come to understand that schools share the following main challenges:

How to train teachers on new pedagogies and content on an ongoing basis, with limited time and resources (teachers upskilling)
How will these teachers be able to bring global challenges into the classroom and develop students' skills?

Schools and teachers are aware of their challenges in training the new generations, but there’s a need in having the right tools to address it. Kimple provides an innovative content model focused on teachers' upskilling that will help them to unlock students' potential.

Given the unstable wi-fi connection of a great part of the school network in Latam, we developed an asynchronous platform allowing Kimple to be implemented fast and easily.

Our focus on teacher upskilling combined with classroom practice has been highlighted as our main value.

Kimple was tested with several directors and teachers from urban and rural areas, low and medium income schools in Spain and Argentina. We are currently working with schools in both countries with constant feedback and content demands, allowing us to feed the product for growth and adaptation.

Which dimension of the TPrize Challenge does your solution most closely address?

Support teachers and educational institutions with teaching and learning methodologies, tools, and resources that help develop future skills for students

Explain how the problem you are addressing, the solution you have designed, and the population you are serving align with the TPrize Challenge.

The existing gap between the school curriculum and the reality outside the classroom is one of the main reasons why not only students find it difficult to get involved with their education, but also one of the main problems for them to get a job afterwards. We present a training proposal that combines skills and competences development with technical training proposal for job placement in the software industry. So, the problem, the solution and the target audience are directly aligned with the TPrize Challenge.

In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?

Madrid, España

What is your solution’s stage of development?

Growth: An organization with an established product, service, or business model rolled out in one or, ideally, several communities, which is poised for further growth.

Explain why you selected this stage of development for your solution.

We started the project design and definition in March 2018. After the design stage, we partnered with Wolox in October 2018, an Argentinian leading software developer (now part of Accenture), to build the platform in cooperation with teachers from Spain and Argentina. Platform developments have been running since then t. We have developed our own team since Feb 2020.

Our First commercial MVP was launched in Nov 2019. We started our first promotion campaign in Argentina , and we reached our first customers by March 2020. We currently have customers in Spain and Argentina, with a robust product and a validated business model. We are now focused on growth in our current regions as well as new countries accrossLATAM in urban, rural, low/medium income schools.

Who is the Team Lead for your solution?

Pina de Paz Alvarez - Garcillán