Electronics Playground

An immersive, physical-digital, low-cost, paper based electronics educational toolkit teaching children STEM skills such as the fundamentals of coding and engineering.

India is home to the largest school system in the world with approximately 264 million children in a K-12 school system. However,  only top international and elite schools following the Indian curricula, forming <0.1% of the total schools in the country, have adopted a rigorous STEM pedagogy that includes engineering and coding education. This results in more than 250 million children across private and public schools with low or poor access to a STEM-related method of learning, such as engineering and coding. Primarily attributed to low school low budgets,  78% of schools in India don’t have computers making it nearly impossible to teach & learn the fundamentals of engineering and coding. What’s worse is UNESCO’s 2021 State of the Education Report for India indicates that the teacher to student ratio on average in middle schools in India is 1:43– one of the worst in the world. With a lack of teachers and technology in classrooms, children are not given the opportunity to explore STEM subjects such as engineering and coding in their most formative years. Struggling STEM learners are more likely to drop out of school, less likely to pursue higher education, and unlikely to surmount the achievement gap. Children with lack of access to STEM education in K-12 schools are 13% less likely to graduate from high school and 29% less likely to attend college. In other words, once children start failing in STEM subjects, they almost never catch up. As such, India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has laid the foundation for the future by calling out a requirement for the “need of a discovery and analysis based learning environment in schools to positively affect a child’s critical thinking skills.”, emphasising the importance of STEM education in K-12 classrooms.

Comparing international assessment scores to economic development from 1960 to 2000, researchers at Harvard, Stanford, University of California and University of Munich found that "a highly skilled workforce can raise economic growth by about two-thirds of a percentage point every year." The study correlates higher STEM skills to a country's economic growth. A 2017 McKinsey report also predicts that 14 percent of the global workforce by 2030 will need to retrain and adapt to new jobs as work becomes increasingly digital. India’s policy, economy, teachers and students demand and  deserve a far better approach to STEM education; and that starts early, in the K-12 system.

Electronics Playground makes “electronics kits” from paper that are used in conjunction with an augmented reality app to turn kids’ paper circuits into virtual working models. Imagine building a circuit using paper and watching it come to live upon scanning it on a phone, with the option to manipulate and alter code for the paper model in front of you. The 3 principles electronics playground embodies are access, experimentation and feedback. Most physical electronics kits cost over $60, however electronics playground kits are expected to cost under $8. That is 7 times cheaper than available solutions in the market. Our AR app runs on low cost smartphones and doesn’t need internet connectivity. For example, it shows the flow of electrons in real time, facilitating understanding of the underlying physics and making it a learning tool that can be used in rural and remote settings. Our toolkit facilitates independent constructionist hands on learning. Sequenced like a learning intervention but produced like entertainment, Electronics Playground guides children through a pre-test, then a customised set of challenges and finally a post-test. In the process, Electronics Playground collects data on demographics, accuracy, and response time to provide real-time targeted feedback to children. The cost of new content creation is low since the app only provides prompts while children have to actively build and iterate to solve challenges making the development and deployment process lean and rapid.

Direct Customer: 

Indian parents with children in middle and high school, middle class, urban, smartphone owner; view high-quality education as an investment/status symbol, need low-touch interventions.

Indian Schools looking to bring high quality, cost effective STEM learning into the classroom as recommended by the National Education Policy (NEP, 2020), urban, use innovation in the classroom as a differentiator to increase enrolments. 

Beneficiaries- children between 10-16 years of age

Demographics- Toddlers between the age of 4 and 7, Indian, barely literate, speak Hindi/vernacular languages but learning English in school, urban. 

Prior experiences- Attends government schools or affordable private school that on average spend $240 to $800 annually per child, first-generation school attendee, minimal cognitive stimulation at home, and digital native.  

Motivators- Interested in project-based, gamified, interactive tasks. They're intrinsically curious, animations, constructing, and promise for a long term benefit. 

Obstacles to learning- poor/no coding/engineering curriculum in school, limited access to quality teachers, parental illiteracy, expensive toys/books, limited scaffolding opportunities, emphasis on rote learning in schools, high opportunity cost of sub-par online education. 

Accessibility- need a smartphone/tablet. 

Constraints- language barriers, digital inequity, poor phone RAM, low phone storage space, and unreliable internet connections.

Electronics Playground addresses the needs of these student populations by adopting phone-first AR technology, which doesn’t need internet connectivity. This allows users to access games anywhere and anytime.

The CEO has received a master’s in Educational Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Electronics Playground was born out of her 5+ year STEM teaching experience in India. Before founding Electronics Playground, she founded Root, a math education app, as an undergraduate at Pomona College, which was funded by Schmidt Futures and Harvard. She has worked in diverse K-12 and EdTech settings—as an educator in India, programming associate at Promise Venture Studio in Palo Alto and Center on the Developing Child at Harvard besides being invited as a thought leader on research partnerships for growth at SXSW Edu. Additionally, we have a board of advisors that comprises of school principals, seasoned entrepreneurs, non-profit CEOs and AR/VR experts from companies like Meta and Google who will help us go-to-market.

As a woman in STEM with a master's in educational technology from Harvard, Aashna has collectively taught over 150 children the fundamentals of engineering in person and online, before and through the pandemic. She has first hand lived experience of the struggles of learning and teaching the basics of engineering online and a repository of student/parent/teacher questions and struggles. Additionally, we’ve conducted 30+ interviews with middle school teachers in India, and 10+ interviews with after school educators and hobbyists.

Consequently, students and parents have been central to the design process. At Electronics Playground we used low-resolution paper and digital prototypes to see how 50+ students responded. We carefully watched as children responded to different scenarios, assessing and evaluating the UI, pedagogy and engagement. We have come up with a custom matrix that has allowed us to narrow in on the key aspects of the product. We intend to start production with funding from MIT SolvEd.

The solution provides a self-correcting way of learning the fundamentals of engineering and coding for children as young as 7 years. Electronics playground will become catalytic for the following 3 stakeholders: 

1) Students: Most children start working on circuits and basic engineering in college. Electronics playground simplifies the science to make it accessible to a very young audience (aged 10 and above) and has an adaptive learning algorithm that adds complexity as children learn. Our pedagogy moves away from top down instruction to user centred education in STEM learning – majority students, especially girls, report feeling unengaged and overwhelmed during science and coding lessons. Our solution is self-paced and provides instant feedback that allows learners to explore, experiment, fail and learn.

2) Technology – AR’s application and utility in K-12 education is at a nascent stage. Electronics Playground’s app is instrumented as a research tool– tracking pre and post learning gains regularly, with robust analytics tracking student progress and getting user input on technology use. We are the cusp of transforming the application of AR technology in STEM instruction.

3) Teachers and classrooms– with only 1 digital device required to run the AR app, Electronics Playground can impact learning at scale in classrooms by aiding STEM teachers, school budgets and learners across the globe. While we are starting out with the intention to teach engineering and coding we believe the technology and process we’ll adopt along the way will help us diversify and target various other verticals such as math, biology and other age groups. What is now a teaching tool for middle schoolers has the potential to simulate complex working procedures for all learners across the world. This is just the beginning!

1. Design, develop and pilot the Electronics Playground Kits with 4 cohorts of early adopters.
2. Produce and Sell 10,000+ Electronics Playground Kits 
3. Improve fundamental engineering knowledge and understanding by at least 40% per student.
4. Reach 1000 hours of engagement (across all users)  with the app by then end of the year.
5. Begin partnerships with universities to measure learning outcomes and study transfer of learning from paper to real electronics.

The key technology used in Electronics Playground is AR. It is used to enhance the students’ visualisation, particularly in understanding tough and abstract topics.  It augments digital content like image, video, 3D models, animation, etc. over the real-world paper circuits and displays an enhanced experience to the learners. Due to its potential to enhance reality with 3D virtual objects, it is used in Electronics Playground Kits. AR provides interactive learning environments to the students which further improves their interest, motivation levels and concentration levels of the students.

We have not launched our product yet. In the upcoming year, we intend to produce and sell 5,000+ Electronics Playground Kits

The barriers for next year include development costs for building and testing the tech stack for the app. Our team is actively looking for a technical co-founder or head of technology to co-build our AR app with a team of contract engineers. We are also looking for lawyers who can help us patent the process/product during/after launch to increase competitive advantage and help us scale. Additionally, we would also be looking to develop a brand strategy as we scale.

We have secured partnerships with 5 groups of schools and various independent academic counsellors. Currently, we have a partnership with Ramnivas Bajaj School and Mainadevi Bajaj International School to name a few. We have signed letters of interest giving us the opportunity to beta launch and prototype kits in these schools. Through these partnerships we can reach over 10,000 children between the age of 10-15. We have also secured initial purchase orders from these schools contingent on the success of the pilot. Other than these, we are also in talks with leading technology institutes in India to recruit talent and set up 3 month projects that students can work on.

We have a B2B and a B2C model.

B to B partnerships with schools. Schools would pay per student for 5th,6th and 7th grade classrooms. Powered by robust analytics, we will give teachers and principals customised reports and analytics on student and classroom performance, growth and areas of improvement.

Direct to consumers through our website and popular marketplaces such as amazon and flipkart.

In the initial stages, roughly 9 months to a year, we hope to raise money through grants and pitch competitions like MIT solve to bootstrap and kickstart our production and marketing. We are in talks with high net worth angel investors about raising a SAFE note to begin our work too. Our CEO has personally invested savings to hire a tech team to design and develop the initial beta version of the app. After 2 years, we are confident that we will be selling products at scale to institutions like schools and direct to consumers which would generate enough revenue and profits to make us financially stable and thrive.