In an exclusive interaction with Mahesh Kallayil of Education Today, Mr. Praveen Tyagi, Founder of STEPapp speaks about the concept of Gamification in Education and how it stimulates creativity among students and improves learning and performance, accelerating Innovation processes.
Please tell us about your journey from being an educationalist to an edu-preneur. How do you come up with an idea for STEPapp?
After 22+ years of teaching, grooming, guiding, and mentoring some of the finest minds of this country through PACE IIT & Medical, there is still an urge for building a strong foundation for students’ careers. It’s really important to build a child’s conceptual foundation as education plays a significant role in our lives. It helps us build an opinion or gives us a perspective on life. At STEPapp, we have always aimed and worked towards solving these two major problems:
- Educational inequalities in India
- Low Technology Adoption in India
These two problems have given us the opportunities to keep ourselves working harder and keeping us connected with the education sector in our country.
Another factor that keeps me so connected with the students and this sector is the joy that it brings with it. I have always shown keen interest in sharpening and nurturing the skills of a child and synchronizing with their intellectual potential. I feel like the richest person in this estate as there is no other happiness than training and grooming such meritorious students that go on to become national assets.
After extensive research, we came up with the idea of a gamified digital learning solution: STEPapp. With STEPapp, students can now learn and revise the topics thoroughly without any disruption at the ease of their homes.
Can you please tell us about STEPapp and the concept behind its inception?
STEPapp is a gamified, personalized, interactive and adaptive learning app that makes learning Math & Science fun and interesting for school students. It allows the students to measure their learning outcomes in a simplified and personalized manner. The outcomes are assessed based on speed, accuracy, and the number of attempts that a student takes to complete a particular learning session. STEPapp makes learning seamless by replacing long lectures into small conceptual quanta.
We, at STEPapp, believe in primarily providing a level playing field in education. The idea is to bolster four key parameters that make education effective and complete. These key parameters are AQEA: Accessibility, Quality, Enjoyability, and Affordability. We aim to provide universal access to quality education for every child using technology and gamification. Our mission is to create a bank of meritorious children who will be transformed into national assets.
From a technology perspective, what is the USP you have over the competitors?
STEPapp is a gamified, personalized, interactive, and adaptive learning app that makes learning Math & Science fun and interesting for K-12 school students. The USP of STEPapp is the opportunity it provides to experience a virtual gamified learn from home experience that enables the students to play and learn at the same time. This gives the students conceptual clarity while making learning an enjoyable experience.
Our team of IITians and Doctors, who spent over 10 years in researching the optimum content delivery mechanism for gamified learning, set us apart from any other EdTech product.
Do you feel that educational inequality is accentuated here? What steps should the government take to counter this?
Solving the educational inequality in India is one of the central missions of STEPapp. We believe in primarily providing a level playing field in education. For this, we have gathered a team of 400+ IITians and Doctors who with their expertise, have developed quality content for every child in every corner of the country. The main mission is to bridge the gap between the rural and the urban areas and provide equality in education and development. We appreciate and also need the interest of the government towards gamified digital learning. With the government investing in online learning apps, the need for equal educational opportunities will be fulfilled.
Could you throw the light on all the recent Government collaboration with STEPapp?
STEPapp has been implemented in hundreds of government schools, where, after playing on our app, students’ performance has improved remarkably. Recently, STEPapp has signed mandates with the Goa and the Uttarakhand government to implement the learning solution in all the government schools across the states. Previously, STEPapp has been implemented in one of the largest chains of schools- Kendriya Vidyalayas, in the state of Tamil Nadu, JNV Schools, Army and Navy Public Schools and all the Tribal Schools in the country.
Could you throw some light on your association with the Tribal Development Department and how this collaboration will help in promoting quality education among deprived and discriminated sections of the population?
The collaboration with the Tribal Ministry for implementation of STEPapp in all the Tribal Schools has given us an enormous opportunity to take a step forward towards our mission. It gives me immense pleasure that we can empower EMRS schools and teachers to provide online learning solutions to these tribal kids and work towards our shared vision of empowering them with quality education. This collaboration with the Tribal Development Department will help the children to acquire a gamified learning experience and achieve greater success in their careers.
The Tribal children are deprived of quality education & high-technological learning experiences but they possess a strong will to learn and are full of talents. Every concept in STEPapp is explained using animations that give visual clarity to the child. While playing on STEPapp, the child’s response time to a question, his weaknesses and strengths are all identified and informed to parents and teachers via mails and SMSes. The child’s efficiency while learning must be measured to motivate children to learn Math & Science and become proficient in those subjects, this e-learning app uses a gamified mechanism of rewarding the children and helping them understand their progress in a digitalised and enjoyable manner. Through this association, we will enhance the students’ performance in school exams as well as in competitive exams. This will also enable schools to measure the students’ learning outcomes through dashboards.
As an edu-preneur, how do you perceive the education landscape in India?
The most important thing for me has always been building the foundation for the students. I believe in understanding a child and seek out to unlock his/her potential to become the country’s biggest assets. Everyone has their own specialized set of skills and powers and a little tap of guidance from us will make them achieve all that they are capable of.
Over the past few decades, education has evolved into a much wider scope and industry that is no more equated with money but with excellence. Today, every child in the country has access to quality education through technology that eases out the process of learning. Society and the professional world continue to evolve and change with the growth of technology and the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, has had a tremendous impact on the educational sphere, leading to a number of growing trends in the world of education.
What can you tell us about the company’s plans for the future?
We see STEPapp as a global product that has huge potential, not just in the Indian market but in global markets as well. We are soon rolling out our product for Grades 1st to 5th app. We are also working towards making STEPapp a multilingual product. There are some new features in the product which are currently into BETA testing which will be announced soon.
