Skalo

37% of students in Latin America drop out of school and 50% of children and teens are in a situation of educational vulnerability. With the right tools and guidance, most of them could find their own way to successfully achieve their full potential based on their preferences, characteristics, abilities and needs and continue with their academic journey. Skalo hopes to create a path for every student, and with the help of parents, teachers, and institutions, create a community that works towards inclusion of every child despite any barrier, disability or challenge they face. We are a system that is affordable, innovative, straightforward, and personalized for everyone involved in a student’s academic journey.

Skalo personalizes accommodations and aids for diverse learners. With our algorithm, we have created an effective way of transforming the challenge of an academic challenge into the opportunity of developmental achievement. For Skalo to do its work, we involve the student’s family and teacher to get an idea of who the student is and what their strengths and weaknesses are. After having the student’s profile, our algorithm comes up with a series of objectives that can be achieved with 10 accommodations, tools and activities that the teacher can implement during 6 different moments of the day to allow the student to participate, progress and remain in class. Skalo creates value for everyone involved in a child’s educational journey by addressing their pains and giving an easy-to-use tool that motivates teachers, institutions, and families to engage in every student’s process and transform their education to personalized inclusion-based methods. With Skalo teachers can manage diversity within a classroom while gaining skills and improving their knowledge on class diversity management and institutions become available for any student and are able to understand their classrooms with results and data on the main learning barriers at their schools.  

Skalo’s targets every stakeholder involved in a child’s academic journey. Our current target population is based in Latin America, starting with Colombia. We work to improve the lives of teachers and parents with children that face permanent or temporal barriers and challenges, and students who are not able to graduate school because of these barriers. Our target population lacks the tools to guide children who face any type of barrier or disability, for this reason, not only have we started our pilot stage with schools from all socioeconomic backgrounds, but we have also organized workshops for parents and teachers where they tell us what they expect, the difficulties they currently face and what the ideal solution would be. In Skalo we are fully committed to each stakeholder individually, which is why we have created an algorithm with specialized and personalized content for every type of user.

Skalo was built as a solution to the pain felt by the founder when trying to get her child with educational barriers through school. As a mother of a kid with cerebral palsy, she experienced the pain of trying to find the appropriate aids to ease her child’s school experience while also helping him maximize his abilities. Since her son was diagnosed, she began a journey to help him and others by turning her experience into an opportunity to create a non-profit (Fundación Cero a Tres) that has been helping more than 350 children from low-income families for more than ten years. Throughout this process, she’s met lots of families, teachers, and institutions who want to include their children in school, but the tools for doing this are scarce and the process can be exhausting and emotionally draining. In Skalo we understand the importance of integrating the student, the family, the educational institution, and the teacher for a coordinated management of the child with temporary or permanent learning barriers since the first day of kindergarten. For this reason, by creating a team of experts who are involved with each of Skalo’s stakeholders, we are able to understand and create value for everyone involved by addressing their pains and giving an easy-to-use tool that truly motivate teachers, institutions, and families to become inclusive and transform their education to inclusion-based methods.

We are applying to Solve because we want to be part of a community of like-minded social entrepreneurs that seek to make a positive impact on vulnerable communities. Additionally, we want to receive mentoring and from experts and we know that with what we learn with MIT Solve, we will be able to reach our impact and growth objectives.

Our solution is a straightforward system that allows a holistic view of every student to develop personalized accommodation plans for each. For Skalo, each student’s strengths, weaknesses, expectations, and preferences are important and are determinant factors for each personalized plan. Students are given a way to actively learn and participate while families get full access to their child’s education and simultaneously learn about the best methods to help their child learn and develop when at home. In addition, with Skalo teachers and institutions are encouraged to engage with every student’s process with the help of a straightforward tool that allows them to monitor each learner’s process while gaining insights into results and data for pedagogical decision-making. Our solution not only transforms education for teachers, families, and institutions but it also enables students to recognize their strengths and further on expand their opportunities to learn and become holistic professionals

Skalo owns an innovative technology that implements an algorithm to generate the optimal accommodations for a child with learning barriers or disabilities. Through our web and mobile applications, we facilitate communication between the family and the teacher, seeking greater effectiveness in the implementation and monitoring of each accommodation. Skalo relies on existing technologies available for developers and cloud services, specifically the following:

-    Ionic, which allows us to generate each new version of Skalo both on a web and mobile platform for Android and iOS with a single version of the code.

-    Amazon Web Services for storage of NoSQL databases, storage of unstructured files such as photos and videos, and user authentication.

We also rely on basic business intelligence tools to generate scoreboards and gamification for educational institutions at the sectoral or national level. In the future we will rely on Machine learning technologies to use artificial intelligence in the generation and management of each optimal accommodation.

In Skalo we seek to create a diverse, equitable and inclusive leadership team through our values and our mission to make education accessible, equitable and of quality. Our team is composed of people of all expertise and all backgrounds which allows us to have a greater perspective on where we stand and what we stand for. In addition, our ideation methods through the whole creation of Skalo have been based on human-centered design and solutions which has led us to fully understand our stakeholders by having first-hand interaction and involving all those who will be the beneficiaries of Skalo in the future. We believe that Skalo must reflect all its core values starting from its leadership, which is why we seek to create a team that is accessible for all, open to everyone and upholding the principles of integrity and mutual respect.

We provide Skalo as a SaaS for institutions with students in K-12. Skalo offers a licence for private schools starting at $120 USD/academic year and for public schools starting at $40 USD/ academic year. These are the starting prices that vary depending on the amount of students a school wants to use Skalo with. Additionally we offer up-selling with many of our features in order to customize Skalo for every institution's needs and requirements. 

By charging affordable prices and offering discounts to our first buyers we plan to achieve 2000 licences by 2022 and continue growing exponentially by having success stories and loyal users. We also plan to grow and acquire new users by offering plans for businesses that seek to comply with the SDGs as a means of corporate social responsibility. 

We have a partnership with United Way Colombia that granted 1000 licenses for students in underprivileged communities in Colombia. Additionally, we are in negotiation with 2 schools that can provide us 500 additional licenses,  these schools were the ones where we piloted Skalo during 2021.