Hi Michael, Aaron, I'm a co-founder of an educational games platform based in the Netherlands. At the moment, games on the market that are targeted at K-6 students are not that much fun, they are not thoroughly aligned to school curriculums (just to CCSS goals in the US), and they're not connected in terms of content + analytics.
We've built 4 games, generate content for math questions (and soon starting work on literacy), and have a dashboard for teachers/parents. Early pilot results are quite positive (most importantly, children want to play the games at home).
I've been thinking about the next step in 3-6 months: should we expand to a neighbouring country (e.g. France, UK) or start looking at the US. The latter seems to be the first choice for most startups originating from Europe, but our improvement over existing competitors is much more in non-English speaking countries than it would be in the US (as 90% of educational apps are English). Any thoughts on this?
Also: what is YC's view on EdTech startups? It seems there haven't been many in recent batches.
At Unfilled, we are trying to rethink and improve the way people learn how to read, write and code and we are currently looking for a Designer to be part of our co-founding team.
You will find yourself designing the wireframes for the mobile app, newsletters, presentations about the product and more. You will also be working with other teammates sharing knowledge and learning from each other.
Furthermore, you can play a role in changing the world, as the platform we're creating could potentially impact millions of lives.
If you are interested in being part of our team, take a look at the key points we are looking for: http://unfilled.org/get-involved/
If you think this position fits to you, just send an email to jeroen[at]unfilled.org and we'll get back to you!
This is simply not true, the US has both signed and ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention [1], though it still has to destroy some of their stockpile [2].
Definitely agree that networking is one of the best parts.
I was at the same Startup Weekend the author of the post started Party With a Local at (swAMS '12) and one of the people I met there is now my co-founder!
"The researchers, led by Ken Nakayama and Richard Russell at Harvard and Bradley Duchaine at University College London, have found evidence that prosopagnosia, once thought to be exceedingly rare, may affect up to 2 percent of the population – suggesting that millions of people may be face-blind."
I can definitely confirm this, at least in The Netherlands literally everybody uses Whatsapp and it has slowly become a verb - "I'll whatsapp you the details!".
It's far from the best messaging app, but definitely the most popular (in Europe).
We've built 4 games, generate content for math questions (and soon starting work on literacy), and have a dashboard for teachers/parents. Early pilot results are quite positive (most importantly, children want to play the games at home).
I've been thinking about the next step in 3-6 months: should we expand to a neighbouring country (e.g. France, UK) or start looking at the US. The latter seems to be the first choice for most startups originating from Europe, but our improvement over existing competitors is much more in non-English speaking countries than it would be in the US (as 90% of educational apps are English). Any thoughts on this?
Also: what is YC's view on EdTech startups? It seems there haven't been many in recent batches.