How a unique collaboration is transforming education into edutainment

Hearing the word ‘education’ brings a monotonous thought of sitting and revising the same concepts until they are grasped by us. Wouldn’t it be fun if the learning happened while enjoying some activity? Lenovo in collaboration with ConveGenius conducted years of extensive research and launched CG Slate to encourage interactive learning.

CG Slate, an educational tablet for children till grade 5 has been specially designed for India and has the best content mapped according to NCERT curriculum. The main idea behind creating such a device is to indulge children into self-learning through play, learn and shop feature. Children will not be able to play games or shop for themselves till they indulge in learning. Through this learning, they will earn points which can be either used to shop or play games. The tab focuses on Maths, Science, G.K, spoken English and grammar and reading stories. It engrosses children using videos, worksheets and interactive games. To help kids deal with obstacles, there is a mascot –Titu– a squirrel, which will help kids and motivate them in solving their problems.

In a tete-a-tete with the Education bureau, Jairaj Bhattacharya, MD, ConveGenius, throws light on how important technology is in today’s education and solving the problem of learning via ‘Gamification’.

Tell us about ConveGenius? How did you conceive the idea?

ConveGenius is an Ed-tech company dedicated towards building mobile solutions to address the problem of education quality and inequity in India. CG Slate is a holistic ecosystems aimed at combining the elements of fun and rewards with the process of learning, thus transforming education into edutainment.

We are inspired by the thought of solving the Education problem in India. We dream about digitising India by innovating in the Ed-tech Space. The key to having an educated population is to make quality education affordable to the masses. We believe that the traditional methods of packaging huge amount of digital content are futile efforts of pushing technology in user’s throats. There has to be a better way, a more innovative one! This was how the idea of CG Slate conceived.

What challenges you faced and how did you tackle them?

Need of Quality Hardware: In order to build a self-learning platform that children could use in a personalised manner, we first had to partner with reliable OEMs. This was how the partnership between ConveGenius and Lenovo started.

We were extremely un-happy with other vendors.

Mapping with NCERT: The need to map our content with NCERT required us to build an innovative mechanism that could aggregate, curate and then finally push the relevant content from multiple content partners seamlessly. This was a huge challenge we solved via our back-end technologies.

Kindly give a brief about your business & revenue model?

CG Slate comes pre-loaded as a solution with Lenovo tablets. Hence, our model revolves around learning outcomes. The more kids learn, the more time they spend on our solution which drives revenues via engagement in shopping and fun activities.

What is the USP of ConveGenius?

ConveGenius focuses on solving the problem of learning via Gamification. Our products are aimed to enable self-learning via access to aggregated and curated content from multiple content developers, which is mapped to the education curriculum in India. Our platform adapts to every child’s individual needs via predictive data analytics on their learning outcomes.

How has your journey been so far? And what is your future road map? Highlight expansion plans if any?

ConveGenius launched CG-Slate on 5th July, 2016 on its B2C channels which involves reaching out to parents via online channels like Flipkart. We also plan to soon start distribution via Amazon and Offline channels. We plan to expand our B2B channels as well by reaching out to more chains of schools, learning centers, NGOS and CSR Initiative focused towards education.

We plan to reach out to 100,000 children by the end of FY17 and 1 million children by FY18.

Highlight major challenges that India is currently facing in the path to become a complete educated economy?

The major challenges can be summarised in 3 points –

• a.Inconsistency in Teaching Quality: Only 5% of students in India get access to good quality teaching out of 350 million children in India in the K-5 segment. The challenge is to provide consistency in the teaching quality among various demographics and parts of the country.
• b.Inconsistency in Content Access: There is a lot of content available out there, but unfortunately very few parents or kids know where to access it from. Our platform aims to curate the best quality content and provide a platform for seamless access irrespective of privilege or class.
• c.Transparency and Analytics: There is a huge gap that needs to be filled in terms of transparency, reporting and analytics on how the Educational system in India is being run at the grass-root level and how it is being assumed at the top. This transparency issue can be solved via building analytics and technological tracking points end to end.

What role does technology play in education?

Technology is an enabler, a layer that can create the right experiences to enable quality education.

There will be more than 650 Million Smart-phones in India within the next 3 years. This is almost 50% of India’s population today. Given that still 72.2% of India lives in the rural parts, it is obvious that more than 25% of India’s population from the rural segment will be equipped with Smart-phones and internet via Data connectivity. It is only imperative that smart-phones will be reaching the pockets of householders faster than Good Schools, Good Infra-structure or Good teachers!

Technology is the only way we can bring the power to teach and make learning easy for children.