KidsCap

KidsCap provides competency-based educational activity, assessment tool and consultation for K-level to help the world’s future achieve their true potential.

A lot of parents and stakeholders in education in this region have not yet fully comprehended the diversity of preschool children's natures. Traditional education and assessment are not suitable for everyone and can lead to delayed or inefficient development. KidsCap offers a solution to discover a child’s potential through ‘KidsCap Case’ consisting of 4 sets of competency-based learning activities, while allowing observers to evaluate their learning nature and true capability based on 3 pillars - head, heart and hand. The backbone of the evaluation process is based on algorithms extracted from our experts. After conducting the pilot tests, all of them show positive results - our little participants' developments significantly improve in many aspects. This is because the better understanding we have of a child, the better communication and support we can provide for them. Subsequently, we plan to build a virtual community of children, parents and other stakeholders that promotes child development through workshops and consultation to further support the competency-based learning ecosystem. Going forward, we will build a machine-learning-based evaluation system from our database in Thailand and other countries to help provide an even more reliable and accurate assessment as well as suitable suggestions. Our business model focuses on both B2C and B2B in order to capture the direct, major stakeholders in the education system, which are parents and educators. Children and parents joining KidsCap will push a bottom-up change as individuals, while the educational institutes will be able to provide top-down support as a whole.

Traditional education which students are listeners and teachers are speakers teaching everyone the same lessons in front of the class with less active activities or only read-and-write practice is not suitable for personalized child development, especially preschool students whose development needs to be evolved in every aspect of their lives. Therefore, the diversity of children's nature under traditional education might lead some of their skills to underage development. In the end, this will impactfully affect their lives in the long run. 

Every child has individual pillars of learning. The age of 0-7 is the most important period for brain development, so inappropriate methods can lead to many significant problems. However, for competency-based education, educators can create personalized learning activities for each child to make them willing to cooperate and lead more development efficiently.

We piloted our product, KidsCap Case, along with 10-week online consultation course for 18 preschool students (2-4 years old) at a traditional private kindergarten school in Bangkok, Thailand to help them adjust learning methods that directly match their students' learning behaviors. Only after 2-3 weeks, the parents said they were really satisfied with our product. It really helped them find their children’s learning behaviors and know how to develop their kids further. More than 90 percent of the children are more willing to cooperate with their parents than usual. This leads to high chances of childrens' development efficiency.

Our target population is preschool students (2-5 years old) who study in Bangkok but some of their hometowns are in other provinces.

1. For preschool students, their development will improve by using our competency-based tool, KidsCap Case, to help them have learning progress that matches their learning nature which could be their personalized education. They could become active learners to adapt their learning method to the circumstance.

2. For parents and educators, the target population will not stress with their underage-skill children and consequently have good family relationships. 

3. For the country's impact: overall preschool students’ learning result is better. The quality of well-educated people in the country becomes better emotionally and smartly.

Our approach can apply to Thailand, Vietnam, and also improve the children's development in other countries that are interested in our product.

The educators are familiar with traditional education and conservative method. So it is hard for them to disrupt and initiate a new modern teaching behavior that is widely proving to be more efficient. To adjust their mindset, we could use competency-based education (head, heart, hand models) to support the educators and parents in public and private schools. That we arrange training and educating them on how to classify their learning childrens' behavior and management system that they could duplicate the instruction to treat and communicate with students in each type.

Not only an instruction guideline but an assessment tool and technique are also the management system helps the educators easier understand each student's type and behavior more precisely.

Our solution is practical for educators and children to use as personalized instruction and can still be measured by the traditional education assessment as we already have applied this approach to the traditional kindergarten school for 4 years. Because we do not just develop only one pillar of the competency but we use the pillar to lead all of the learning skills that match students' desires. So this method still aligns with the government education policy and can enhance countries' educational systems.

Our solution can work in a covid 19 epidermic situation as well. We have launched our pivot online consultation course at the same school we stated before.

Our Team Lead is Pharavee Wattananukit, the CEO of Outermost Co., Ltd., who has devoted herself to Thai education development for more than 6 years.

We apply competency-based education that is popular in upper than grade 1 students to preschool students in our pilot MVP and our consultation services. In the near future, we have planned to use digital technology to implement our assessment product by getting more cases as a database and develop a machine learning model that will be usable when a trend of ML as a human helper comes widely in the future.

It is also innovative as we could scale our product and services by helping and training educators and parents.

We piloted our 10-week online homeschooling consultation course at Denla Kindergarten School, a leading private school in Bangkok. The number of student personas that join our class is 10. And the result and feedback from students and parents are great. We evaluate the student every week to follow the childrens' development.

We implement an assessment tool that has 2 of 4 series to the students that will be used by the parents each month and they record the childrens' behavior while following the instruction of the boxset. This method could help the educator evaluate their students' learning base and give consultation and advice to the parents.

Our core technology uses competency-based education (Head, heart, and hand models) to create a personalized education method that allows students to develop their knowledge and competency-based skills. To master their skills in the proper environment and to lead to more efficient student outcomes. 

To evaluate their learning nature and true capability based on 3 pillars - head, heart, and hand. The one who uses a head pillar refers to one whose learning behavior is based on thinking (cognitive domain). The heart pillar refers to one whose learning behavior is based on feeling (affective domain). The hand pillar refers to one whose use of learning behavior is based on doing (psychomotor domain).

As stated before, our assessment tool has 4 series (the accessories in our box series include soil, seed, novel, baking soda, etc.). Each series can be used to evaluate the student. The more series we use, the more precise the result.

1. Activities: To assess the preschool students using our assessment tool to describe their learning behaviors.

To consult the parents about their childrens' nature so that they could treat their own efficiently and happily.

To consult the educators to personalize their preschool students to lead more efficiently or help solve a problem that is caused by some of their underage skills.

 2. Outputs: The students are assessed by a proper method to their nature.

The students are taught the proper method to their nature.

The parents and educators are trained by the competency-based education specialist.

 3. Short-Term Outcomes: The students show the improvement of the learning progress that matches their learning nature. The childrens' stress decrease due to matched communications between students and educators.

 4. Long-Term Outcomes: Parents and educators can understand their students' natures. So the children do not have any underage skills and that they could become active learners to adapt their learning method when the environment changed or is not as personalized as they used to. The childrens' relationship improved with their friends and families. Also the country's educational systems would improve.

Educators of private and public schools.

Parents of the children.

Our KPI within 8 months are.

• Building awareness of the diversity of childrens' learning natural behaviors and our competency-based education method to the parents and educators at least 3,000 people.

• Having customers buying our assessment tool (B2C) at least 80 people.

• Having students using our consultation services (B2B) in at least 20 cases and more than 90% of students and parents are satisfied.

For the 1st year, we aim to build awareness of the diversity of childrens' learning natural behaviors and our competency-based education method that can improve children's development rate. By building a Facebook community and awareness by third-party media and channels. 

For the 3rd year, we calculate that our solution will be well-known and make a great impact on the educator stakeholders in Thailand. So the government would support our solution while we are expanding our customer base in Thailand among public and private schools.

We set our goal to expand our solution globally. Trying to collaborate with the foreign partner educator and training them our solution.

For the 5th year, We plan to have a lot of use cases in our database from 3 countries. So we would develop assessment and consultation machine learning that could help educators and parents.

The barrier for our business is almost all educators and parents are used to the traditional system of education and assessment. 

To overcome it is to change their mindset by building awareness widely of the diversity of children's nature. Starting from potential private schools and parents that would be able to adapt to our methods. Then we would scale to the public schools.

We also have to build the sustainable competency-based education methods mindset in educators' stakeholders such as the Thailand government, public schools, parents. Because the education structure in Thailand is not capable of sustaining the system by itself. So we have to lead the solution by being a new Social Enterprise in Thailand. 

After this approach is acceptable widely, the government will try to adjust the structure to support this trend along with the environment according to the other startup cases.

Ourtermost started from our CEO's potentials and intentions to develop both Thai education and human capital to the fullest and furthest, consisting of a small group of young generations who decided to devote themselves to make a change for the society in education industry.

Our CTO has experience in the education industry for at least 16 years. Then she saw the education problem that diversity of students' nature in the traditional education system does not work for all of them and can cause some of their skills to develop underage due to forcing the student by this method could make the student not willing to cooperate in some parts that do not match with their learning behaviors. So she has designed competency-based education and used it in her classes based on her experience for 8 years and the students' development result is more efficient according to more will to cooperate by the students that match with their natures.

Then in this covid-19 situation, the school lost its students. Our CTO proposed this online homeschooling course to the school as we fully started this project 6 months ago with Miss Pinsurang Kittiwarapon and Mr. Kamin Narenpitak.

We also partner with Outermost Company to help the educators in the consultation course and help the students develop their skills. The assessment result combined with consultation is accurate and very satisfying for the customers. So we would like to continue our product and services as we stated above.

There are 5 people working on this project.

1. Miss Pharavee Wattananukit, a full-time business developer and CEO of Outermost

2. Miss Pattarin Sanguankaew, a full-time business strategist

3. Ms. Patchanee Saikaew, a full-time academic technical director (CTO). 

4. Mr. Kamin Narenpitak, a full-time business developer and operation officer.

5. Miss Pinsurang Kittiwarapon, a part-time business analyst.

Our team members have been working together for several years, and specifically on KidsCap for around 6 months. Each of us takes responsibility for our specialised area of expertise. Our CEO has collaborated and worked for several schools, especially in Bangkok and the provinces around, so she can introduce the product to the target market easily. Our CTO, who is in charge of product development of 8 years in education, has been accumulating knowledge and experience needed throughout her career.

Our Team Lead has been working in the education industry for more than 6 years in various positions. She is also an education consultant for private schools working along with the board teams. When the schools need help and support, she always comes up with new ideas and solutions including how to execute the solutions practically.

We have partnered with Denla Kindergarten. Our CTO has designed a competency-based education course and has taught as a special teacher at this school for 4 years. Also, our 10-week pilot online homeschooling courses have been tested with students and parents of Denla Kindergarten during the COVID-19 lockdown.

• Our team would like to make an awareness in the education industry that competency-based education learning with integration of our solution would lead to more efficiency in preschool-age learning.

• We are looking for funds and connections, resources, and mentoring support from Octava and MIT Solve that we believe would make high efficiency in education impact and our business growth. The partnership will especially play an important role in our international expansion in the 3rd year of our business plan. In addition, we are finding a digital technology solution that properly applies with our solution (competency-based education) in scaling up products and services.

• Product / Service Distribution: At this stage we need channels and connections to distribute our final assessment tool (Kidscap box).

• Legal or Regulatory Matters: There is no known law person in our team that legal issues would become obstacles to business expansion not only in Thailand but also internationally. Moreover, the law consultation firm cost is quite expensive that we cannot afford at this stage.

• Public Relations: In terms of market expansion, we need public connections which could accelerate our awareness growth rate in our country and internationally. We also need mentors that could help shape our business plan and market growth strategy.