FrogPlay Mobile

Reducing the learning gap by providing equal free access to digital learning content in response to the pandemic’s impact on students

We believe every child should have access to quality education. The pandemic has created a larger learning gap, especially for the lower income communities, and has also severely impacted household income. A larger proportion of children now face a greater chance of being unable to catch up, affecting future livelihoods.

Our solution provides engaging learning content and revision quizzes mapped to core subjects across the entirety of the national syllabus via a mobile app (often the only digital device in a household). The app is available for free download on the AppStore and Google Play.

When the pandemic struck, we established a partnership with the YTL Foundation and Yes (a telecommunications company) called ‘Learn from Home’. Free data was provided to all students, learning content via FrogPlay and a free phone to those in the lower income communities. 

FrogPlay is designed to support self learning by students and created in conjunction with leading organisations that specialise in education including Pelangi (leading publisher), Teach for Malaysia and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. 

To help every child reduce their learning gap, we believe we must meet every child where they are at in how they learn. Our existing solution incentivises them to self assess via the gamified quizzes. 

The solution is scalable in the region to address learning gaps in other countries if more partners are recruited to provide the learning content. For example, Teach for Philippines, Teach for Thailand and Teach for Vietnam.

We want to reduce the learning gap caused by the pandemic and prevent it from compounding as children progress from one year group to another. Malaysia has experienced one of the longest periods of school closure in the world since the pandemic began.  As of August 2021, there has been 41 weeks of complete school closure and 11 weeks of partial school closure (UNESCO data).

Schools have just begun a phased re-opening in October 2021.

McKinsey found the learning gap in USA from low income households (<$25K) was 7 months in maths and 6.5 months in reading. In the absence of official government data we estimate the gap in Malaysia is at least 8 months in maths and 7 months in reading (estimated using McKinsey’s findings and variations in OECD PISA scores between the US and Malaysia).

Malaysia has 5 million students across K-12 spanning all income levels. Government data estimated 2.91 million households out of Malaysia’s 6.39 million households were from the lower income (B40) category.  We estimate there to be 2.27 million B40 students.

The Government is trying to close the gap by extending the current school year by 3 months.  This is not proportionate to the estimated learning gap. Students will need to find alternative methods to catch up, and we know accessibility to solutions (such as tutoring) for lower income families is limited. 

Providing a learning app accessible anytime anywhere, will enable students to catch up.

While our solution could help any child, we are primarily focused on the B40 children. Over our 10 year history, we continue to frequently speak to teachers, B40 parents and NGOs. We know that B40 communities are underserved across two main areas, affordability of tuition and NGO access to digital content aligned to the curriculum. In Malaysia, tutoring is a common solution to help children catch up or perfect grades. The price point is unaffordable for the B40s, who earn less than USD 597 per month. For NGOs who are working serving these communities, they recruit volunteers who require access to digital content in order to give free tuition. 

For most B40 families, the only digital device they have access to is an older generation smart phone with limited internet data (data is shared across the family). 

To solve this problem, we have developed the only comprehensive digital library of the national syllabus in Malaysia. We have also created a reward system. Our app is designed to be easily loaded from phones with a learning experience catered to mobile. Our app is free and students can earn extra data as they learn content (via partnership with Yes telecoms). This helps build autonomy and enable ongoing learning.

We believe that post-pandemic, we should also be building skills that align with the OECD Learning Compass 2030. Through the next phase of our app, students will be able to learn in a way that encompasses the attitudes, knowledge, skills and values required.

Our solution seeks to increase equitable access to quality learning opportunities, especially for underserved learners. Malaysia is uniquely positioned because all schools have access to 4G internet through the Yes telecommunication network. The challenge is that the majority of members from B40 communities struggle to afford the hardware and phone data plans which permit them to access the internet.  This is a prevalent issue which existed before the pandemic struck and has since been compounded by the pandemic due to the impacts on household incomes.

We have designed strategic partnerships into our solution to tackle exactly this issue. Through our partnerships with Yes and the YTL Foundation, over 100,000 phones and 450,000 data SIM cards have been given out to date. Each of these phones has our FrogPlay Mobile app installed on it giving recipients immediate access to our learning content. The app contains lessons and quizzes aligned to core subjects which covers the entire Malaysian national primary and secondary curriculum. This is exactly the content students need to help close the learning gap that has arisen as a result of the pandemic.

We recognise motivation to study varies across different personalities. Our solution includes a gamified learning approach to ensure that learning is also fun and engaging.

Pei Lou Yeoh , Executive Director, FrogAsia

To date we are the only provider of free digital content aligned to the entire national curriculum for all core subjects currently available in Malaysia that is available on a mobile App. The next phase of our solution is to help students develop transformational competencies from the national curriculum per the OECD’s Learning Compass 2030. We believe that by presenting the national curriculum learning outcomes in a real world context, students will be able to develop transformational competencies.

Through our strategic partnerships with Yes and the YTL Foundation we are also in a rare position to tackle accessibility challenges.

Since launching the solution in May 2021 we have already run an interim impact survey. The results found that: 

• 76% of children were from a B40 background
• 95% of parents said our lessons were effective
• 91% of parents said they were enjoyable 
• 70% of them were using our lessons weekly

Today we continue to see high engagement from students with the educational material. Since May this year, there has been over a 211% increase in the number of users doing quizzes in our learning app, FrogPlay Mobile. From an inclusivity standpoint we are also reaching some incredibly marginalised communities as some users are from Malaysia’s refugee community.

Our mobile app is built on a technology stack that is founded upon principles in Open Source from the underlying infrastructure to the libraries that power our user interfaces. We have a content authoring tool, content engine, quiz engine and a user management system built using PHP. 

The FrogPlay mobile app is available on Android and iOS and free to download.

Through our device partnership with YTL Foundation, every device deployed has a pre-loaded app to access immediately.

We measure our impact using two principal methods. Our first method leverages app usage and quiz result data collected from our FrogPlay mobile app to track usage and improvements in student quiz scores. 

Since the solution launched in May 2021 we have observed improvements in quiz scores across the three main subjects of English, Maths and Science. These results were:

Maths -  44.4% improvement for secondary school students and a 30.2% improvement for primary school students

English - 31.1% improvement for secondary school students and 28.9% improvement for primary school students

Science - 30.9% improvement for secondary students and 27.2% improvement for primary school students

The second method is through impact surveys.  We have run an interim impact survey to ensure our solution was being used by the B40 and marginalised communities in Malaysia:

• 76% of children were from a B40 background
• 95% of parents said our lessons were effective
• 91% of parents said they were enjoyable 
• 70% of them were using our lessons weekly

Together with our partners, we aim to reach 300,000 students by the end of 2022 and 1 million by the end of 2024 through accessibility to devices, data and our app. 

 In order to close the learning gap, we aim to see improvements in quiz scores by 30-50% in all students using our app. 

We hope to generate more awareness and momentum having already measured improvements (results repeated below for ease of reference)::

Maths -  44.4% improvement for secondary school students and a 30.2% improvement for primary school students

English - 31.1% improvement for secondary school students and 28.9% improvement for primary school students

Science - 30.9% improvement for secondary students and 27.2% improvement for primary school students

We hope to have a working model in 3 years time and then expand to work with partner organisations in neighbouring countries to replicate.

Accessibility: Families are unable to afford the latest smartphones/mobile devices. The form factor of our solution must be tailored to older hardware.

We are focused on progressing towards universal access to quality education. Developing a cloud based learning solution is essential for scale. However, our approach also needs to involve developing the online solution to meet the form factor of older generations of smartphones. These are more affordable and accessible as they can be purchased second hand. The product and content have to be light enough to load on these devices. 

 We are also developing the solution to operate on medium to low bandwidths. Internet speeds vary across the entire country and this needs to be accommodated. We will continue to work with our strategic partner, Yes, who are committed to providing free data to qualifying families across the nation.

Ensuring our target population has the ability to access the solution via a smartphone is the hardest barrier.  We are working with our partners YTL Foundation and Yes to solve the accessibility problem by providing free and/or low-cost smartphones for those who need them.

FrogAsia was founded in 2012 with a vision that every child should have access to quality education regardless of geographical location or background.

Since 2012 we have been transforming traditional classrooms into 21st century spaces, where every child has the opportunity to be equipped with the knowledge, information and skills that will empower them to be creative communicators, collaborators, and changemakers in their own communities and across the globe through our enterprise product, the Frog VLE.

When Malaysia first went into lockdown we were concerned about the impact on students. Our survey with parents found that they were concerned as there was insufficient learning material online. B40 families were worried they would not be able to afford data and devices for their children. 

We recognised that the impact on B40 students who were already underserved, would be further compounded. Working together with our partners YTL Foundation and Yes, we sought to design and deploy a viable solution that would help them tackle this through the Learn from Home Initiative. 

Through promoting agency and self-learning we believe more students will feel empowered. Alongside this, we believe that if we provide real world applications to frame their learning content as they close the pandemic’s learning gap, they can rebuild back better.

Solution team is part of FrogAsia currently funded by the YTL Foundation for this specific solution.

Total team size: 10

Team Lead: 1 (part time)

Product Design & Development Team: 6 people 

Content Development Team: 3 full time

Volunteer teachers: 60 (working with our Content team)

Our team has extensive experience working with the Ministry of Education and/or were teachers previously themselves.  What unites us is a common sense of purpose to see the livelihoods of Malaysians improve through access to quality education. Over the last 10 years, we have worked directly with teachers and schools and other NGOs, such as Teach for Malaysia, on the ground solving the issues around education inequity.  Working with the Ministry of Education, we delivered the Frog VLE to all 10,000 schools in Malaysia.

There is over 40 years experience between our Director of Technology and Head of Delivery.

At FrogAsia, we practice the Design Thinking methodology. We spend time understanding our users and their problems in order for us to come up with our solutions. User feedback is incorporated in our design and development cycle. As we build our solutions, we run focus groups with students and teachers to test their response and the way they interact with our product. The feedback is then incorporated into our design.

FrogAsia holds its flagship event ‘Leaps of Knowledge’ every year, bringing together thought leaders, educators and innovators to discuss the ongoing evolution of education. When the pandemic struck, the question arose of how we could continue to deliver this event at a time when educators were under most strain and needed it most.

The start of the pandemic saw many lengthy online conferences. The experience of listening to speakers speaking for hours on screen was exhausting for many.

 Our Executive Director conceptualised the creation of a series of short online events called 'Leaps of Knowledge: The HEART Series'. Instead of the usual annual full day conference, we pivoted into a series of shorter events to capture the attention of the audience. She curated an interactive documentary series, taking place throughout 2021, discussing how to rebuild back better in education. The 5 episodes are based on FrogAsia’s five HEART values:

• Here to make a difference;
• Enjoy what you do and who you do it with;
• Act with integrity;
• Reach for perfection; 
• Think ahead and out of the box.

More details and videos produced for the events can be found here: www.leapsofknowledge.com

Our strategic partners are Yes (a telecommunications company) and the YTL Foundation. Our content development partners are the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Teach for Malaysia, and Pelangi (one of the longest running publishers of revision material in Malaysia).

With our content partners, we build content frameworks and training material, source volunteer teachers to develop our content and ensure that all content meets a minimum quality standard.

Our partnership with Yes tackles the affordability and accessibility challenge. Families from low income backgrounds may not be able to afford data to access our cloud based content. Through YTL Foundation we have a partner who is willing to give basic smartphones and through Yes, a partner who provides sim cards loaded with data for free to qualifying families.

The YTL Foundation is the charitable arm of the YTL Corporation. The Foundation was founded on the belief that education is the basis on which every society progresses. The Foundation helps scale FrogAsia’s impact by raising awareness of the importance of education and the role it plays in improving the quality education for Malaysians. The Foundation is also another channel through which FrogAsia can hear the needs of students and teachers across the country.

We are applying because we believe in our vision and to see it realised would benefit from mentorship, increased visibility and funding opportunities that could come from winning the Octava Social Innovation Challenge. 

We do believe our learning solution could help a significantly larger number of children across the region reduce the learning gap. Malaysia was not the only country to face school closures. As an example, UNESCO data indicates that full school closures affected Malaysia for 41 weeks, 49 weeks in the Philippines and 20 weeks in Indonesia.  Partial school closures impacted Malaysia for 11 weeks and 44 weeks in Indonesia. Combined partial and full closures have resulted in disruption to learning.  We believe that the solution we have is equally needed in other countries in the region to assist their students in reducing the learning gap. 

Solving education inequity is a huge task and to make it as affordable as possible for as many children to access the solution but will require partnerships across regions. By being introduced to local partners who share the same vision, it would greatly improve the feasibility of doing so.

In the Asian context there is a very firm belief in scoring good grades using the existing traditional learning methods. However students of today live in an age of greater connectivity and information compared to the age parents and teachers grew up in. We need help to raise advocacy for establishing evidence to prove that gamified learning techniques can help students perform just as well in exams, especially in the Asian context in particular.

We also would greatly value help in raising the call to action with corporates to help tackle the accessibility issues whether it is in the provision of free phones or free data. 

No single company/organisation can achieve universal accessibility on their own. We want to find and unite like minded organisations and bring a coordinated effort to tackling this.

We believe that learning from a broader network of organisations introduced through MIT Solve and Octava will help us successfully implement and reach more students.  In particular would be learning marketing techniques that have been successful in changing consumer mindsets on traditional topics.

Solving education inequity is a huge task and to make it as affordable as possible for as many children to access the solution but will require partnerships across regions. By being introduced to local partners who share the same vision, it would greatly improve the feasibility of doing so.