WorldSchool

Description

WorldSchool - A Revolutionary Global Learning Ecosystem. WordSchool has cracked the code on the future of education by creating the world's first dedicated platform connecting families, teachers and children around the world. The ecosystem operates as a fully decentralised, fully autonomous, open sourced, shared economy, free marketplace that empowers parents and teachers to develop self directed & individualised learning practices that best suit their children's needs.

Technologies used

React Native, Firebase, iOS & Android

Accomplishments

We are very proud of: 1) recruiting two top quality new members and working as a high functioning team already 2) getting our deliverables done in time for the deadline 😊 3) working very hard to get great outcomes from the work within the system (team, mentors, etc) to market research, conference presentation and reaching out to potential partners outside of the internal hackathon ecosystem, bringing it all into. 4) Very positive response during market research and educational conference presentation on Saturday by Anthony 5) Deciding on the WorldSchool name and acquiring websites 6) Attracting new users (teachers and parents) 7) Launching on the AppStore for beta testing 8) Creating a Marketing Video

Obstacles

The start of the hackathon seemed to be very quiet, and we found it difficult to recruit new team members. After a few discussions with potential new members, we were very lucky on Saturday to find a bright young entrepreneur, Ieva, looking for a new team as the previous team did not go forward, and we even managed to recruit one of the mentors, Chris. We are very thankful to be able to grow the team. Our second main challenge was getting everything done in time – from technical work to progress with the app development, to business plan development, as we are still quite a small team.

Learnings

We have learned that we should never give up… we found our new members as we have persevered. We have learned that we can build a great team quickly, based on trust and clear expectations on the deliverables for each individual. We combined our skills and leveraged our individual skills to build a concrete solution to help families and children to optimise the education opportunities today and for the future. We have learned that anything is possible with concerted efforts in a short period of time. We still need more hands on deck to create more in a shorter period of time. We will continue building a dream team to join us in our mission to transform education in Switzerland and beyond!

Next steps

We will be following up on a range of areas. Team: continue team-building for long-term implementation. Understand in more depth key drivers and skills, how to combine them during short, medium and long term, and what additional skills we still need to bring in. Business and Marketing: we started dividing the market segments between team members. Chris, expert with video production, will drive relationships with teachers and universities to include university course access to the WorldSchool ecosystem. We reached out to mentors and will continue looking for links to Swiss teachers/professors who would like to have their materials and courses available through our ecosystem. Because of our individual connections, we already have initial traction with a couple of universities in Spain and Germany. We also need to complete our business plan and investor pitch, to attract funding. We will move into a seed funding round in order to help hire a stellar team with full time capacities. We also plan to launch a Kickstarter to start with some of our immediate funding needs. Technical development: running metrics on the live beta, iterating on the product, further improvements on the app. We will launch our product on the App Store this week. We will then focus on enabling wider content and initiating gamification.