IndiaExamPrep Free Android app for Grades 6-10 in India

Free Android app in five languages to enable low-income students from Grades 6-10 to study chapter wise videos, questions, and answers to excel in Indian central and state board exams. 

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth,” said the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. 

Education in India is mandatory for all children from ages six to fourteen and is provided free of charge at Government schools. Inspite of significant efforts in expanding access to education, enrolment rates across states in India are not consistent. 

There are millions of students in India who lack access to high-quality education that could help them, and our society, grow. Finding this vast educational divide alarmed me, especially since these children are perfectly capable. 

One of our firm beliefs is that all children deserve not merely the right to education, but the right to quality education. 

There are 265 million students in India under Grade 10 and around 25% of them drop out before Grade 10. 

According to Government research, the dropout rate is 4% in primary years (grades I-IV) and upper primary years (grades VI-VIII). Dropout rate dramatically increases in secondary years (grades IX-X).

Our goal is to address this problem of dropout rate in the upper primary years by providing tools and methods to improve interest and passion in education among low-income Government School children and also build habits of hard work. On further research, we found that there is a dire need for robust preparation material for these disadvantaged and under-served school children to have a fair shot at exams. 

Grades 6 to 8 are pivotal to learning fundamental concepts. Children who don’t perform well in school during these years,  tend to display a genuine lack of interest in their academics and could lead them to eventually dropping out of school. We found that free apps like Khan Academy do not cater to the Indian syllabi completely & commercial apps like Byju’s are too expensive for this segment. 

Therefore, we designed & coded ‘IndiaExamPrep’, a free lightweight, self-learning application using topic-wise open-source videos, questions, answers & explanations to prepare for exams. To develop the App, with support from a mentor, we used Java, APIs & Machine Learning algorithms that enabled multi-language support.

This app covers Math, Science, and Social studies Chapter wise questions from Grade 6 to 10 categorized into Central Board and other State boards such as Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. 

Our solution supports Multi-language capability across 5 languages. 

We hope to increase students' ability to understand concepts, prepare them for grade level skills, test their knowledge through the app, and reduce the dropout rate in schools thereby contributing to the UN Sustainable development goal of “Reducing Inequalities”

“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth,” said the Greek philosopher, Diogenes. 

Education in India is mandatory for all children from ages six to fourteen and is provided free of charge at Government schools. Inspite of significant efforts in expanding access to education, enrolment rates across states in India are not consistent. 

There are millions of students in India who lack access to high-quality education that could help them, and our society, grow. Finding this vast educational divide alarmed me, especially since these children are perfectly capable. 

One of our firm beliefs is that all children deserve not merely the right to education, but the right to quality education. 

There are 265 million students in India under Grade 10 and around 25% of them drop out before Grade 10. 

According to Government research, the dropout rate is 4% in primary years (grades I-IV) and upper primary years (grades VI-VIII). Dropout rate dramatically increases in secondary years (grades IX-X).

Our goal is to address this problem of dropout rate in the upper primary years by providing tools and methods to improve interest and passion in education among low-income Government School children and also build habits of hard work. On further research, we found that there is a dire need for robust preparation material for these disadvantaged and under-served school children to have a fair shot at exams. 

1. I am Vedanth Nandivada, a grade 12 student in Bangalore and I built this app along with my younger brother under the mentorship of Mr Prasad and with support from our parents. 

2. We have been working with children near our community through our NGO - LifeBeyondSchool Foundation for the last three years and have a good understanding of the children’s areas of interest and challenges in academics. 
3. We have applied Firebase ML API to translate the questions and answers at run time to 4 other Indian languages. 

4. We wrote a Python program for promoting the app through WhatsApp and email. We were  able to download phone numbers, email Ids of various school Headmasters from the Internet. We were able to promote this application by sending it to Headmasters of schools and other teachers through WhatsApp / Email using a Python program we built. 

5. We have 26,000 downloads so far and 7000 hours of usage. We are hoping to touch 100,000 downloads and over 10,000 hours of usage by the end of this year. We have 2500 Monthly active users and hoping to increase the same as well. 

1. We have been working with children near our community through our NGO - LifeBeyondSchool Foundation for the last three years and have a good understanding of the children’s areas of interest and challenges in academics. 

2. With the help of NGOs and schools, we conducted tests to over 200 students over the last few months to understand the challenges students face. Many students have an academic understanding significantly below their grade level. 

3. Based on the user feedback, we launched 11 versions of the app over the last 2 years. The fifteen positive youtube testimonials provided by students generated over 250,000 views and helped in increasing the number of downloads.

4. We notice that some students want to just get by in their exams while others want to excel. Some students want to learn by guessing, eliminating options and testing their luck. 

   1. Those who want to pass the exams with minimal understanding can go through practice tests, True/False questions to get minimal understanding and do well in the exams. 

   2. Those who want to excel can go through the chapter wise tests, read the explanations and take tests multiple times till they cover all the randomized questions.

   3. Students can learn through Multiple choice questions by eliminating options , guessing the choice and then learning by reading the explanations. 

1. IndiaExamPrep app is targeted towards self-paced learning with open source questions and answers from school text books

2. Chapter wise questions and answers can be used for internal exams such as formative assessments, unit tests, quarterly, half-yearly exams, mocks and final boards. True/False questions are helpful for those who want to guess and learn a concept. 

3. It is completely free. There are no ads. 

4. It is light-weight (10 MB) that works in low connectivity and displays questions and answers very quickly without any latency (<1 sec). This is very critical in developing economies like India where children use their parents phone for fun and studies. 

5. It is carefully designed for the target audience with varying goals :

   1. Those who want to pass the exams with basic conceptual understanding can go through practice tests and True/False questions  and do well in the exams. 

   2. Those who want to excel can go through the chapter wise tests, read the explanations and take tests multiple times till they cover all the randomized questions.

   3. Students can learn through multiple choice questions by eliminating options , guessing the choice and then learning by reading the explanations. 

   4. For 10th grade math, chapter wise videos are available to learn the concepts. 

1. 2023 Goal :

   1. We have 26,000 users and 2500 monthly active users. Looking to grow the app to  atleast 100,000 Users by continuing to improve the quality of questions and answers, linking open source videos to each topic and building partnerships with various government officials and not-for-profits to create visibility. 

   2. We conducted a few tests for various NGOs and schools. We want to raise funds and reward economically needy students based on the tests conducted using the app

   3. We want to get feedback from students on the difficulties in using the app and continuously improve the app to improve adoption and finally make a dent on the drop-out rates. We intend to promote this app within disadvantaged neighborhoods and under-served school children across India though it is available for anyone to download freely on Google Play store. We are happy to report that many of the heavy users of our app are girl students. All the testimonials provided were girls who used the app for 1 to 2 years. We expect the usage to increase among low-income family children and especially girls.

2. 5 year Goal:

   1. Cover various other state boards, expand the coverage to grade 11 and 12 

   2. Make our app a household name like Byju’s is today and make a small difference in reducing the drop-out rates in middle year and high schools. 

   3. Potentially partner with other not-for-profit companies like Khan Academy 

1. The App was developed using Java, XML and Json files. App is hosted on the Google Play store. IndiaExamPrep website is hosted on the Hostinger platform.

2. Json files containing metadata (Board names, chapter names, subjects, Questions, answers) are stored on a file server hosted on the Hostinger Platform. 

3. We used Firebase for analytics and the Google Translate API. 

4. We wrote a Python program for promoting the app through WhatsApp and email. We were able to download phone numbers of various school Headmasters from the Internet. We were able to promote this application by sending it to Headmasters of schools and other teachers through WhatsApp using a Python program we built. We have collated numerous mail ids of ministers, Headmasters and school teachers. We intend to use the Python program to send mass mails during our spring break holidays in April.

We have 26,000 downloads and 2500 monthly active users. Looking to grow the app to  atleast 100,000 users. We are hoping to improve the quality of questions and answers, linking open source videos to each topic and building partnerships with various government officials and not-for-profits to create visibility of the app. We are looking to have NGOs use this app to conduct tests for scholarships.

We use WhatsApp and Email marketing. Free WhatsApp marketing is prohibited, so we do use the same sparingly.  The google mail merge limits 50 free emails per day. So, it takes time to grow the user base. We are hoping to apply for a few awards and use the publicity and recognition to promote the app.

We have established connections with NGOs such as Swabhimaan and Vidhyadaan in Bangalore. We did outreach to various government schools in South India through email and WhatsApp campaigns. We don’t have any formal partnerships established.

There is no revenue stream attached to this business.  The app is promoted as ad-free and doesn’t mandate registration of mobile number or email id to use the app. The application is built to provide free and easy access to education to students from low-income families.  Costs of running the website and any ongoing maintenance expenses are paid by our parents.

The cost of the Infrastructure is quite small (<50 USD) and is currently funded by our parents. We intend to raise funds to help in a few additional focus areas:  

1. We conducted timed tests in various schools. We want to scale these tests and give more prizes to the students. 

2. Depending on the success, we want to organize a nationwide talent search to give cash prizes of 5,000 INR to deserving students from low-income families to encourage them to study. 

3. We want to have NGOs in India use the App to select students for scholarships. 

Since costs are low, and spend depends on the fund raising, there are no challenges for financial sustainability.