MONTE - STEAM and Screen-Free Coding Toy For Young Children

Many parents are using smartphone or tablet as a tool to keep their children stay quite while busy. Recent researches show that too much screen time could have negative impact on a young child’s development. WHO’s health guidelines say any time spent in front of a screen is time not spend in physical activity.

To promote positive, creative, and educational engagement with technology, we provide an unique and playful way of integrating arts and creative design with robotics and coding into early childhood education with hands-on, screen-free tools like Monte Playset.

Monte playset also an IoT-powered toy that can track children activities then help teacher to evaluate children skills developing in problem solving, logical thinking,....

Tracking information will be send and analyze by an AI-powered platform to help keep track child development and can recommend learning path for this child in the future.

For decades Early childhood education has focused on numeracy and natural sciences when it comes to STEM, lack of “T”(Technology) and “E” (Engineering).

Robotics and programming provide a fun and hands-on way to introduction young children to all aspects of STEM. Unlike many apps developed for children, Monte offer a playful and collaborative way for children unleash their imagination without requiring screen time on PCs, tablets or smartphones. Monte can help young children to make their ideas physical and tangible, make coding as a playground. Similar to traditional wooden building blocks and toy like Lego, IoT-powered Monte blocks allow young children to develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination. Children as young as 4 years old can buid and program a simple robot while learning concepts of computational thinking

Thanks to IoT devices embedded inside wooden blocks, magic wand and robot, teachers can get report and analysis of children skills development from cloud. This will help teachers save time and focus more on improving the quality of instruction. Data collected also will be used by artificial intellignence platform to predict and recommend learning path for a child with available MOOC courses from Khan Academy, Coursera, edX,…

Inspired by Montessori method, Monte playset combines traditional education philosophy with technology to help children learn 21st century skills with easy and fun.

Monte playset can be used as a playful STEAM coding toy for boys and girls aged from 3 to 7.

Research shows that even in early childhood, children are already beginning to form opinions and stereotypes about which tools and technologies are better suited towards boys or girls. By engaging young children in coding and robotics activities before these stereotypes begin to take root, we can help them build positive associations with technology and engineering and a self-image as a creator with technology.

Introducing coding robot integrated with STEAM activities in early children using Monte playset offers a unique approach to foster curiosity, creativity and imagination of children.

Artificial Intelligence platform will help parents, educators understand children compentencies and knowledge gaps, the platform also help parents save time and efforts to find courses for their children by suggest a learning path for each child based on their learning history and capability analysis.

MONTE is the first educational platform combines IoT devices, artificial intelligence for young children.

The playset looks simple for children to play, inside is the complexity of embedded electronics, enabled IoT board. Rather than simply creating apps for children play and learn then record all activities on apps, we have created a tangible, physical playset similar to traditional wooden building blocks, young children learn more through playing and hands-on.

Data recorded will be synchronize to cloud, AI platform will use data to learn and training the model.

Parents or teachers can get report of child’s skill compentencies. If the data collected enough, they can get courses suggested from the AI-powered platform. This AI platform will search courses from online MOOC resources and arrange for each child based on their learning abilities, knowledge gaps. A child can use suggested learning path to learn by himself, online. This process will be time saved for parents or teachers to get the best suited courses for a child.

How technologies are integrated to our solution:

Technologies in hardware will help us collect children activities in real-time, BLE (Bluetooth low energy) will help to transfer data to the cloud easily through Monte Link app or Monte-Hub hardware. Thanks to services like Azure IoT Edge and Azure AI from Microsoft, our solution can run without internet. It only needs internet to update data to cloud for machine learning update the learning model or analysis to generate report and other outputs.

Our solution works from hardware level to collect data (Monte playset) to cloud with AI-powered.

Our solution goals over next 12 months:

• Selling more Monte playset to schools, target 1000 playset delivered.
• Develop more add-on module using with Monte playset to cover more children activities, e.g: record voice, video; add-on to learn more skills.
• Develop Monte Link app and Monte-Hub.
• Develop AI-powered algorithm.
• Roll out beta program for AoT platform for schools for free, in Vietnam.
• Expand beta program to international schools, particular in US.

Our solution is the first educational platform that combine IoT devices in education and AI platform to help predict and suggest learning path for students with courses from many online MOOC learning platform like Khan Academy, Coursera, edX, Udacity,...

We take advantages of hardware technology (NFC, BLE) and integrated into AI technology.

The core technologies using in our solution:

 - Communication in IoT devices: NFC and BLE.

 - AI, machine learning to process data collected from our IoT-powered playset.

By utilize AI and online MOOC learning platform, we build a new business model from selling hardware, membership subscription and commission  affiliate program from MOOC platforms (e.g: Coursera)

We pilot and demo at some schools and home, we recorded the engagement of children during play time.

Currently we are in pilot and demo to end users.

So far we have reached around 100 users to demo.

Our goals for next five years:

• 1 million playsets sold .
• AI-powered platform reach 100.000 users with 10.000 paid users.

We're working on developing more IoT devices in education to get more data for our AI platform.

With Mobile App to save all students activities will save data set to train AI model.

Next year we focus on developing hardware and delivered to more customers.

We also kick-off AI platform task by end of next year.

Within next five years, we target to implement the AI platform and reach to 100.000 users with 10.000 paid ones.

We have limited resources in term of finance and human resources that I believe can be solved by selling Monte playset and call for investment to continue R&D Monte products and AI platform.

We plan to develop product division to get the good cashflow to support finance for other R&D activities.

Full-time: 3 engineers.

I have more than 10 years working with technologies, co-founded a tech-based company 8 years ago.

We're based in Vietnam, it is a big advantage for us to manufacture the Monte playset.

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Value proposition:

 - Screen-free, hands-on playset.

 - Learn 21st century skills.

 - Personalize learning based on real history learning data.

Revenue stream:

 - Selling products.

 - Membership on Monte Learning platform.

 - Commission from Affiliate program from MOOC platforms.

Currently we self-funded and in next few months, we will sell product to get better cashflow.

In 2019, we plan to sell 1000 units with revenue from $200,000 as an entry market phase and we focus on Vietnamese market first.

In early 2020, we will launch our membership program to enable users can access more lesson plan, curriculum and more benefits. It is also channel to help communicate and keep our customers stay with us.

In 2020, we plan to raise fund for around $1,000,000 (one million USD) to enter global market. Furthermore we also invest in R&D to have more products to support our ecosystem better. Especially apply AI to our platform to help users in learning.

If we can have MIT Solve support from its partners network, we believe that our products and services will reach to more kindergarten schools in global market.

In case we receive prize from Solve, we will invest more on mobile app and IoT, AI platform to move faster to reach our goal: AI-powered platform for personalize learning.

We believe in the power of open innovation and being a part of the Solve will help us to collaborate with other passionate people or organizations and grow our international plan. We are particular expected to have a chance to connect with educators, experts in education to help us make the platform more useful and comprehensive. We would love to attend the Solve finals to connect with others people.

Schools, early childhood development experts, educators.

We would like to apply for AI Innovation Prize and we can utilize the prize and developing and pilot the platform to schools in Vietnam.

We would like to apply for Innospark Ventures Prize and we can utilize the
prize and developing and pilot the platform to schools in Vietnam.