If your child is petrified of numbers and mathematical formulae, and you are worried about his or her future, you can just relax now.
Help is on the way – from an army of women maths demon slayers in India, being raised in cities like Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi.
Preparing this army of maths demon slayers is Avneet Makkar, an ex-Infosys employee who turned an “edupreneur” after getting inspired by her own daughter’s mortal fear of mathematics.
Avneet spoke with many of her fellow IT professionals, academics, educators and artificial intelligence (AI) scientists to find an answer to her child’s fear and how to drive it away. They put their collective heads together to find a way to make maths teaching more interesting and to exorcise the fear from the minds of the children.
Thus, came forth a product that makes learning math a fun activity, fosters creative thinking, and sharpens logic, reasoning and problem-solving skills. This group created the math education product – beGalileo.
Avneet then quit her plush job at Infosys three years ago to get into full-time entrepreneurship to float a company, CarveNiche Technologies. “A lot of experiments, tests and trials were conducted and we made a soft launch of the product – beGalile,” she told this writer.
AI to track child’s learning curve
An after-school maths learning programme, beGalileo uses artificial intelligence to track a child’s individual learning curve, detect the difficulty the child was facing, and find the right solution.
At a beGalileo centre, a diagnostic assessment is made so as to detect learning gaps, using AI, and take it up from there. The programme is for students from Class I to Class X.
“The more gamified the programme, the more attention of children can be retained,” Avneet said, adding, “which is why there is constant updating of the programme to include new activities, games, software, animations, and the like”.
Creating the product was half the battle won. The other half was to train the teachers to use the programme. It is for this that she tapped into her vast network of colleagues from the IT sector, to start with, and then other professionals – mostly women who left jobs halfway to tend to their families.
Human resource base
“Many women leave jobs to look after children and are highly qualified and able. So, I tapped into this human resource base and I must tell you that within no time we had an army of excellent teachers who are running their own beGalileo teaching centres now – in Chennai, Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi. At the last count there were 600 centres.”
Madhuprita Tekur, 35, is one such ‘entrepreneur’ running a beGalileo centre from her Mylapore residence in Chennai. She learnt about the programme through her IT network and once she looked at it, for her own son, she was hooked.
“My son used to be very confused, but now is very confident of maths and enjoys the games through which he is taught the subject,” Madhuprita said. She has at present six students coming to her every evening after school hours. I am very happy that my son can handle maths on his own as he understands the concepts, their application, and how things are related,” she stressed.
Certified to run centres
Like her, there are 600 women who are running beGalileo centres in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai and Delhi. The teachers are chosen after a basic test in mathematics. Those who clear are given a month-long training at Bangalore. Once they successfully complete training, they are certified to run the centres.
The course material comes in a software programme that can be downloaded onto your computer or laptop. Each person buying the beGalileo course gets a user name and password. Subscriptions are to be made for updates and newer versions.
Avneet is the Founder and CEO of CarveNiche Technologies Pvt Ltd. CarveNiche has designed 3 ed-tech products, beGalileo (an after-school math learning program), Wisdom Leap (a free resource for K12 education) and Concept Tutors (a 1:1 tutoring platform focused on India and international markets).
Main Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay has been used for illustrative purpose only
