Tinker Clubs

Educators agree that early and regular exposure to STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) activities and other progressive learning experiences is extremely beneficial to early childhood development. These activities and experiences can help engage children and develop crucial learning attitudes and skills, such as empowered curiosity, creative confidence, and critical thinking.

In the Philippines, however, 15.5 million K-6 students don’t have adequate access to these kinds of learning experiences because of low awareness, prohibitive costs, and scarcity of resources and service providers in their local communities. The few existing STEAM service providers are concentrated in key metropolitan cities, and are often priced beyond the reach of regular Filipino families. 

With Filipino students also lagging behind 58 countries in the most recent global math and science assessment, there is a serious risk that a majority of the next generation of Filipino workers will not have the skills needed to compete and thrive in a rapidly evolving world. 

As the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already significant challenges and burdens of Philippine schools, this problem of inadequate access to STEAM is expected to continue over the long-term, unless more initiatives are organized by other sectors of the community. 

Tinker Clubs is a learning ecosystem that will deliver story-driven and play-based STEAM activities through a nationwide network of clubs connected by a social learning platform.

This ecosystem is comprised of: 

1. Tinker Ed: Our curriculum comprising story-driven, play-based, and hands-on STEAM activities/experiences and kits. The gameplay is centered on helping children build their own "Curious City" by completing learning missions from over 50 interest-based learning stations.

2. Tinker Net: The activities/experiences will be delivered through a network of franchisees, schools, facilitators, real-world venues and other partners who can manage local community clubs across the country. This will also empower various members of the community, including those outside of the academic institutions, to help provide hands-on STEAM learning experiences. 

3. Tinker Tech: All these participants of the learning ecosystem will be connected by a social learning platform, which tracks learners' aggregate engagement across the various activities we offer. The platform enables learners to submit proof of their learning output to earn experience points, digital badges and real-world rewards.  

Through all these, our goal is to build a vibrant and inclusive community of learners who have access to the resources they need to supplement their formal academic journey with hands-on STEAM activities & experiences. In doing so, we aim to help raise a generation of children with empowered curiosity, creative confidence, and critical thinking skills.

Who are they: The millions of Filipino students aged 4 to 12 who currently don't have enough access to hands-on STEAM activities and other progressive learning experiences. 

How are they underserved: Hands-on STEAM activities and progressive learning experiences in the Philippines are largely targeted to the upper-income classes in the few key metropolitan cities in the country. For the vast majority of Filipino students, these types of learning activities are seen as a luxury, creating a larger learning gap between the upper-income students and the larger underserved population.  

Our own experiences and interviews with students have also revealed that children are more engaged when:

• The learning experiences involve hands-on activities
• They're allowed to choose the topics that interest them
• The learning activities are play-based and gamified
• The learning activities are story-driven
• They learn with friends 

How will the solution address their needs: Tinker Clubs will provide these engaging learning experiences that kids want through hands-on STEAM activities and kits that are:
(1) affordable, starting from US$3;
(2) available in their local communities; and in some cases,
(3) accessible in their local language.     

We are parents based in Leyte, Philippines, a province that belongs to the fourth poorest region in the country. We established Tinker House in 2016, inspired by our own struggles to find engaging learning experiences for our children locally. In the process of finding a solution, we realized how many other parents and children across the country were encountering the same problems. 

As parents, we have consistently centered our solutions on a children-first approach. Tinker House, at its core, is about providing children the learning needs they have expressed themselves. In our early years, we delivered these learning experiences through mall-based activity centers throughout the country. But with the Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to adapt and design Tinker Clubs — a new solution to the same problem that addresses the new challenges created by the pandemic.

Tinker Clubs is designed to be a community where these conversations with parents and other stakeholders can continue to flourish. Our platform also seeks to collect relevant data and insights from our community, so that we can continuously improve our understanding of what children are interested in learning, and the types of learning experiences children find engaging.  

The co-founders and core team members are all former scholars — beneficiaries of government- and private-funded educational programs institutions. Our dedication to this venture comes from a deeply-rooted sense of obligation to give back to the country to whom we owe our education to, and to the majority of Filipinos — who currently do not have access to the same quality education we were able to enjoy.

As we are still recovering from the impact of the pandemic, there is much work to be done in terms of improving our solution and maximizing our impact.

We would like to be connected to the international community of people working on the same problem as we are, so that we may learn from their experiences. This space is very challenging to work in, and as a small startup company, we believe that we’ll have a greater chance of success if we work together with other people with the same goals. Mentorship and guidance from more experienced people are always welcome. 

We also believe that there are several opportunities for us to improve our technology, but we currently lack access to the financing and talent required to successfully fund and develop these additional features. Access to other education-focused programs that may be able to help subsidize or discount the maintenance of our technologies would also be extremely helpful. 

Our solution taps into the power of community to help ease some of the burden on a pandemic-crippled education system. It seeks to bring together various STEAM-focused initiatives across the country into one portal, accessible to children everywhere in the country.

It is designed to scale through our franchising and licensing programs, empowering people and groups who are not traditionally part of the formal academic system to contribute in creating learning opportunities for children at home, online, in schools, and out in the “real- world”.

Through our proprietary game, characters, and unique line of STEAM activities, we provide children the kinds of learning experiences they ask for: learning that is hands-on, play-based, interest-led, story-driven and hands-on.

All of these, powered by an online platform that tracks and rewards members for exploring their interests.

Our goal is to have 10,000 Tinker Club members over the next year, and 250,000 members by 2028.

Pre-pandemic, Tinker House ran a network of mall-based activity centers offering affordable hands-on STEAM activities. This first iteration of our business model was able to reach 100,000+ children across 18 activity centers in 2 years through our franchising model. We will be building on the same approach to achieve our targets for Tinker Clubs. 

Our primary impact metrics are the number of active members, retention and level of engagement, number of learning activities served, and our geographic reach.   

We also measure the following:

• Percentage of learners/users that come from public schools versus private schools;
• Percentage of centers/clubs located in underserved cities; 
• Percentage decrease in the cost of access to activities, as compared to comparable offers from competing foreign brands. 

We can help children become better, more engaged, and self-motivated learners by supplementing their formal education with a community dedicated to providing them with progressive real-world learning experiences they will enjoy and love.

Empowering children's innate curiosity and creativity throughout their formative years will help make them lifelong learners who are equipped with 21st century skills needed to face the challenges of the future. 

Our website is a social learning community platform where members can find various STEAM learning activities and products, connect with other members of Tinker Clubs (members and mentors), and track their learning progress through a mix of experience points and badges awarded for activities they do on the platform.

These activities include submitting photos of their activity outputs, joining citizen science projects, participating in group discussions, and attending online and offline events. 

Our technology roadmap includes the development of a mobile app where Tinker Clubs members can find learning stations near them, build their virtual Curious City, interact with fellow club members, collect points and exchange for real-world rewards, and more. 

We welcome talented and passionate individuals from all walks of life, and our flexible and remote work set-up allows us to accommodate workers with a variety of unique needs. 

We also have a strong commitment to empowering women, specifically underemployed home-based mothers and teachers, to lead the growth of our community. Our franchise and licensing programs target women entrepreneurs, with a target to maintain a 75% female demographic across all partnerships. 

Tinker Clubs seeks to provide STEAM activities through a network of organizations that have access to groups of children, such as schools, parent's groups, village-based groups, and other children's organizations, with our network of partners (franchisees, licensed operators/distributors, third-party service providers, advocacy groups, STEAM professionals) through our gamified learning system and platform. 

• Franchisees can avail of a turnkey business model to establish a Tinker Clubs activity center in their local community. 
• Schools, parents, part-time teachers, and other STEAM professionals can earn additional revenue by applying for a license to offer Tinker Clubs activities in their local communities. 
• MSMEs can also participate by making their stores/spaces as learning venues for Tinker Clubs, and earn from selling our activity kits.

Our model has a mix of revenue streams coming from a variety of products and services. Specifically: 

• Sales of our own line of retail products and services
• Membership fees (freemium model)
• Franchising and licensing 
• Wholesale sales to partner network of schools and distributors

Prior to the pandemic, we used to generate steady revenues from from 11 franchise and 7 company-owned mall-based activity centers, and was on track to grow our franchise network to 30 centers by the end of 2020. However, the prolonged pandemic and restrictions for children's centers in our country forced the closure of almost all our centers. 

We have spent the past year restructuring and redeveloping our solution, with funding from from the  Philippine Department of Science and Technology, under their Startup Grant Fund program, and the Bank of the Philippine Islands's Sinag Spark Challenge.