Boddle Learning

The challenge we are focusing on is 'Re-Engaging Learners'. Bridging learning gaps for the most underserved children and youth has been a focus of our work at Boddle and aligns directly with this MIT Solve Challenge. According to the US national report card, only half of elementary school students are proficient academically, and that number drops to less than 25% by the end of high school. This is due to the accumulation of learning gaps. When learning gaps are unaddressed early on, they compound and affect student achievement as they move towards high school and college readiness.

Two big pain points expressed by educators across the country are:

1. Lack of student engagement. Teachers emphasized how hard it was to engage their students to practice math, and how their disengagement led to less practice and less mastery of skills. The tools they used in class that were engaging did not provide good data, and the tools that provided data were not engaging.

2. The second was time. It takes a lot of time to create and grade assessments such as homework, exit tickets, and quizzes in order to identify where the learning gaps are; and teachers usually do not have very much time to address learning gaps before they need to move on; so they are leaving learning gaps unaddressed.

Pandemic related school closures exacerbated these issues and disproportionately affected students in underserved communities. 

Boddle is a gaming platform for education that consists of an interactive web/mobile game, a management platform for teachers, and a proprietary learning algorithm.

The game makes practice questions engaging and motivates students to practice confidently.  While they're practicing, the adaptive algorithm identifies and adjusts practice questions to target fundamental skills that each student is missing.

Student responses are also collected and turned into real-time actionable reports that let educators know, instantly and accurately, who needs help and what they need help on. It also lists out where all of each students' gaps are, and automates the process of creating and grading homework/tests— saves teachers 2-4 hours every week.

The product is also interoperable content-wise, which allows content from other subjects, and other institutions/organizations, to be plugged in and turned into online courses within Boddle's game that drive student engagement.

Boddle is designed to truly support grades K-6 educators and students both in traditional classroom environments and non-traditional learning environments (learning pods, homeschools, etc). 

With features such as targeted practice, data tracking, individual and whole class assignments, customization, and engaging game play, educators are able to better facilitate learning and address learning gaps in their classrooms. Teachers can assign quests from a standard, or students can explore the Boddle world on their own (solving problems and getting rewarded with mini-games). Boddle’s adaptive algorithm helps students learn at their own pace. It follows student progress and establishes a baseline from the beginning of their time on the platform. The placement test at the start of the game helps teachers know each students’ level. This information helps create an adaptive plan for individual students. Additionally, tools such as text-to-speech to read out the questions and answer options, as well as the option to watch a short video with a sample problem and explanation is provided to students to enhance the learning experience. 

The assignments feature allows teachers to choose specific skills they want to target. So if you know that a group of students or an individual student needs extra practice with a particular skill, you can place it in front of students right away. The game-first approach helps keep kids engaged as they practice content tailored to their needs.

Boddle exists to improve student outcomes, especially in underserved communities. Since Boddle’s inception we’ve had all students in mind. We began piloting in inner-city schools, and these pilots informed us of what updates were crucial to improve the platform's equitable accessibility. 

On the product side, a huge part of ensuring accessibility was optimizing our game so that it could run on even the slowest chromebooks, which were exactly the kinds of devices made available to kids in the inner city.

From a pedagogical standpoint, we know that a one-size-fit-all model will not serve the needs of all students, so we use machine learning to help students get the individualized education they need; an important learning opportunity that is not always accessible in low-performing/low-income schools.

From a business model standpoint, we wanted to ensure that our paths to monetization did not negatively affect low-income households, so we offer the math content free to all schools and homes, and monetize like a game company by selling in-app game features. 

Our team is lead by founders of color and made up of passionate educators with first hand experience in the classroom, as well as game designers, developers, and more.

While majority of our growth has been organic and grassroots, it would be incredible to begin making connections and relationships with education leaders across the US and internationally to see how we can best leverage Boddle's solution to make an even deeper and wider impact in elementary education.

Along with that, we understand how important it is to grow the team as we scale, and we hope MIT Solve will support us as we seek expert talent and board development.

By using AI and gameplay, we help kids in underperforming schools/communities catch up by boosting engagement, and by tailoring learning to the right level. On impact, we currently serve 1.5 million+ registered students in thousands of classrooms across the US.

Our team recognizes that math programs typically do not provide a wide variety of questions tailored to students’ specific learning needs. Moreover, math programs currently used in schools do not deliver questions to students in a fun and interesting way. Furthermore, teachers who want to differentiate instruction often have to create and score their own problems, assignments, and assessments, which can be time consuming.

With a feedback loop that allows us to iteratively design features that are beneficial for educators and students, we’ve been able to create a teacher dashboard that presents useful insights into student performance, and continue to release gameplay that engages students while keeping them focused on math skills. Case studies which show how Boddle at its current state have helped educators in their classroom can be found here and here.

With Boddle, we're unlocking student's confidence to learn and master math skills through fun and engagement. Our vision is to expand to serve the parents and teachers globally so that regardless of the educational setting (traditional vs non-traditional), students have access to a high quality learning tool that helps them close gaps and excel in math. In the next year we also plan on expanding to more subjects like English Language Arts in order to expand learning opportunities for students. 

Boddle Learning can measure progress and examine the extent to which core activities were delivered and participants were reached by examining the following quantifiable outputs:

● number of educator, parent, or guardian logins
● number of practice problems, assignments, and/or assessments assigned
● number of learning gaps assigned to students by the program (or educator, parent, or guardian)
● number of reassigned assignments
● number of student logins
● number of minutes in the platform overall (practice problems, assignments, and/or assessments)
● amount of time spent on a single problem
● number of practice problems, assignments, and/or assessments completed
● proportion of practice problems completed correctly
● average score on assignments and assessments
● number of knowledge points earned by student

The link below contains a Tier IV study that spells out our logical links between activities, outputs, and outcomes:

https://drive.google.com/file/...

A usability and feasibility research study was also conducted in Spring 2021 in partnership with LEANLAB Education. Boddle Learning partnered with LEANLAB as a third-party evaluator to identify usability features or functionalities of Boddle that could be enhanced or added to make
Boddle more user-friendly and valuable to teachers. The study also set out to collect preliminary data on how teachers implement Boddle in the classroom with greatest success. LEANLAB used a co-design research framework throughout the study as a means to elevate the voices of those most impacted by education tools being used in the classroom and in order to help create a tool that is responsive to the needs of school communities. The study had three main research
questions:
● What features and/or functionalities of Boddle need to be enhanced or added to make Boddle more user-friendly?

● What aspects of Boddle add value for teachers and what features and/or functionalities should be added to provide additional utility to teachers and students?
● How do teachers use Boddle in the classroom with greatest success?
The full results of the research study which show several positive outcomes for teachers, including time-saving, can be found using this link.

Boddle's technology consists of multiple 3D game environments (for students) and a learning management system (for teachers).

A decision-tree algorithm works in the background to help facilitate personalized/self-paced learning for students, and a content management system enables the company to author and customize math courses and curriculum that are packaged and delivered into both the game and
management system for teachers.

The current game environment comes with a variety of different 3D games that embed multiple-choice, true false questions, short-answer questions, rationales, and lesson videos; and a rewards framework that includes player avatars (bottle-headed characters), a shop system, coins, badges, quests, and pets. 

The teacher’s platform comes with a placement test, rostering system that integrates with Clever and Google Classrooms, a live feed to monitor who’s on the platform and what they are working on, and an assignment creator where teachers can assign specific skills to students that override the curriculum until certain parameters (time or number of questions) are met. 

The teacher’s platform also has three reports that show: 

1) where students’ math placement levels are 

2) where students’ gaps in learning are, and 

3) general usage (times and questions attempted).

Boddle Learning’s leadership team is lead by founders of color, one of whom is a female founder deeply passionate about the education space and making an impact in black and brown communities. Our global team is proud to be 50% female and strives to continue to hire and attract diverse talent from around the world. 

We incorporate this diversity into the games we build and characters we develop as well so that kids can feel represented while they engage with Boddle, as we will continue to intentionally incorporate different cultural perspectives to our team and product as we grow and scale.

Boddle uses a freemium business model where teachers, schools, and parents always have access to a free version. However, like most games that are highly-profitable, optional subscriptions and micro-transactions can be purchased by parents for additional in-game items and content.

However, unlike gaming companies that have to spend around $1.50 in marketing per player download, Boddle approaches schools and teachers bottom-up and is able to acquire players(students) at around $0.02 per user and beating the gaming average by 75x.

The freemium business model and approach gives Boddle high commercialization potential and also keeps us equitable.

For now we are bringing in money through investments and grants which enable us to continue improving development and focus on acquisition and retention.

We do plan on monetizing through parents. Typically, educational tools are purchased at about $5-$10 per year per student license for supplementary learning products whereas parent-purchased apps and learning tools average $10/month, which adds up to $120/year, making the freemium model more profitable than the school sales model.

To date Boddle has raised $2million in a combination of investment funding and grants to help with product development and growth. Notable investors include:

- Pharrell William's Black Ambition

- Google 

- AT&T

- VELA Education Fund