I had a very thought-provoking conversation with Colin Brown of Skoolbo last Friday.
Skoolbo is a free resource for teachers, parents, and kids worldwide that contains short learning games. They are used by over 50,000 schools (about 300,000 students ages 5-9) around the world with about half of all users coming from the US. There is a premium version for schools with enhanced ways of tracking student progress and assigning work to students.
The conversation centered around learning research an d a new partnership with ChuChu TV. If you haven’t heard of ChuChu TV, you really need to learn about them.
The Research
The Skoolbo platform responsibly (based on their student privacy and child safety policies) tracks student performance and activity, and makes the research available to researchers. Lamar University correlated the data with itegs (International Test of Early grade Skills) for Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the US. In these early grades, the US did surprisingly well, showing the greatest improvement in reading and numeracy skills in the lowest quartile of students, especially compared to the UK and New Zealand, which are both seeing increasing gaps between higher and lower performers. And, if you don’t look too closely at the number of countries included, you will be relieved to know the US never ranked lower than 6th.
In general, top performers at age 5-6 are more advanced than lower (bottom 25%) performers of children three years older, ages 8-9. It would be interesting to find out if those gaps increase even further as the children grow up. Boys are about 3 months more advanced than girls in numeracy skills, while girls are about 3 months ahead of boys in reading skills. These trends go across all countries.
One surprising outcome was the incredible lead of Hong Kong in numeracy skills. Even at age 5.5, Hong Kong students are three grades ahead of students from the other countries. And these weren’t “privileged” Hong Kong students, the students were poor, with no Internet access at home and whose first language is Chinese. One big cultural difference is the importance of Math in the culture in Hong Kong; there is a firm belief that Math will take you anywhere, and that it’s simply not acceptable to be bad at Math, it would be as foreign as saying, “I am bad at breathing, so I won’t breathe.”
Colin said that Skoolbo is committed to making the data available free to researchers.
ChuChu TV
ChuChu TV runs Youtube channels of educational videos for children ages 0-6. Colin said that for the last 5 years, their prime channel has ranked in the top 20 of all Youtube channels, with about 500 million views a month, and is the number 1 preschool channel worldwide. SocialBlade currently rates them 21st (with 10.5 billion views), which is still nothing to sneeze at.
While I hadn’t heard of ChuChu before the conversation, I did check with relatives that have young children, and they used these videos with their kids.
ChuChu employs about 230 animators who churn out videos with musical educational content.
With their content free, ChuChu makes their money on Youtube ads.
What’s next?
Marshall McLuhan coined the terms “hot” and “cold” media in Understanding Media back in 1994. And while Youtube is a 21st century phenomenon, watching videos is still passive learning on cool media.
Colin is partnering with ChuChu to add learning content and analytics around the videos in a joint venture named Chu Chu School. Games, activities, curriculum, tracking, and reporting will be available in a school package in the next few months.
It will be very interesting, to watch this merger one of the most popular creators of children’s content and a widely used education games platform, to see if they can successfully use the mechanisms of Youtube tie-ins and freemium offerings to reach schools and parents and offer them subscriptions.