VIVIBOOM

With VIVIBOOM, we aim to bridge the educational inequality gap between the wealthy and impoverished globally and locally, within countries. A United Nations report has shown, within countries, children from more impoverished families tend to fare worse in a standardised test than their peers. In a 2019 study done by UNESCO, it is found that only 1% of children of primary school age from affluent regions like Europe and North America are out of school while there are 7% of such children in Southern Asia, and 18% of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. A prominent explanation for such a phenomenon as pointed out by numerous researchers on educational inequality is the lack of access to the same educational resources for children from a lower socioeconomic status family.

According to a study by Unicef, there are approximately 1 to 2 million institutions providing primary and secondary level education, and at least 200,000 of such institutions within the developing countries of the South East Asia alone. With such a large scale of the global and local inequality gap, children from lower income countries would have a reduced comparative advantage to maintain their livelihood and receive better general well-being. Thus, while recognising the importance of education as a human right, and the integral role it plays in helping each individual attain other fundamental human rights, it is imperative that we reduce this educational gap.

To effectively reduce the educational inequality gap, we flagged out two major contributions to the educational inequality gap. Firstly, schools from poorer countries or districts would have lesser funds to access resources that schools from wealthier districts could. For example, even in a wealthy developed nation like Singapore, children are exposed to Artificial Intelligence in primary school, a privilege that not many of her neighboring countries could afford, especially for schools in more rural or poorer regions. As such, our solution aims to bridge the educational inequality gap between wealthy and poorer groups by providing a platform with real-world and up-to-date content for schools in poorer districts or countries. 

Secondly, in institutions from countries where English is not their first language lacks the exposure to up to date quality education materials in the STEAM field as most of these contents are primarily produced in English speaking regions. As such, through VIVIBOOM, we aim to provide these contents to such institutions and do our best to level the educational playing field between institutions and schools from different regions.

VIVIBOOM is a gamified project sharing platform where users can attempt challenges (Fig 1.1) and earn STEAM-related badges (Fig 1.2) in a plethora of categories such as design thinking, coding, art, sewing, 3D modeling & printing, etc. These resources were designed to not only expose children to the latest advancements in the world, but also to equip them with skills necessary in the twenty-first century, whilst fueling their passion to be a lifelong learner. To provide a variety of high quality badges and challenges that are applicable to the real world, VIVIBOOM has also worked with organisations like James Dyson Foundation to present challenges designed by them on our portal.

Fig 1.1: Challenges Page

Fig 1.2 Badges Page

Through this application, children are encouraged to take up the active role of learning as the application supports event booking, messaging and project co-authoring capabilities for users to connect and collaborate to make their dream project, or even learn something new together with their peers.

Fig 1.3: Projects Page

Fig 1.4: Project completed by a VIVIBOOM child

To aid with showcasing the child's skills and capabilities, VIVIBOOM includes a portfolio sharing system where a child could build their portfolio and exhibit their projects and skills in their preferred order. The portfolio could then be sent to selected individuals by the child once it is completed!

Fig 1.5: Portfolio Page of a VIVIBOOM user

Additionally, an in-house event booking system is made available to schools to cater to interest-based classes. Through this system, students from different classes and faculties  in institutions could sign up for workshops organized by the institution. The institution could also open up some slots for members of the public to take part in their workshops, allowing for more synergy and serendipitous development of ideas beyond the school.

Figure 1.6: Event Booking Page

VIVIBOOM also allows for administrators of the institutions to upload custom made challenges and badges, organise events through our in-house booking system, and even connect with children through the in-house messaging function.

Fig 1.5: Admin portal for teachers to manage VIVIBOOM

Fig 1.6: In-house chat system

Finally, VIVIBOOM provides a platform for our children to proudly show the world what they can do through our digital portfolio system. Being General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)and Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) compliant, the VIVIBOOM digital portfolio system allows children and institutions to showcase projects, badges earned and challenges completed to the world, while maintaining the privacy of children.

The target audience for VIVIBOOM are institutions/schools of a lower socioeconomic status. As these institutions often lack the funding to engage resources, such as Artificial Intelligence training, coding and 3D modeling workshops, that wealthier institutions could afford, we hope to provide such resources free of charge for them. These resources are provided through existent badges and challenges that are already designed for and used by children from 7 countries worldwide.

Additionally, through the building of a mechanism that fosters collaboration within VIVIBOOM, we hope to build our children’s communication skills and fuel their interest in learning, both of which are necessary yet underdeveloped skills for poorer institutions. Certain features that contributed to this mechanism are the in-house messaging functionality, project co-authoring capabilities, like and comment function for projects, etc. Through VIVIBOOM’s digital portfolio system and project sharing capabilities, we hope to strengthen their social skills by boosting their confidence as they showcase the repository of their projects. 

As financially stringent institutions, especially in South East Asia, often experience a higher teacher to student ratio as compared to affluent institutions, we hope that the VIVIBOOM in-house messaging, challenge and badge system, project sharing system could aid in the facilitation of lessons within the institution. Through the use of these capabilities, teachers would be able to provide quality interaction with and guidance to children in their classes, while covering the contents required.

Our team consists of a group of 3 software engineers from different cultural backgrounds throughout Asia with a passion for using technology to provide quality education for children of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

To ensure that VIVIBOOM remains easy to use for children from different backgrounds with different talents and interests, our team has taken up a multi-faceted approach to not only garner feedback from children globally.

Firstly, our  non-profit VIVITA Singapore runs a physical makerspace that had to figure out a way to continue impacting kids in STEM/STEAM during the COVID Lockdown. During the 3 years of COVID lockdown, we rapidly developed and iterated VIVIBOOM based on user feedback from our non-profit youths. This culminated in over 900 STEM/STEAM projects created by our youths and uploaded into VIVIBOOM. 

Secondly, to ensure that our badges and challenges content are easy to understand for children all over the world and maintains a good balance between the different STEAM categories, we have worked with a global team of engineers, designers and artists spanning across the 7 countries in the United States, Europe, and Asia, to develop these community resources. 

Fig 1.7: Day to day workshop with beneficiaries of Vivita Singapore

Fig 1.8: Brainstorming session with children on building a virtual economy in VIVIBOOM

Fig 1.9: Brainstorming sharing about VIVIBOOM virtual Economy

We have built and tested the following functionalities:

1. Project sharing among children

2. Commenting and Liking of projects from others

3. Co-authoring projects among children, where a group of children could work together to complete a project

4. Challenges for children to attempt

5. Badges for children to earn

6. Chat function for children to connect

7. Events for children to book within VIVIBOOM

8. Individual digital portfolio for children to showcase their projects to the public

9. Custom made challenges and badges by administrators of an institution

10. Hosting of private and public events by administrators of an institution

11. Institution digital portfolio for institutions to showcase their children’s projects, and institution challenges and badges

One challenge that we are currently facing is the promotion of the usage of VIVIBOOM beyond the countries we are operating in. We hope that with the Solve network, we would be able to connect with influential educators who would be able to advice on adapting VIVIBOOM’s content to not only the language but materials, tools and teacher expertise available in the country. With their advice, it’ll be easier for schools to see the value of VIVIBOOM in empowering their school’s STEM/STEAM initiatives and onboard their schools into VIVIBOOM according to their country’s legal framework, cultural values/sensitivity and data privacy laws.  

We would also like to tap on the nine month virtual support program to develop VIVIBOOM further beyond just a tool, but rather a well-equipped product and service that can better cater to the needs of our underprivileged youths and also provide better quality education to children all over the world. We hope that through the nine month virtual support and the network with impressive peers, we could gain more inspiration and guidance in developing new features and improving on current features that would be relatable to and easy to use by underprivileged youths.

Lastly, as we provide VIVIBOOM free of charge to underprivileged youths, we would like to experiment and develop a sustainable business model through Solve. We hope that the developed business model could not only help sustain us but also expand our reach to underprivileged youths at an exponential rate so that we can not only reduce the educational inequality gap, but also contribute to the Solve community in future.

There are three ways in which VIVIBOOM approaches the problem in a novel way.

Firstly, VIVIBOOM focuses on nurturing our child to be passionate lifelong learners by equipping them with the right skills. There are indeed multiple applications in the market such as Schoology, Remind, ClassDojo, etc. yet, most of them, if not all, are focused primarily on communications between parents and teachers, or digital portfolio building. Although these applications have benefited many institutions across the globe, they are designed for documentation purposes and act as a tool for institutions in countries with a well established system to facilitate their lessons instead of building an environment for children to develop their interests as they learn and take charge of their learning journey.

Secondly, there is a base set of resources such as challenges and badges for children to learn about STEAM-related content such as the basics of 3D modeling, arduino coding, and more. These contents have been tried and tested for at least five years with children of differing backgrounds, socioeconomic status and countries, and are proven to be effective.

Lastly, most solutions about reducing this educational inequality gap between countries revolve around provision of educational services, or hardware alone. For example, the provision of digital educational resources like tablets to schools in several countries like Ghana, Kenya, and India, by Rumie Initiative, a Canadian nonprofit organization. With VIVIBOOM, we would like to work with these organisations to provide more impact and reduce the educational inequality gap.

As VIVIBOOM builds an environment for children with varying capabilities and interests, we have employed some nudging methods to make it easier for children to approach seemingly difficult and complicated topics such as artificial intelligence and coding. Through the multitude of nudging methods such as splitting the challenges and badges into beginner, intermediate, and advanced level, showing other children’s projects when they first enter the mobile application to improve the visibility and hence encourage them to attempt more projects, and making plans to gamify the system to excite children in attempting challenges or creating their own projects. Through these methods, we would expect to create a low wall high ceiling approach for our target audience to remain engaged and be independent self-directed learners of STEAM-related content through VIVIBOOM. By effectively engaging our target audience and educating them with resources that they could not easily access, it would help reduce the educational inequality gap by providing a quality education and resources for children in less privileged regions.

Additionally, we believe the methods mentioned above could tackle two important issues the VIVIBOOM aims to address. Firstly, it could produce a higher quality education by reducing the workload of the teachers in schools from poorer districts and countries, often with high teacher to student, by acting as a platform for children to independently learn on their own time and pace. This ease in burden would allow teachers to provide better quality of education as they direct their resources to those who require more assistance yet allowing students who are performing well to continue developing at a pace that they are comfortable at. Secondly, it allows for a different rate of learning and development in a classroom. We believe our system allows for different individuals to continue developing and learning at their own pace as it provides a myriad of learning resources of differing difficulties and rigor. This would empower children who are learning at a faster pace to continue developing in their preferred trajectory and rate whilst remaining engaged in their education, even when the lesson is slowed down to cater to the needs of children who would require more assistance.

Through VIVIBOOM, we aim to equip all children with twenty first century skill sets, and provide a creative learning environment for children to envision the limitless possibilities they can achieve across geographical, social and economical boundaries. Our primary impact goal is to increase the number of institution sign ups with VIVIBOOM. According to a study by Unicef, there are approximately 1 to 2 million institutions providing primary and secondary level education, and at least 200,000 of such institutions within South East Asia alone. As such, on a conservative level in the initial stages of pushing VIVIBOOM to the world, we are aiming for 10% of the market which includes approximately 20,000 of institutions providing primary and secondary level education within South East Asia, and 100,000 of such schools globally.

To measure our progress in equipping children with twenty first century skill sets, we have been monitoring the number of children using VIVIBOOM, the average challenges completed and badges earned by each user, and the number of projects uploaded onto VIVIBOOM by our children. These statistics help us understand the usage of the VIVIBOOM application, and aid in the determination of our users’ learning progress through the monitoring of their activity.

To measure our progress in equipping all children with these skills we have been tracking the number of countries using VIVIBOOM, the number of children from less privileged families in Singapore using VIVIBOOM, and the number of children from public schools using VIVIBOOM. These numbers are effective in anchoring our team in ensuring VIVIBOOM is effective in reaching out to all children, especially those from less privileged backgrounds.

VIVIBOOM uses mobile and web software to provide a platform for a serendipitous exchange of ideas that can facilitate our users in learning better. To ensure that our application is suitable for both children and adolescents, we underwent multiple user testing sessions to garner feedback, and observe how our users from different age groups and cultural backgrounds interact with our application interface. This helps us understand our users better and enable us to make changes to better facilitate their learning process. Additionally, VIVIBOOM has enhanced our communication functionalities through collaborative project functions, and our in-house messaging function. We believe that these methods would help users to communicate better, and as a result discover their strengths and weaknesses, or passions as they continue to learn and improve on themselves.

Rooted on Pedagogy of Play by Harvard University, VIVIBOOM has incorporated a gamified system of learning such as the earning of badges and completion of challenges, provided our users with the opportunity to brainstorm and design new features they hope to see on VIVIBOOM, and provided a plethora of systems for users to collaborate with each other. In these endeavors, we aim to not only provide a platform for users to learn STEAM-related content, but also to provide a sandbox environment for our users to learn how to work with others, negotiate rules and relationships, and to equip them with the ability to be an imaginative individual that brings their ideas to life.

3 full-time staff, and 1 consultant

4 years

Our team of three consists of two females and one male, with our team lead, Su Yuen, from Malaysia, a developing country where the primary language used in public schools is Malay. Due to most STEM/STEAM content being available in English, she felt a huge barrier to accessing all these educational content that are important in equipping youths with important STEM/STEAM skills. Our lead software engineer, Bowen Feng, grew up in Ganzhou, China where the primary language of education is Chinese. Bowen personally felt the same challenges in accessing STEM/STEAM educational content growing up. 

To ensure that all our team members have an equal opportunity to be heard, we hold bi-weekly meetings to understand the challenges we have faced, and discuss our upcoming plans. Through these meetings, we ensure that all voices are heard by actively directing the conversations to those who are more reserved and quiet. Additionally, to ensure everyone remains engaged in the meeting and is not left out, we adopted a modified version of the Six Thinking Hats, parallel thinking process method, in accordance with our Mission and Vision. In this version, some prominent ‘hats’ we make compulsory in our discussions are namely the Facilitator hat where the person would facilitate the entire discussion, the No Hard Feelings Hat, where the person would raise up contentious points about the discussion item, the Members Hat where the person would perceive the discussion item from our users’ point of view, and the Sustainability Hat where the person would consider the viability of our decisions on the discussion item in the short and long run.

To ensure that everyone is coping well, our team leader has also made it a point to catch up with our team members both online and offline whenever she can, and would offer advice or help when required. This ensures that no one falls through the cracks because of their struggles, and effectively aids in building an inclusive environment for all our team members.

Apart from making efforts to build an inclusive environment that promotes equity as shown above, we are also maintaining diversity in our team by opening up roles for people equipped with the skills to fulfill their job role regardless of age, color, race, and religion.

VIVIBOOM aims to employ a freemium model where we provide basic features for our customers without compromising the quality of education provided to children. To achieve this, we would provide features such as project sharing, liking and commenting, challenge and badge earning system, communication through in-house chat system, project collaboration system. Furthermore, to ensure that institutions would be able to provide content that is specified to their content, other features such as badge and challenge creation and event management would be made available to institutions without cost. This ensures that all institutions would be able to use VIVIBOOM to provide quality education that is specific to their curriculum.

Our chargeable features include data analytics/reporting capabilities and the ability for teachers to purchase pre-populated badge and challenge content. The specifics of the features to be charged are still in the discussion phase and are subject to changes in future development. Yet, to ensure that we could positively impact and help as many institutions from less privileged regions and districts, we hope to provide some of these features that could greatly elevate the education quality to them at no cost.

There are two viable revenue streams that we are aiming to secure funds from. Firstly, we would like to bring in money to fund our work through grants and donations. To do this, we have been researching on, and applying for grants both in Singapore and globally. Currently, we are applying for a grant in Singapore where we will be funded to add on additional features within VIVIBOOM. We are hopeful that through this endeavor we could provide more impactful capabilities for children to be exposed to STEAM related content through a multitude of avenues such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality/virtual reality, gamified learning system, etc. 

The second revenue stream our team is looking at is the securing of funds through our freemium model. This is a model we saw to be really successful for ClassDojo. Through a series of interviews with our current customers, we have learnt that most institutions would be willing to pay more for additional features such as the provision of data analytics of users, events, projects posted, the ability to mass import users, and the additional badges and challenges content we created with our business partners like James Dyson Foundation. Apart from these primary research findings, we have also studied the efficacy of such models for applications that are similar in nature to VIVIBOOM. The use of the freemium model has not only been proven to be effective for most technology centered companies like Zoom and MailChimp, it is has also helped multiple edTech companies that are similar in nature to VIVIBOOM like ClassDojo, SeeSaw, and Bloomz secure revenue. Therefore, considering the market feedback and the historical evidence of the efficacy of the freemium model in raising funds for businesses similar in nature to VIVIBOOM, we believe that the freemium model would help us attain financial sustainability when used in tandem with our efforts to secure grants and donations. Additionally, to test the viability of this revenue stream, we have opened our application to institutions in Singapore including enrichment centers, public schools, and tuition centers, and have gained three paying customers within a month. After a series of discussion with them, we have gathered that VIVIBOOM would be an application that institutions in general would be willing to pay for given it solves multiple pain points for modern day education. As such, we believe that this freemium model would work effectively as a revenue stream for VIVIBOOM.