Nexus of Good: Playful learning

India has made mammoth strides in inclusion and enrolment over the last decade; however, despite an enrolment rate of over 95 per cent, only half of all children in grade three match the grade level in reading and math. As a result, students fall behind their peers and are unable to catch up, further hampering the learning process as they progress from grade to grade. Early intervention is therefore essential to ensure that all students have mastered the foundational skills required for meaningful learning experiences as they grow older. When used appropriately for learning, technology can engage students, support teachers, and allow for new and innovative ways to teach, learn, and assess progress, particularly in low-resource settings. Further, technology enables a more engaging, interactive, and playful learning environment, especially to engage young children. Chimple, a non-profit organisation set up in 2015, leverages technology to do exactly the same – create a meaningful and playful experience for all children.

The organisation's approach is grounded in best practices and research in game design, early childhood development, and learning sciences to support children's engagement in learning at home and in school. The journey to impact is based on two key pillars:

1. Engaging the learner. A game-based app, Chimple, contains a library of engaging games mapped to a curriculum-aligned learning journey for children aged between three to eight years. Game-based learning has shown efficacy via rigorous evaluation, particularly in the early years. In Chimple, the repository of games is supported by other scaffolding and engagement mechanisms.

2. Involving the learning agents. Chimple's teacher and parent consoles allow learning agents to have a bird's eye view over students' learning — enabling parents and teachers to engage more meaningfully in a student's journey.

This dual-pillared approach serves to improve uptake, adoption, engagement, and retention in two ways – by creating in-app engagement hooks geared towards children in this age group; and by creating a service layer through the learning agents that can drive the requisite usage and engagement to meet Chimple's minimum usage.

Having established its efficacy in Tanzania as one of the finalists for the Global Learning XPRIZE, Chimple turned its focus onto the main geography of interest – India. With support from partners such as Central Square Foundation, the product went through multiple rounds of iteration and contextualisation for deployment in India, including translation of the app into Hindi and the inclusion of Hindi as a subject within the offering. In partnership with the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), Chimple began implementing its tablet-based intervention in 10 BMC schools around Chembur and Govandi in September 2019 and carried it out until the March 2020 lockdown. Learnings and feedback from teachers around this intervention led to the creation and development of Chimple's teacher console – the Chimple Class app.

When schools closed during the pandemic and Chimple's in-school deployments were halted, the team quickly pivoted their outreach strategy, and launched the app on the android Play Store. Teachers were provided this link to share with parents so as to bring students back to their learning journeys. Paid ads, as well as marketing on Facebook and other social media, were used to organically reach as many students as possible. Additionally, Chimple also partnered with Top Parent – an app that seeks to foster parental engagement in learning through social gamification and creating access to quality EdTech that was then released by the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh. This helped enhance Chimple's reach and get students onboard to the Chimple app. The onboarding assessment within Chimple helped place students at the right level, minimising learning losses and boosting engagement. From the period of April 2020 to December 2020, Chimple saw the addition of ~30,000 users, and an average engagement time of ~12 mins per user.

During this time, a companion teacher app was also developed, allowing teachers to remotely assign activities to their students, and view each student's progress through the app in real-time. Recognising that technology will inevitably play an important role in our classrooms going forward, Chimple aims to create a truly blended experience with seamless integration from home to school. This year, in collaboration with key ecosystem partners, the Chimple team plans to experiment, learn from, and iterate this model of implementation at scale.

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, Chimple has been running a weekend programme in collaboration with Robin Hood Army (RHA) in four urban slum settlements across Bangalore. Through the interactive Chimple Learning tablet, children in these communities have had an opportunity to learn and practice basic literacy and numeracy skills, scaffolded by instruction from RHA volunteers. The RHA intervention also allowed the Chimple team to observe the self-learning power of Chimple, and helped inform critical product improvements.

In Maharashtra, Chimple, in association with Sajag Foundation, is bridging the learning gap by supporting and promoting Sajag's home-based learning initiative. Chimple's dual app ecosystem has allowed Sajag volunteers to understand each child's learning level, and helped them tailor their instructions and remediations accordingly. Similarly, in association with DoorStep Schools in Mumbai; Chimple is running a tablet-based intervention in community centres located in Dharavi and other urban slums.

In Haryana, Chimple team is all set to implement, experiment, and learn from a teacher-directed at-home learning model in a set of schools. The onboarding of students in the first phase of the programme has already started and early results from the Hindi heartland have been very encouraging. Uptake and adoption are rising, and organic engagement on the app is growing.

In the spirit of creating a user-first product, and given that the pandemic has changed the relationship between students and technology, the Chimple team prioritises the integration of user feedback into product development. Armed with this valuable user feedback, the team continuously upgrades the app for children with more intuitive games and activities, improved augmentation of content for each learner, and an improved user journey within the app to create a more meaningful learning experience. As Chimple embarks on its journey to scale, the team's goal is to continue iterating the product and the programme to set the stage for an eventual impact evaluation, and establishing Chimple's efficacy in India's low-income community context.

Chimple, under the inspired leadership of its founder Srikanth Talapadi, has demonstrated that good ideas can be materialised and, in the true spirit of Nexus of God, can be scaled through a public-private partnership.

Views expressed are personal