Vidyut Joshi
It’s not very frequent to see traditions and modern science being on the same side. So, we got very curious when we discovered that both science and traditional belief system support the power of nurture in the early years, especially in the first three years of a child’s life.
For example, the Indian tribe of America teach horse-riding to their two-year old babies. The legend of Abhimanyu in the great Indian epic of Mahabharat vividly narrates how he esoteric war skill in his mother’s womb. This is all tradition. Right?
Look at the education, last 130 years or so, we have seen Maria Montessori, Froebel of Kinder Garten, Steiner of Waldorf and John Piaget, all come up with popular theories and methods. While there are some interesting differences among them, they all agree that
- All babies have immense potential
- The earliest time to start with their education is right at birth or even earlier
Also, modern neuroscience that has the benefit of state-of-the-art scanners, the sensor technology and computing power to study the human brain, agrees about the positive impact of early care and nurture.
The experts at the Harvard Center for Developing Child suggest that constant “Serve and Return” or in other words, frequent interactive communications with infants significantly strengthen their neural connections and pave the way for a higher level of intelligence. Cognitive Scientist Laura Shultz from MIT narrates very eloquently in her 2015 TED Talk, how surprisingly logical babies can be. Dana Suskind in her famous book, Thirty Million Words, demonstrates how the number words that we speak with babies in zero-to-three age can dramatically alter their capabilities.
So, after we learnt all this, the natural question was, if everything points towards a single direction, why don’t all parents make the most of this precious 0-3 year window of their little ones? In reality, majority of children do not pick up reading in the early primary school.
The answer perhaps lies in economics. It’s not viable for institutions like play schools and nurseries to offer the right zero to three developmental education at an affordable cost. So, if you are a school that decides to offer, cutting edge, zero to three education, you will have to first offer lots of personal care because that’s what babies would require. Second, to be effective, you will have to offer personalized learning.
Both personal care and personalized learning in a nursery kind of set up would be expensive. How do you finance that?
So, the onus shifts to the parents and family. Even they find it difficult because
- They lack the academic understanding of how to carry out these learning activities.
- The effort required for a parent to research the methods and then arrange all the materials is simply daunting.
And that’s why many children do not get the optimal developmental ecosystem which reflects on their own future opportunities and on the society in terms of poor developmental indicators. An opportunity lost!
So sometime back we decided to solve this problem and ended up building Bablr Learning System for 0-3 Years that heavily leverages digital technology.
To create Bablr, we followed five steps:
Taking cues from the neuroscience, we created a framework for efficient, power packed “Serve and Return” interactions that can help build the foundation for a child’s growth. We also developed practical approaches using which, all parents can offer rich language environments to their children.
We then curated tested practices from methods like Montessori and other popular traditions and organized them within a Framework or a flexible curriculum. We also benchmarked this curriculum with the reputed early years developmental frameworks such as EYFS of the UK.
Because serving everything from a standard curriculum to every parent and every baby won’t be meaningful, we designed software algorithm that personalises the activities and provides for all kinds of life situations.
We then created effortless and cost-effective activity interfaces and materials that the parents can conveniently use with their babies. Here we leveraged the sweet spots identified by the latest research. For example, we generally think that screens may not be good for babies. Research offers a sweet spot here. Turns out, a show and tell with digital materials and human voice is highly effective with babies.
- We packaged all this and made it accessible to all parents using internet and tablets. The objective was to democratize this amazing science of early years.
It is our belief that our design will make a difference at two levels
Because of the flexible and personalised nature, Bablr process will result in better development of each baby and therefore higher motivation for everyone to use it.
Because of the flexible and personalised nature, Bablr process will result in better development of each baby and therefore higher motivation for everyone to use it.
One baby at a time, we hope to build a revolution that will change the world.
