Meenal SharmaAs digital education has begun to transform traditional education NYU graduate Ms. Prerna Jhunjhunwala, founder of Creative Galileo e-learning app has become a pioneer in the field bringing pre-school education into the fold of the digital revolution. The Creative Galileo platform has developed award-winning curriculums for children of 3 to 8 years of age. She aims to create a personalized learning experience for each kid and enable them to bloom in life.
We had the pleasure of talking to her about her journey, her inspirations, and her visions. These are the answers she shared with us to our questions about her work-
Q1 What was your inspiration behind the creation of Creative Galileo? What made you develop the Little Singham app?
From my early childhood days, we were encouraged to focus on education and learned that equity in education isn’t a given at a pretty young age. My mother was very involved in assisting the communities with their needs. Initially, I occasionally accompanied her to shelter or community homes, but soon it became a routine. In no time, I was personally involved in helping the kids from these communities to read and write. As part of visiting my father’s Jute factories across India, I also witnessed a huge class divide in access to education while spending a considerable amount of time in these rural areas. Meeting kids there made me realize, how talented they were but lacked the proper means of formal education. I have always believed the education cannot just be a transactional business. It is about preparing the children for their future, our country’s future. These experiences left an impression on me and led to Creative Galileo- an edtech startup, after my first successful venture, Little Paddington- a chain of preschools in Singapore. With Creative Galileo’s Little Singham-Kids Early learn App, we are leveraging the power of technology and the internet to democratize education in the remotest parts of India, which remain underserved.
Business and financial management skills are vital to running any company. They help in planning, budgeting, decision-making, and checking the organization’s overall health. From an early age, I was always passionate about pursuing my purpose of modernizing and upscaling the education imparted to children in their formative years through innovative tech interventions while keeping it fun. Both my ventures, Little Paddington and Creative Galileo, are in the same direction.
Q2. How do you and your company want to revolutionize the education system?
Education systems worldwide faced disruption brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. It massively accelerated e-learning adoption with school closures. With a keen interest in making education as accessible as possible, especially in the formative years, I launched Creative Galileo in July 2020, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Our Little Singham- Kids Early Learn App is the first-of-its-kind character-based that aims to leverage technology to emphasize personalized needs, inquiry-based learning methods, and experiential activities, resulting in a fun, interactive curriculum. While there are many International character-based apps, we wanted to offer children in India something they can associate themselves with without comprehension barriers (accent, etc.). Our e-learning app weaves together the best of edutainment and helps kids improve their knowledge base, and reinforces their educational concepts and goals/ outcomes. This educational App is a paradigm shift from traditional teaching practices and delivers highly engaging storylines of Little Singham and his friends, Babli, Lattu, Hawaldar Karate, and many others.
Q3. What is the psychology that’s embedded in the development of these programs?
The App is thoughtfully designed and developed by a chosen team comprising award-winning educators, product designers, animators, and software designers, collectively creating engaging content to keep learning fun for children. Our Little Singham- Kids Early Learn App aims to facilitate active, minds-on thinking in the children—asking them to question, guess, evaluate, and think deeply. Personalization and gamification are the two most significant factors that are embedded in our program.
Q4. How has the response and feedback of the application and program been?
We have built an app that is at par with the best globally and not just in India. Our Little Singham- Kids Early Learn app is created to make learning fun. It gives kids access to educational videos, audiobooks, and interactive games. In less than a year, we have seen approx. 2 million downloads from the Indian sub-continent (tier 1, 2, and 3 cities) with an average rating of 4.5 stars. We have also seen up to 5,00,000 monthly active unique users. Our downloads and the active user base are increasing every day. The tremendous response to our App is a testimony to the hunger for quality content and how edutainment will be the key to making learning fun for children. We have also seen downloads from Nepal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Q5. On which lines do you see your organization growing further?
Deploying digital platforms will play a vital role in this new normal, helping to connect students and impart exciting and relevant content. Our e-learning app is a paradigm shift from traditional teaching practices. We are using IPs with a deep resonance with our target user base, i.e. kids and toddlers who watch Indian characters.
To make education accessible, we have kept the underserved community in the centre and developed this e-learning app below 20MB to ensure that users with data and connectivity issues can download our free for use app without hassles. Our Parents Zone in the App, keeps parents informed about their child’s learning development- areas of improvement and strengths.
Q6. Are there any expansion plans on the way? Would you like to tap into any other age group?
There has been a growing preference for localized content in recent years, and early learning (below eight years) has been in the limelight for various reasons. With over 71 million active internet users between the ages of 0 and 9, this market represents an under-penetrated and under-invested sector. We believe there is tremendous potential in this category, and we continue to focus all our efforts specifically on the early childhood segment. We are also in the process of raising funds to make this platform more robust.
Q7. What is your vision for the company?
Edutech has a massive role in ensuring no one is left behind in the shift to digital. We believe the blended learning format will take precedence over everything else, and apps like ours will come in handy to bridge the gap. Our vision is to build a world-class Edtech platform that democratizes access to quality education and can narrow literacy divides by paving the way for more inclusive educational systems