Free Educational App in local language for middle and high school students in India

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

Education in India is mandatory for all children from ages six to fourteen and is provided free of charge at Government schools. In spite of significant efforts in expanding access to education, there are millions of students in India who lack access to high-quality education that could help them, and our society, grow.  

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). One of the challenges is lack of sufficient teachers and quality teaching in public and government aided schools.  

One of the surveys shows that 30% of the 5th grade students are two grade levels below their current level.

On further research, we found that the students need either coaching in small groups or 1:1 settings in addition to the existing school based curriculum. Many wealthy families are able to get quality teaching through private tuitions. However,  it is harder to accomplish the same economically and in a scalable way without digital tools for under privileged students. There is a dire need for robust preparation material for these disadvantaged and under-served school children to have a fair shot at exams. 

Our goal is to reduce inequality by providing access to quality education. We would like to address the problem of dropout rate in the upper primary years by providing preparation materials such as revision notes through chapter summaries and self-paced questions and answers to assess learning challenges and overcome them.

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, chapter summaries, 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. We have now over 10,000 questions available in five languages each - English, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, and Tamil. 

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 goals of “Reducing Inequalities” and “Quality Education”

Link to the Website for the IndiaExamPrep app http://indiaexamprep.lifebeyondschool.in/ 

1. Our goal are  “Reducing Inequalities” and “Quality Education”

2. Our target Segment is students (grades 6 to 10) from disadvantaged and under-served schools in India studying in English, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi and Telugu languages.  

3. One of the surveys shows that 30% of the 5th grade students are two grade levels below their current level. To improve the pass % and reduce dropouts from schools, we wanted to provide supplemental self-paced learning solutions that children can use. Free apps like Khan Academy do not cater to all the Indian syllabi completely & commercial apps like Byju’s are too expensive. 

4. Many children spend more time on their parents' phones than books at home. Our view was that with our app, students can use their parents phone to self study.  

5. Our solution serves students (grades 6 to 10) from disadvantaged and under-served schools in India studying in the CBSE, Andhra Pradesh State, Karnataka State and Tamil Nadu state board curricula. 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  basic conceptual understanding can go through practice tests, True/False questions to get  basic conceptual 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. 

6. We hope to increase students' ability to understand concepts, prepare them for grade level skills, and test their knowledge through the app through repetitions and iterations.

7. This approach directly helps in reducing the dropout rate in schools thereby contributing to the UN Sustainable development goals of “Reducing Inequalities” and “Quality Education”

1. I am Siddanth Nandivada, a grade 10 student in Bangalore and I built this app along with my older brother under the mentorship of Mr Prasad and with support from our parents. 

2. We have been working with children near our community for the last four years and have a good understanding of the children’s areas of interest and challenges in academics.  I volunteer through APR Charitable Trust on the weekends to teach students and understand the academic challenges across Math, Science, and English among low-income families. 

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 promote this application by sending it to Headmasters of schools and other teachers through WhatsApp / Email using the Python program we built. 

5. We have 30,000+ downloads so far and 8000 hours of usage. We are hoping to touch 1 M downloads and over 100,000 hours of learning in the next 3 years.

• We organized multiple tests for students in local schools over the last two years to understand the challenges students face. Many students have an academic understanding significantly below their grade level. 

• Based on the user feedback, we launched eleven versions of the app over the last 2 years. Some of the users gave positive feedback and provided testimonials. 

• The fifteen positive youtube testimonials provided by students generated over 250,000 views and helped in increasing the number of downloads.  

• We have 30,000+ downloads so far and 8000 hours of usage. 

• We are hoping to touch 1 M downloads and over 100,000 hours of learning in the next 3 years.

• Non-Monetary support:

1. Looking for mentorship and guidance from experienced professionals in the field of education in improving the branding and marketing. 

2. Looking for connections to build partnerships to improve the adoption of the app.

• Monetary support: While we generated funds through fundraising, additional funding would help in accelerating the below actions. 

1. Looking for funding support to apply advanced Machine Learning to take open source content and include in the App 

2. Proof-read the questions and answers which were converted using ML models and the Google Translate API. 

3. We are looking to organize a timed test and select the top students across India who qualify the grade specific tests from marginalized communities and give cash prizes. 

1. IndiaExamPrep app is targeted towards self-paced learning for each chapter. Each chapter has a summary with open source questions and answers from school text books

2. For some of the difficult topics in Math such as polynomials, trigonometry, open source videos from Youtube are made available in the app for them to watch before solving chapter specific questions. 

3. 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. 

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

5. It is light-weight 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. 

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

   1. Those who want to pass the exams with minimal understanding can go through practice tests and True/False questions to get a basic 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. 

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

1. 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. We hope that with the usage of this IndiaExamPrep app on a large scale, the dropout rates in school will decrease slightly. 

2. The fact that the app has 30K downloads and 20 min average engagement per active monthly user is an indication that the app is making a difference to our target community. 

3. We have received feedback from a few school teachers and also saw positive feedback on Google Play store with 4.3 as the average rating across all the reviews. 

4.  We believe that students who feel confident of taking the exams based on the preparation are less likely to drop out of school. 

2024 Goal :

• We have 30K downloads. Looking to grow the app to atleast 50,000 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. 
• Launch a Talent Search Test and reward economically needy students through fundraising from the industry. 

• 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.

Three year Goal:

• Grow the adoption to 1 M users and 100,000 hours of learning. 

• Make our app a household name like Byju’s is today. 

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

We use Firebase Dashboard to track the total number of users, average engagement time, no. of engaged sessions per user and distribution of users across Indian states. Main metric we track is the number of downloads and average engagement time. 

Currently the average engagement time per active user is 20 min.

1. The App is 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 (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 for language translation . 

4. We wrote a Python program for promoting the app through WhatsApp and email using the contacts of ministers, Headmasters and school teachers.

2 part-time students and a part time mentor.

We have been working over the last 3 years on this solution. It took 1 year to launch and last 2 years has been in revising the app based on feedback and promoting the app. 

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. Most of the testimonials are from girls. We expect the usage to increase among marginalized children and girls.

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 it . The application is built to provide free access to quality education to students from low-income families.  Costs of running the website and any ongoing maintenance expenses are paid by our parents. 

Our main goal is to reduce inequalities and improve the quality of education in India. We measure our success through the number of downloads, no. of hours learnt using the app, and positive testimonials.

The cost of the Infrastructure is quite small (<50 USD) and is self-funded. We raised funds to help in a few additional focus areas:  We conducted timed tests in various schools / NGOs and distributed prizes and merit scholarships worth ~ 3000 USD from the fund raising. 

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