So how exactly do I start this? “Hello world?” “Hello Medium?”
Well, however I ought to head my first Medium article, what is uppermost in my mind is the fact that yesterday, March 23rd 2020, was a great day!
Why? (I hope you ask :-D)
Yesterday was a mega-happy & super-momentous day for us all in the gidimo Team as we quietly slipped “The Land of Kyrion” the new version (4.0) of our gidimo Senior School Program (SSP) into the Google Play Store!! 🕺💃
Why were we so happy? Firstly, and less importantly, because it has taken some three years of sweat and blood, from picturing it in my mind to seeing it in the store. But secondly, and much more importantly, because over the past 15 years, approximately 70% of Nigeria’s school-leavers have FAILED the secondary school-leaving examination, each year!! This shameful statistic, along with the needs of our learners in Nigeria & India, has driven us to conceptualize & deliver what we honestly believe will become the most revolutionary learning product ever born in the global South!
gidimo SSP v.4, the Land of Kyrion, is designed to deliver mass-gamified mastery learning, tackling that till now impossible educational conundrum: the trade off between learner scale & learning depth. This is but the beginning of a loooooong journey, but several months of iteration with our learners convince us that gidimo SSP4 already substantially delivers on her three major design planks
Curriculum MASTERY
Mastery is the number 1 objective of gidimo SSP, and we are quite certain she is the most advanced gamified curriculum mastery platform in our markets. With over 53,300 custom-designed, syllabus-based Socratic learning questions, 492 topic summaries across 14 subjects, and 53,000 detailed explanations, SSP delivers on comprehensiveness as well as mastery.
Finally, the gamified structure delivers on pacing too, as our learners will complete their curriculum AHEAD of non-gidimo users.
Engagement
Our second design principle is where, (in our thoroughly biased view 😁) the Land of Kyrion completely leaves everyone else behind! Working with 13–18year olds over the past eight years, we know that THE NUMBER 1 ISSUE WITH LEARNING is ENGAGEMENT, or “learner readiness” as we call it technically.
Learners embark on the Grandmasters’ Quest to bring peace and order back to the Land of Kyrion after ages of suffering and strife. By becoming Master of the 13 Kingdoms of Kyrion (i.e. mastering your entire syllabus) before midnight on August 31st, you achieve the rank of Grandmaster and qualify for the National Grandmasters Assembly (where prizes include participating in the Grandmasters World Tour which will take the top 10 Grandmasters to 3 Ivy League schools, Oxford, Cambridge, & Silicon Valley)!
The daily learning battles and duels with friends & new learners, and the quarterly knowledge tournament we’ve been having for years, are features our learners have come to love! As Akin Dawodu, Cluster Head for Sub-Saharan Africa at Citi, said at our last prize-giving: “this is truly the future of global learning, but born in Africa!”
Reward
Finally, among our learners, gidimo has always been known as a brand that rewards, a brand that gives. This is because our message to them has always been that learning is what gives, not crime, not cutting corners, but rather KSA — knowledge, skills, and attitudes. In this line, we’ve continued our partnership with our friends at MTN, and learners continue to earn 1GB weekly IF they achieve their weekly learning goals. (We’re in talks with Glo and hope to have them on board very soon).
Well this has turned out much longer than I planned. But we’re really happy to have started on this new journey. Now, it’s time to iterate, improve, cut, refine, redo, insert and grow this product with our learners. We’ve onboarded some 250,000 of them over the past years, and we’re looking forward to dwarfing that number in the near future.
So kindly rejoice with us and help us spread the word! For anyone interested in high-fidelity, high-engagement mastery learning for SS1–3 kids AT HOME, then please have them type “gidimo” in the Google Play Store for Androids or gidimo.com for all others Thanks!!
Thanks!!
