WSAM

Children today are widely connected to the internet more than ever before. More than 1,600,000 Saudi children with an age falling between 9 and 12 years old use the internet on a daily basis and a significant portion of these children mainly use the internet for entertainment purposes only such as playing games or watching videos. 

Our main target is Saudi children that are underserved with educational platforms that promote fun learning either inside or outside school.

Due to the wide variety and unlimited genres of games and entertaining content, it became challenging to try to redirect children’s time spent on the internet towards educational content that provides valuable learning objectives. Additionally, in Saudi Arabia, it's a challenge for parents to find rich and fun activities for their children that is of high quality and that can strongly contribute to their educational journey, especially in their out-of-school learning journey

As a result, it would be useful to bring all organizations that want to contribute in providing valuable content for children under the same roof on one platform. However, we still have the challenge that children might still not get attracted to using this platform unless they are obliged to do so from school or parents, or if they get to use the platform, they would browse for a while and get bored afterwards due to the lack of engagement elements that particularly drive them to stay excited and motivated to continue learning.

“WSAM” is a digital platform that aims to adapt any educational content in the form of interactive challenges presented in an entertaining approach for children to access and go through. The word “WSAM” means a badge or a medal in Arabic as WSAM fosters the use of the badge system as one of its main motivators for children. By adapting educational content in the form of missions or quests on WSAM with the use of gamification elements such as points, badges, and leaderboards, we can incentivize children to be engaged in self-learning and acquire a rich and fun educational experience anytime and anywhere with minimal effort and time from parents or educators. The featured educational content would address a range of learning objectives in multiple educational disciplines that can be associated but not limited to 21st century education.

In order for WSAM to fulfill its mission, it got designed as a hub that connects children with stakeholders who want to contribute in providing valuable educational content for them. The provided content will be adapted to fit WSAM’s theme and framework before children get access to it.

WSAM will be a hub that serves and connects the following two main segments. The first segment is our stakeholders(ex: educators/schools) who believe in WSAM’s mission and would like WSAM to include their educational content on board. By incorporating their educational content in the context of WSAM, our stakeholders would get access to the progress of children in their integrated materials, as well as see the impact of WSAM’s facilities on children’s performance. The second segment is children who are the primary focus of the app. WSAM is designed to boost children’s willingness to learn by using gamification elements to make their educational journey more appealing as they invest their time in learning while having a playful and enjoyable experience.

During the past years, our team dedicated their time and effort towards developing measurement tools using games and gamification elements and created products that would contribute to Saudi children's educational journey, either in increasing their learning scope, or in providing accurate measurements for their skills in different disciplines to be further assessed and developed. Hence, we were able to get closer to our target population through the events we created, and through testing and piloting our products with them. This established connection allowed us to indirectly get continuous insights from those children regarding what they need. We really aim for improving children's educational experience through providing innovative solutions and ideas that would truly make an addition to their lives.

In Saudi Arabia, it's a challenge for parents to find rich and fun activities for their children that is of high quality and that can strongly contribute to their educational journey, especially in their out-of-school learning journey.

WSAM is built to address such problem affecting our target population by providing a platform that has the potential to be a connecting point between parents & their children, instructors, educational content creators, etc.

Additionally, in Saudi Arabia, there is also a lack of customized educational programs for children. WSAM has the potential and aims to gather info (by consent) from parents and their children to customize an educational program that is tailored to fulfill their needs and improve their competencies accordingly.

It's important for us to scale WSAM for a wide reach of children in Saudi Arabia, and afterwards outside Saudi Arabia, and applying for Solve would help to shed the light on WSAM locally, regionally and globally. In addition, it will bring attention to other organizations, content creators or NGOs who would be interested to partner with us.

We also want to make sure that our product is actually making an impact, hence, applying for Solve would support us in the monitoring and evaluation process to ensure that we are moving towards our target in addition to overcoming the financial barrier of collecting data from a representative sample to accurately measure its impact and fulfill any needed gaps for improvement.

We not only aim to make WSAM accessible for every child to benefit from without the need of reaching out to every school or district, but also want it to have a significant future impact on children’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors.

There’s no doubt that if we search the internet now we’d find lots of different platforms or organizations that are providing educational content for children. However, due to them being scattered, neither do the organizations fully reach their target segment, and neither do children get to find these sources of education. 

WSAM acts like a library that offers a gateway to knowledge through gathering different kinds of books in its shelves and sorting them according to their topics, names, and divisions. In addition, patrons go to the library to browse through the books, read, or study. These books are represented in stakeholders and educational content creators who have their content yet are scattered. Patrons are represented in children who use WSAM to have full access to different educational content that is arranged in a user-friendly manner for better accessibility. Additionally, WSAM is also designed specifically for children to further provide motivation and excitement to learn through its use of gamification elements.

WSAM will also have the potential and aims to gather info (by consent) from parents and their children to customize an educational program that is tailored to fulfill their needs and improve their competencies accordingly.

WSAM would provide a positive impact to educational content creators as it gives them better reach and accessibility to children.

WSAM aims to expand locally across Saudi Arabia in the next year. Moving forward, it will expand across other countries in the MENA region,will Involve more stakeholders and partners and will make the platform multilingual for higher accessibility.

Impact goals:

-Increase reach to WSAM platform through possible collaborations with the ministry of education and educational institutions such as schools. 

-see a transformation of children’s internet usage, moving from games and useless activities to learning through WSAM app. This can be done by quantifying the level of change though conducting evaluation surveys to a representative population before launching WSAM and its campaigns, and after a while from launching WSAM.

-In the long term, children’s 21st century skills can be measured to see to what extent they developed it. Additionally, WSAM would be measuring the level of growth each child encounters from the beginning of using WSAM till any phase that they reach.

-Since lots of children refrain from seeking learning by themselves due to the burden and pressure they feel, WSAM aims to change how children perceive learning, So it would transform them from feeling required or obliged to learn to them having the willingness to learn which would be reflected in their actions. (passing quests, finishing lessons, etc).

-Number of users on the platform

-Number of active users on the platform

-Number of partners, sponsors, and subscribers

-Statistics on the number of badges collected, and level of participation of students on the platform

-Statistics about the demographics and location of participants to see the measure of the impact across Saudi Arabia

-the level of content diversity on the platform

-the ability to maintain customer retention

1. Represented below is the a simplified version of the theory of change framework

Inputs

Description

A platform that connects our stakeholders to children to add non-formal educational content. 

Indicator

Have a list of badges on the platform. Each badge contains the content related to the badge name. Elements such as leaderboard, points, avatar are embedded for engagement.

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Outputs

Description

-All content from different genres is gathered and presented on one platform for children to access and interact with.

-Children's involvement with the platform increases as they become extrinsically and intrinsically  motivated

Indicator

-Number of users that create accounts on the platform

-Number of organizations that collaborate by supplying its content, topic ideas to sponsor, edutainment products

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Short term outcomes

Description

Children: -Increased awareness and knowledge in the content they learn.

-Have a richer educational journey & become self-motivated to learn with less external pressure.

Stakeholders: -Work on developing new content as they see the impact on children

-More likely to increase social responsibility in benefitting their community

Indicator

Children: Outcomes are reflected from the badges they attain, the scores they reach, and the challenges they pass

Stakeholders: Increase in content provided, number of badges

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Long term outcomes

Description

Children develop behaviors, skills and attitudes that are reflected in their behavior and decisions as they grow up 

Indicator

RCTs to measure impact 

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2. To ensure we're on the right track, we piloted a version of WSAM app and launched it on the app store. The app contained content that had learning objectives associated with financial literacy, reading skills, and other topics for children to access and try. Data collection of children's progress in the questions was collected, and feedback from users regarding their experience was also gathered.

Our solution is currently presented in a mobile app to increase reach and accessibility. However, we plan to expand it in the future to be a platform that can be implemented in different contexts, as in an online hub and a location-based hub.

Therefore, the solution we are currently working on is the online hub represented in a mobile app where gamification technology is integrated.

We aim to provide access to WSAM for all children that are underserved with such service, regardless of anything else. So, no differentiation will take place when providing access to it. It will be available on app stores and there will be no restrictions to being able to use it. To include all levels of children, content in the app will be categorized to different stages so that any child can use the app and use the content that is adequate to their level of knowledge. In the marketing phase of WSAM, we will ensure that there is a big reach so that the greatest number of children and their parents would be aware of the app. All children who will use the app would have equal opportunities in collecting points, getting access to content, winning prizes, or taking a position in the leaderboard. and if we provide any type of assistance to children, no groups will be prioritized over the others.

We have 4 key customers.

The first segment is education program providers who create educational content that can be designed for schools or other educational institutes.  and would like their content to be sparkled with gamified elements. Educational program providers would make a subscription on WSAM for their content to be designed, adapted and featured on the platform where other content from different providers is added and where high accessibility for children is present.

The second segment is Governments and NGOs who want to present their CSR awareness or educational programs through WSAM or would like to connect with educational program providers to create their content. WSAM chips in to be the middle ground between both segments by facilitating the process for Governments or NGOs to achieve their goal by sponsoring the content of the most relevant program providers and by connecting to children.

The third segment is Toys & kids products providers who would like to promote their edutainment products and toys. WSAM would provide commissions to this segment by featuring them in the Rewards section where children can redeem their collected points with gifts or discounts with their products.

The final segment is children aged between x and y. WSAM is meant to be a hub that connects the previously mentioned 3 segments with children to serve its mission.

Subscriptions from educational program providers. They would subscribe with WSAM in order for their content to get customized to the platform's theme and get added for children to access.

Sponsorships from CSR programs in private sectors and government institutes

Commissions from toys and kids products providers that would feature their products on the platform