YEII´s Powerful Project Based Platform --- Helping Educational Institutions to overpass Covid19
Covid19 has changed how things are done in the world. One day our kids were at school. The next day there was a shutdown that most of us haven’t experienced before. Our company was in jeopardy, since our main revenue income came from educational institutions paying us a monthly fee, which since there were no more schools active, our innovation and entrepreneurship programs were not in the first thoughts of deans and academic people. Moreover, our YEII Business Competition 2020 was supposed to happen on June 1st, we’ve already the premises, people, schedule and invitations to investors and judges to see the pitches; everything was cancelled!
The Pivot
One of our main assets we have is the YEII Project Based Platform, it’s an online platform developed by us and mounted on AWS to help teachers at educational institutions do the follow up of kids' ideas step by step until they get to a pitch.
We moved fast and decided to do everything Fully Online, it means, we kept the same date June 1st, 2020, and invited the schools to subscribe their students to be part of the event. We had 5 categories: Technology, Social Innovation, Improving the World, Toys & Innovation Challenge. It was a surprise that more than 800 students were subscribed from around the Americas. Out of them, 120 participated in a 2 days Innovation Challenge called Convid19 Challenge, which main goal was to get ideas on how to get back to school safely! Judges from all corners of the USA as well as Mexico evaluated their ideas through the platform and selected the winners in the different categories.
Our learnings
This successful exercise is the first of many others we’d start doing. We’ve learnt the following:
Our kids love challenges, teachers were astonished how kids were uploading information Saturday and Sunday night before the competition. Engagement with our platform was outstanding!
Our Project Based platform is so flexible that we can set up any other content on it, such as Science Projects and Fairs, Greenhouse Project, Patent Projects, Business Incubation Projects, School Party project, Italian Kitchen Challenge, Real Company based Innovation Challenges, etc. It can handle any kind of projects you may imagine!
Some schools requested to use our platform as their main school learning management system to be used in this situation and afterwards, over other existing consolidated platforms such as Schoology, Moodle or Google Classroom!
We’d thank the advice of Dave Martinez and Tim Draper (during Meet the Drapers show), to turn YEII into a fully online platform for education that may have a limitless impact on kids. Great opportunities are opening now in Singapore, Argentina, Central America and India! I’d like to invite you to keep supporting our initiative by: Telling other friends to become part of it and taking the decision to keep investing in us!