EduTech

IITian-founded start-up offers free math courses online to take on bigger rivals

  • Cuemath, an online math-course provider backed by Google parent Alphabet Inc., is making much of its content free for a year to fend off rivals in India’s competitive education-tech market and help fight inequalities in learning.
  • Cuemath is up against dozens of startups – including giant Byju’s – that offer online learning modules and classes to students around the world.
  • He founded Cuemath, formally called Cuelearn Pvt, in 2013 as an offline company whose tutors taught in their homes, and then quickly pivoted toward online courses.

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Unacademy Announces ESOPs Buyback Worth $10.5 Million

  • Edtech startup Unacademy has announced its largest ESOP buyback plan worth $10.5 million for its team members and educators.
  • Happy to announce Unacademy’s largest ESOPs buyback till date worth $10.5M for our team members and educators.
  • Extremely thankful to all our team members and educators for believing in our vision of democratising education.

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Byju’s losses jump 30 times; device sales boost revenue

  • Device sales fetched the highest revenues for Byju’s in 2019-20, regulatory filings showed, even as losses at the edtech giant swelled nearly 30 times.
  • The company, which recently became the most valued startup in India, witnessed around 80% growth in consolidated net sales in FY20 as compared to the previous year.
  • Sales of tablets and SD cards, usually sold to students as part of the package, accounted for 63% of the business in FY20, compared to 55% in the previous year.

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India’s rural youth is 10 years behind when it comes to education [Report]


A look at Annual Status of Education Report for 2017 will tell you the massive problem India is sitting on when it comes to education of rural youth.
The rural youth, when it comes to solving basic math problem or answering simple questions is almost 10 years behind their age. 78% of all rural 14-18 year-olds – whether enrolled students or not – do some agricultural work whether for wages or on their own land.

Socio-economic factors at play.

For instance, consider a 15 year old who doesn’t live in a “pukka” home, whose parents

haven’t been to school, who is not a fluent reader and cannot divide. The probability that this youth will drop out is 33%. Affluence in the form of a “pukka” home reduces this probability to 25%; but having educated parents reduces it to 18%.

Apart from socio-economic factors, a large proportion of youth also cited “lack of interest” as a reason for leaving school. About one fourth of the youth said that they had to discontinue their studies because of financial reasons.

In addition, 50% of boys who had left school said the reason for doing so was either lack of interest (34%) or because they had failed in school (16%). For girls these numbers are 19% and 17%, respectively. Among girls, the predominant reason for leaving school was family constraints (32.5%). Interestingly, only about 11% of the girls said that distance to school was a contributing factor.

The correlation between socio-economic characteristics and drop out rates is well established. Youth who have dropped out come from more disadvantaged backgrounds. For instance, 37.2% out of school youth live in pukka homes as compared to 54.1% enrolled youths.

Parents’ education matters.

The difference in the education of their parents is even starker – 70.7% out of school youth have mothers who have never been to school, 46.1% have fathers who have never been to school and 41.8% have both parents with no schooling. The comparable numbers for enrolled youth are 39.2%, 21.8% and 17.3%, respectively. Given these figures, it is surprising that only a fourth of the out of school youth cited financial constraints as the reason for leaving school.

Data: For every 100 elementary schools (Std I to VIII) in rural India, there are just 14 offering secondary grades (Std IX and X), and only 6 offering higher secondary grades (Std XI and XII).

What will ever solve this?

Cuemath launches original ‘motion comics’ to gamify math learning

Cuemath, a home-based, after-school learning program for math, launched a first-of-its kind ‘Mathematical Universe’ for students across K-8 to engage them better in order to strengthen their foundation in the subject.

All Cuemath’s 20,000 students will be able to experience this form of learning through stories on the Cueapp across 2500+ Cuemath centers starting today.

These stories have been broadly divided into three levels – Class K-2, Class 3-5, and Class 6-8. This has been done after carefully analyzing the students’ responses to content across media like storybooks, puzzles, games, apps and televised programs.

Each story would be released periodically over a series of classes, incentivizing students to consistently attend and perform well. The objective behind this is to engage the students to strengthen their problem-solving ability and increase their affinity for Math.
Within each of these categories, Cuemath has developed a set of characters who embark on Math-based adventures in stories that enable the student to tangibly interact with the infinite possibilities of the Mathematical universe:

  • Class K-2: Thomas Tallman and Friends – These are stories that focus on the wonders of math and logic in the natural world, and in the immediate world that the younger children live and play in. Thomas Tallman is the newest kid in the odd little town of Oddity, and quickly becomes the town’s expert problem-solver when he discovers a book on Math. Expect exciting times on bicycles and seesaws, discoveries in growing plants and telling time with shadows, and the joys of flying kites!
  • Class 3-5: Zero-Squad – These are stories about an intrepid crime-solving detective duo, Eka and Dvita – the “Zero Squad.” Raised by an honest and upright District Collector, their family is often transferred, so the stories take place against the rich backdrop and history of the smaller towns and cities of India. Get ready to crack cases that even adults cannot, for brains to overpower the local goons’ brawn – for Eka and Dvita are most certainly superheroes, with the superpowers of logic and reasoning.
  • Class 6-8: Kalina and the Shards of Singularity – These stories, for our oldest students, take place in a world reminiscent of the Arabian Nights – but with intergalactic space-travel in a not-so-distant future. We follow a young rebel, Kalina, as she travels across the universe with her trusted AI partner/sidekick (they can’t decide which one), the Djinn. Get ready to explore space/time continuums, break complex codes, and discover the mysterious mathematical origins of the stars.