String

We solve the issue of lack of digital skills exposure that is especially relevant in an age of learning disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The education of more than 140 million in Southeast Asia – across Asia has been disrupted due to school closures since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Children in the Philippines have been waited for more than 2 years to return to their classrooms. In spite of the rapid rise of the digital economy in Southeast Asia, on the road towards a $1 trillion gross merchandise value economy by 2030, many teachers and students in the region are ill-e quipped in digital competencies. Even in Singapore, teachers are often busy and are rarely adequately trained in digital skills. 

String brings industry professionals, teachers and students together to enable exposure to industry-relevant digital skills. This is done through two major components:

(1) aggregating events for tech exposure with personalised content for users

(2) providing a learning management system for fundamental digital skills - this includes teacher training to scale digital skills exposure in their communities

Apart from grading submissions, teachers can also participate in events curated for them as well as go through learning modules. 

On the other hand, students get exposed to fundamental digital skills like User Experience Research, User Interface Design, Low/no-code Web Development, Digital Marketing, Workflow Automation and Integration and Data Science through the learning modules. 

We work with pre-university students and educators who are interested but lack exposure to digital skills. Educators in the Southeast Asia region are underserved as they - especially in public schools - lack the time as well as willingness and ability to pay for exposure to digital skills. Consequently, students similarly face the same problems of lack of exposure.

Our solution addresses their needs by providing a plug-and-play solution. Designed by educators with a unique intersection between industry exposure in tech careers and teaching, the learning modules are carefully scaffolded and tested to empower teachers. While application of digital tools may seem abstract, our solution focuses on user journeys of both students and teachers in their everyday lives to cultivate interest and excitement to learn about tech. We have run pilots in Singapore, Thailand and Philippines where teachers of local schools are actively involved in delivering the digital skills program we designed.

We are a team of educators and tech enthusiasts.

Jian Zhen, our CTO, never went to college. He picked up coding on his own and actively gives back to his alma mater through ad hoc coding workshops, Ngee Ann Polytechnic and also runs coding programs with Singapore Management University. He also loves and shares about astronomy. His varied teaching experiences guides learning design. Jian Zhen shares our team’s philosophy of taking greater ownership in one’s learning and sparking curiosity as the main driver for lasting educational outcomes. We design our solution with this in mind.

Hui Xuan, Melvin and Kahhow are educators at the junior college level (grade 11 and 12). They interact with youths on a daily basis and are highly sensitive to their learning needs. Kahhow leads curriculum design and executed digital skills programs for 6 schools across Singapore, Philippines and Thailand in collaboration with 8 startups/ small and medium enterprises in the region. Our experiences in teaching has helped to refine and improve our solution.

As a team, we regularly run user interviews and surveys in order to gauge the usefulness of our product and measure learning outcomes. We also regularly speak to other educators in our networks - which we have an unfair advantage in accessing - in order to get feedback about our product.

As for go-to-market strategy, Kahhow has previously worked with the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines as well as a venture capital in Jakarta, Indonesia. These helped to build connections with local schools and startups to enable String to scale.

In spite of ample funding for startups and entrepreneurship, the social impact community in Singapore is still fairly nascent - with many social enterprises, in spite of their best intentions, struggling to find proper product market fit or scale quickly and effectively. This is in large part due to young support structures and ecosystems for social impact. My team is applying to Solve in order to leverage on MIT’s network and contacts to address a problem close to heart as educators. We believe that speed especially matters because we are addressing a problem of learning loss and that the MIT network can help us to grow a meaningful education solution. Our Filipino counterparts and their students have not been to school in-person for over 2 years while even in Singapore, exposure has been severely compromised due to the pandemic and we cannot wait for our solution, String, to grow. 

While there are some localized solutions to engaging students and providing generic career advice, there is none that:

1. encourages cross border interaction to enable cultural exchange as an explicit learning outcome (our current program with Colegio de Letran, Philippines and Raffles Institution, Singapore does this)

2. aggregates digital events or provide digital skills courses with scaffolding from educators for educators in a concrete manner

We expect it to change the market by providing a strong alternative to existing “professional development programs” offered to educators in schools. Plug-and-play models of digital skills education can be confusing without proper scaffolding which is why the shared experience of education is such an important edge that my team provides.

If this succeeds, we expect to support a stronger ecosystem for educators in Southeast Asia through the communities we build. More than just a tool, String brings passionate teachers together to grow the next generation of tech savy youths. In the inter rim, we expect teachers to benefit from significant productivity gains especially since as a sector, it tends to be resistant to change.

While program execution comes with a human touch, we remain data-driven and provide a model of education that is highly scalable precisely because we bring the human touch that educators resonate with.

Over the next year:

1. Scale to impact over 50,000 educators and students in low-income backgrounds in Thailand, Singapore, Philippines and Indonesia

2. Migrate off the existing Ruby-on-Rails application to a more streamlined codebase, implementing a recommendation system alongside the tech events aggregator.

3. Increase events and learning opportunities by partner with organisations like Tribe Academy to offer hackathons and more ad hoc learning workshops

Over the next 5 years: we hope to reach 5million educators and students across Southeast Asia and increase digital competencies, thereby bridging the digital divide and access to opportunities. We will do this through partnerships with governments and learning academies of tech firms in order to bring a truly integrated experience instead of the fragmented one that may be confusing and daunting to navigate.

1) Number of internships enabled through our program/ digital skills pipeline. In 2021, 2 students placed with YC-backed startup, CocoCart and a Fintech unicorn, InstaReM respectively. While we do not necessarily expect our exposure programs to lead to full-time employment outcomes, we believe that some work experience goes a long way to help students understand the potential of digital skills and acquire lasting insights. Apart from high profile companies, another 60 students were placed with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and accelerated digitalization of SMEs in the region.

2) Net promoter score (NPS) of teachers (and students) who undergo the program as facilitators or implement this program by String in their own schools. If teachers (and students) organically share about us, then scaling plans are likely to actualize with less friction. This validates learning value that we provide.

3) Learning outcomes through pre-post impact assessment as well as quizzes. As educators, we highly value checks for understanding are committed to collect data points to establish if the learning outcomes are truly achieved.

Our overall mission is to increase digital skills competencies of students and educators in Southeast Asia to improve livelihoods and bridge the digital divide. Our long term outcomes also include growing tech talent ecosystems in Southeast Asia.

In the medium term, we anticipate productivity gains among students and teachers as they acquire and apply digital skills in their lives. Students may also qualify for internships and learn on the job. 

In order to enable these outcomes, partnerships with schools, governments as well as a robust social media engagement plan will be crucial. The sales cycle for educational programs are typically long and building trust to strategic partnerships, such as the one we are seeking with MIT, will be paramount. This is important because less time delays means less learning loss.

The key assumptions are (a) schools are receptive to and value alternative outcomes beyond academic grades, (b) teachers are willing and able to be trained in digital skills remotely.

The core technology is a web application that is mobile optimized. For personalization/ recommendation system, an algorithm that presents recommendations based on likes, clicks and views is likely to improve user engagement. 

Southeast Asia is a very diverse region. Our team is fully committed to incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusivity into our work.

Our key customers are schools (which then allow us to offer our service to students and teachers). We provide our product as a bundle - the web-application is the Software we provide as a Service while also bundling in-person synchronous workshops and events as necessary. Pricing is adjusted based on the relative purchasing power of the country. We tend to charge schools and students in Singapore more as compared to Thailand and the Philippines. 

Based on our market research, pre-university institutions in Singapore, Thailand and Philippines want such programs because there are few programs specifically tailored to suit such a learning profile. In contrast, there are often many programs targetted at university students to enable tech skills exposure and acquisition. 

We plan to do so through the following ways:

1) B2B Primarily through schools - we plan to sell our solution as Software as a Service while bundling in-person workshops. Anglo-Singapore International School in Bangkok, Thailand was one such paying customer. Expected revenue in 2022: $10,000-30,000 SGD

2) B2G Service contracts - we currently have the Infocomm and Media Development Authority of Singapore (IMDA) as a paying customer and anticipate that we will be able to onboard other government agencies as well. Expected revenue in 2022: $10,000 SGD

National Youth Council, National Youth Fund (monetary amount to be confirmed - lower bound of $15,000 SGD)