Solution description

Dada is a virtual platform that will connect young students to real life, practical and soft skills education by making information and learning accessible and personalized. This platform will enable engaging learning with a long term accompanying approach. Our solution is based on the Montessori educational method and focuses on developing the seven elements of social skills proposed by Daniel Goleman: communication, influence, leadership, catalyzing change, conflict resolution, collaboration, cooperation and teamwork skills, along with emotional intelligence; in accordance with Montessori's method of education. 

Dada proposes a game-like experience, complementary to traditional education, in which students can learn real life problem solving skills by interacting with a virtual scenario, and which can then be applied to their reality. This renders their virtual based learning applicable to the physical world through a better understanding of information through mental and physical stimuli.

Dada offers the possibility to customize your avatar and 3 levels that will provide learning depending on the stage in which the child is, these levels are: 3-5 years old, 6-8 years old and 9-12 years old; the first level will focus on strengthening the parent-child relationship through active participation of activities in which they both participate; for the second and third level, Dada offers the option for the child to live an individual experience (if a more personalized learning process is required) or collaborative, in which children can acquire teamwork, collaboration, leadership, and other skills through virtual interaction with other children of the same level.

In addition, the platform works as a game divided by worlds (which in the Montessori’s method would be the rooms), in which the student will be able to choose the world they prefer. Within each world there are activities focused on the development of soft skills, as well as emotional intelligence. Once the child has successfully completed the activity, the game will award the child a badge. This aims to motivate and encourage them to continue completing tasks and gaining experience.

Lastly, Dada offers parents a monthly report about the progress of their child, detailing the competences and soft skills they’ve developed ever since starting to use the platform. We invite you to check out our video pitch and prototype to get a better understanding of the platform.

Solution context

Standardized educational models have been around for centuries, and have been proven to work against students, creating educational lag for millions. At the start of the 20th Century, educational models such as Montesorri started to address the problem, but access to these learning experiences is still too shallow for most of the population.

In the article, “What Makes a Leader?” by Dr. Goleman states that these skills are what separate high impact leaders from those in the middle-low range. Positive development in early age education, translates to high impact in future work environments, because these students are able to visualize solutions and alternatives to the problems they are presented with.

Ever since 2013, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) representatives have surveyed over 85,000 students in order to test their problem solving skills, and found that better performing students applied collaboration, creative and communication skills. These are all part of a subset of abilities called “soft skills”, and the United Nations denominates them “skills for life”. This results in a lack of personalized, practical and soft skills' education for students in all stages. This hinders these people’s ability to perform real life tasks.

In addition, formal traditional education is limited to class hours, and professors have no tools to measure, quantify or complement their learning experience. 

With Dada we respond to Goal 4 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals which seeks to ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education and promote learning opportunities for all, as together we will help countries address content and connectivity gaps, and facilitate inclusive learning opportunities for children.

Solution target group

For our user persona, we target children from 3 to 12 years old who are in any grade and are interested in playing something fun and intuitive on their digital devices. The reason we focus on this age group is that we take into account the needs and evolutionary characteristics of each age according to the observations of Dr. Maria Montessori who expressed that the child passes from childhood to adulthood through 4 evolutionary periods called "developmental planes" consisting of absorbing mind, reasoning mind, humanistic mind and specialist mind. Let's remember that in order to build a successful future it is necessary to take care and watch over children's present.

On the part of our buyer persona, we focus on the parents of these children, who are looking for a solution in which their children can develop useful day-to-day skills that they can apply in the real world by taking advantage of today's technology.

We expect to start selling the service on an individual basis with the opportunity to scale it and implement it in educational institutions as a complementary service to the traditional educational system as it is possible to implement it in any country and expand it globally, thus providing a complete education to millions of children around the world, which is necessary to build generations of leaders with a positive impact.

In other words, our early adopters are families attending public and private schools in urban areas with access to internet services who are looking for a complete or complementary development for their children.

Our second target is focused on families, educational and government institutions in more vulnerable areas in order to tailor our service to their needs through strategic alliances with organizations such as UNICEF, which today works with 145 low- and middle-income countries to support governments and education partners in the development of rapid response and system-wide plans, including alternative learning and mental health support programs.

Solution impact

Dada’s impact is creating children capable of making decisions in real life through social, mental and physical skills. These children develop a combination of virtual and physical knowledge that translates into a complete learning experience that betters their whole development.

The game will offer many different worlds divided into their own activities. To level up their in-game experience, the children will need the verification of their tutors, in which they will evaluate if the child can successfully apply the knowledge acquired by the virtual platform in a physical environment.

We will measure Dada’s success by a detailed report generated once a month. First, with a brief survey in which they will rate the success of the platform in complementing their child’s education, to later release a report of the child's progress registered in the platform, whether it is the case of worlds completed and skills developed. This report will contain a detailed graph that will reflect the challenges and new abilities the student has acquired.

The way in which the impact of Dada is demonstrated, apart from offering a complete developmental interface for the child, is by offering metrics, direct data and child tracking to parents, and later teachers, so that they can understand the development of children in the different contexts in which they grow up and therefore support them, provide them with personalized attention and understand their development.

Just imagine a world where everyone can access to quality education, a world where the future generations are expert problem solvers and the developmental barriers in schooling fade away through an innovative solution that proposes the use of emerging technologies for the evolution of global education, a future that will be possible with Dada.

Solution tweet text

A virtual platform that will connect young students to real life and soft skills' education by making information and learning accessible, practical and personalized. This platform will allow for engaging learning with a focus on long term accompaniment.

Solution innovativeness

When we developed the idea for Dada, we aimed towards creating something never before seen. In this new platform, we merge strategies such as gamification, technological learning and the educational method of Montessori, in order to provide the best experience possible for all students.

Apps like LingoKids, Duolingo and KinEdu inspired us in our pursuit of building better and more accessible education for everyone, but also Dada’s focus on soft skills and long term accompaniment makes it the first of its kind in the global market.

For us, continuous innovation is one of the most important pillars for the healthy durability of a company, that is why in Dada we aim at something more than just another education application like the thousands that already exist in the market, and what differentiates us from them is our expansion plans that cover not only global governments in the earthly world, but we also aim to be the first virtual education platform prepared for the future that awaits us. A metaverse in which the barrier of standardization will become a mere urban legend and where pedagogical models focused on the development of soft skills such as Montessori and Waldorf, will head up the education of the future generations that will be waiting for us in the world.

Solution transferability

In its first stage, we plan for Dada to have an open service to everyone in Mexico with access to basic technology. Once we’ve proven our solution works, we will open our service to communities from around the globe. 

As a third step: once we’ve further improved our platform, we will establish partnerships with governments in order to provide our service directly to students in public schools as a learning complement.

Further into the future, our goal is to utilize emerging technologies in order to create a metaverse in which students will be able to more deeply interact and immerse themselves in the service we aim to provide.

Solution sustainability

Dada is designed to work with a Freemium model, which does not limit under any circumstances the basic features that the student is expected to have at their fingertips when using the service, even for the first time; but rather focuses on the purchase of cosmetic items. This economic model has already become a recurrent, functional and sustainable practice in video games and digital platforms of this kind.

The platform is designed to be adaptable according to future trends. Further into the future, we seek that through virtual reality technology and artificial intelligence, the scenarios of the Montessori Model can be projected through the development of a metaverse.

We see Dada in the future as an education tool accessible to everyone no matter their context. Being the educational platform with the highest demand worldwide, offering services focused on creating future leaders of high impact, capable of being positive agents of change in global environments.

Solution team work

From the first moment we entered the competition we knew that we were entering to put all our commitment into the project, because our vision from the beginning was not only to enter the competition to have a challenging experience, but it went beyond that. 

As a team we work incredibly well because we always respect the opinions and contributions of all members, thus achieving the creation of innovative and disruptive ideas that support us, being this hackathon our second final disputed as a team, after winning the last edition of the Latin American event "B-Challenge" with a solution of a different social problem. To know more about this, we invite you to check it out on our landing page.

Today, in Nazar we are looking more and more to the future, for us this project has ceased to be a simple prospect of future idea, since now, more than ever, what we seek is to make it a reality; which would be possible thanks to the support received from all mentors, teachers, collaborators and stakeholders in general who from now on have become part of the structure of Dada. 

At this moment, we are already working hand-by-hand with Innovative Entrepreneurship Zone of the Tecnológico de Monterrey campus Monterrey, as well as the Entrepreneurship Institute “Eugenio Garza Lagüera”, the Institute for the Future of Education, and also different mentors and teachers with whom we have the same vision: To make Dada the most in-demand educational platform worldwide, offering services focused on creating future high-impact leaders capable of being positive agents of change in global environments.