“Our Methodology Promotes Innovative Thinking”

Can you share in brief the USP of the edtech services that you offer?

Mighty Me is a gamified educational platform centred around K-10 education that focuses on holistic development of a child. The idea behind the initiative Mighty Me is to foster, preserve and propagate the natural Mighty traits present in every child which sadly diminishes with age such as curiosity, empathy, innovative spirit, never-give-up attitude etc. We intend to do this by incorporating well researched educational methodology and pedagogy with cutting edge technology like AI. Our methodology promotes innovative thinking and logical approach rather than crunching information. Considering the rapidly transforming tech ecosystem and scenario, it becomes a thing of paramount importance to be agile and innovative with tools and technologies for students to thrive in future. This puts even bigger question mark on the traditional educational approaches. Our USP is our early acknowledgement of this problem and a well-knit solution for the same.

What inputs go into aligning the edtech services that you offer with what students need? What kind of assessment is done to understand the students' needs?

We have assignments designed in all bloom’s levels with changing difficulty levels and topic wise segmentation. Based on this we understand the knowledge gap of a candidate using all these information. Accordingly, we suggest assignments and video lessons to solidify and fill knowledge gaps with our personalised learning approach. Also, to improve students’ innovative approach we have introduced Socratic Discussion Sessions and inculcated the use of AI to ensure personal attention within a group discussion for every student. The parents, students and our academic mentors get to track a student’s performance quantitatively over time which is generated by our AI and can act accordingly to improve the performance of the student.

With AI making deep inroads at every level, what will be the impact on teaching-learning and how to ensure that the creativity of students doesn't get impacted? What is your approach towards incorporating AI in learning?

We believe AI is an amazing tool to enable greater possibilities and make individuals more efficient. Teaching and learning can be greatly enhanced with the use of AI. For example, on our platform we are using AI to enable individual attention in group activities and discussion to improve and optimize the performance of every student with successive sessions. AI can also be used to understand knowledge gaps of the students and enable personalised learning for better knowledge retention. The only way to ensure that AI doesn’t impact the creativity of the students negatively is by limiting the use cases of AI to that of tools but not as solutions itself. If used properly AI will be a great catalyst in enhancing the creativity of the students and preparing them for the future because inevitably AI is the future.

How can the digital divide be bridged across the country?

The key to bridging digital divide is to make technology more accessible and affordable for masses. While incorporating easily available devices like mobile phones for easier access is a great step, lowering the prices of the digital service while ensuring the quality is also very crucial. To achieve this AI is a great tool. AI can help ensure individual attention with minimal human intervention. This can help us to provide personalised learning solution at minimal expenditure. It is also very crucial to make applications compatible with older devices to ensure every stratum of the society is benefitted.

What has been your observation about comfort of school teachers and parents in adapting to new technologies?

My observation is that initially there’s an inherent inertia from parents and teachers when it comes to exploring newer technologies. It is also to be noted that there’s a sense of scepticism in the beginning. The dilemma between scope of development for the students as against the concern of distraction for the students is also a big concern for the parents. We believe that the best mentors for parents and teachers to be comfortable with technology can be students themselves.

What is your own philosophy of education?

Personally, my philosophy about education is that, ideally education should be the training of the brain to think, analyse and imagine. Because adaptability and agility are keys to thrive in the rapidly evolving tech world. Strength alone is not sufficient to survive and thrive in the long run. Similarly, the knowledge that we teach to the students might not remain relevant by the time they grow up if we stick to information crunching based education. Only if we can enable the students to innovate, think and adapt, we can create individuals who can thrive in the unpredictable future utilising every new tool to their advantage.

Meha Mathur

BW Reporters The author works as Senior Associate Editor with BW Businessworld