Synerducate TeamOpportunity Analysis Project

Our ideaA fun, interactive, game-based teaching sys tem to s timulate coding interest in kids & help them learn the basics of real programming.

Too many ideasBrainstorming & first initial concepts

present a challenge

immediacy

ability to “show off”work

little teacher intervention required

share the code that is createduse code to create stories to be used in school but accessible from home

reward badges

role play game

Narrowed down to 3 possible concepts:

“CodeAcademy” for kids: schools only, heavy community element, learn real code from start.

Story-telling game: complete programming tasks to progress further in story & create own narrative.

Simple game: use programming commands to control a character either as a warm-up game or additional feature.

Show me the money!

Lots of competition already exists and a lot of it is free.

Even if it is run as a ‘non-profit’ we would still need an income source to cover our costs.

Failure to define a successful revenue model is main cause of failure in Educational start-ups.

Charge schools a fee per child, in which case the price per child will have to be low.

Implement product as part of after-school club and get parents to pay directly with possibility to offer financial incentives to teachers to run clubs (but this means less revenue for us, and limiting it to after-school club already reduces the potential number of customers).

The problems of trying to define our revenue model

In the Headmistress’ office

Paid subscriptions not popular: budget restrictions mean schools prefer free alternatives even though quality generally inferior.

Disadvantages of competitors: Scratch has steep learning curve & is not a game, Logo cannot be used for more than one term because children become bored.

Interest from the school to incorporate programming in the classroom.

Lack of interest in implementing our idea as part of an after-school club, too much competition from other clubs mean schools unlikely to offer this option.

Primary school teachers reluctant to teach programming as many have no experience in this area.

Talking with potential customers

Seeing it through a child’s eyes

Real opportunity: majority of 8-10 year olds do not have programming experience BUT showed strong interest to learn.

Existing competitors considered too slow or requiring too much effort.

Great feedback on what kids love about games (multiplayer options, collecting objects, building stuff, survival element).

Got kids to play a simple programming logic game to see response: they loved it, which showed us the ‘fun’ element is essential for our product.

Need to respect intelligence of this age group: they are particularly sensitive to anything which seems babyish or too simple.

Talking with potential users

Back to the drawing board

We have chosen to use a 2 stage revenue model, with the aim of creating sufficient revenue in the first stage, which will then be reinvested in the second stage.

Stage 1: charge schools a small fixed amount (irrelevant of student numbers) per year for an educational version of our product.

Stage 2: charge a monthly subscription fee for a premium version which is available for ANYONE to play and which includes facilities such as creating own worlds, avatars, puzzles etc.

Tablet/Smartphone app for children who want to play around with software outside of school.

The product itself will be a game and must have a gently learning curve and immediate results, these are the elements found to be popular with of target users and are missing from our main competitors.

Modifying the original idea

Round two?

From the OAP we have seen interest in the product from both schools and kids, which encourages us to continue.

There seems to be a market for our product and whilst we initially are looking at introducing it in the UK, it can be scaled up to go global.

By introducing a low cost educational version we are confident we can achieve high market penetration, and by keeping the add-on & app costs down we aim to generate large sales volume.

Lastly, we are all keen to develop this idea further

Is this opportunity worth pursuing?