Careerspotting 4 Kids: STEM4Girls
Qykno makes career exploration into a game for 13 - 17 year olds. We crowd-source fun, activity-based content to accelerate and reinforce classroom learning with professionals as subject-related mentors.
The vision for Qykno is to provide a platform where high school age kids can more readily discover what motivates and interests them, and that by identifying those motivations and interests, have a greater chance of being successful in life.
Our first content channel (launching in early fall 2011) will be STEM4Girls and will introduce young girls to the wonders of STEM-related careers. STEM4Girls is just the beginning.
Qykno's mission is to Make Career Day, Every Day.
About You
About You
First Name
Kalimah
Last Name
Priforce
About Your Organization
Organization Name
Qykno Labs
Organization Website
Organization Phone
3479850365
Organization Address
P.O. Box 7841
Organization Country
United States, CA, Alameda County
Country where this project is creating social impact
United States, CA, Alameda County
Is your organization a
For‐profit
How long has your organization been operating?
1‐5 years
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Innovation
Entry Form title
Careerspotting 4 Kids: STEM4Girls
What change do you want to bring to the world?
Qykno makes career exploration into a game for 13 - 17 year olds. We crowd-source fun, activity-based content to accelerate and reinforce classroom learning with professionals as subject-related mentors.
The vision for Qykno is to provide a platform where high school age kids can more readily discover what motivates and interests them, and that by identifying those motivations and interests, have a greater chance of being successful in life.
Our first content channel (launching in early fall 2011) will be STEM4Girls and will introduce young girls to the wonders of STEM-related careers. STEM4Girls is just the beginning.
Qykno's mission is to Make Career Day, Every Day.
What are the primary activities of your project?
At Qykno, we believe that in an ideal world, every kid gets a roadmap to his or her dream, but they don't.
55 million K-12 students in the US, less than 30% proficient in math and reading. 70% of 8th graders can't read at grade level, 1 in 6 students attend a high poverty school making them 24% less likely to go to college. By 2010, only 50m Americans will be qualified to fill 123m highly skilled jobs. 81% of dropouts report that they would have stayed in school if it were relevant to their lives.
We don't have enough scientists. Not enough engineers, geriatric specialists, or green technologists to win the future and compete as a global economy.
Education is broken...
Traditional classrooms fail at providing innovative platforms that motivate kids to learn, set goals, and aspire greater. But why is that important?
Kids who fail to connect scholastic achievement with professional opportunities are more likely to grow disinterested in higher demanding school work and short to long-term goal-setting - no matter the incentive.
That's where Qykno comes in by advancing career literacy through a series of game like phases.
Imagine a kid getting the thrill of literally building their future one step at a time...being rewarded for unveiling new opportunities...and having their awareness expanded by unlocking new levels that will get them a front seat, on-stage, and in the cockpit experience of their dreams.
The primary activities of users will be center around road-mapping that boasts a fun and compelling game mechanic::
We match the existing interests of our users with career possibilities by crowd-sourcing relevant-content & professionals using "Careercards" that empower our users to complete activity-based missions, play games, and earn badges.
After a Careercard is unlocked, users gain access to its exclusive social club where they can win prizes, scholarships, internships, and gain chances to meet their virtual mentor - on a safe ubiquitous platform accessible behind school filters during the hours when Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and even Khan Academy aren't allowed in most schools.
For example, Jennifer loves video games, gets top scores on science exams, and would rather read Madeleine L'Engle's a Wrinkle in Times series than Twilight. However, Jennifer's teacher notices that her interest in the sciences is declining at an age when most girl's interests in sciences are trumped by social factors. None of the "cool girls" care about sinking rock experiments, why should she?
Jennifer's teacher learns about Qykno (through the STEM4Girls marketing campaign), a career exploration platform that is specifically designed for students like her: too young for LinkedIn, too old for PBS Kids - FOR FREE!
Qykno's design is suited for her age group so that it's less text intensive and more content focused (videos and games). Qykno also adapts to Jennifer's learning needs. As a supplement to a classroom lesson, Jennifer learns about STEM-related careers from female professionals in the field.
As she explores each Careercard (career pages), she learns that she's already gained her first set of level one badges: "Newbie", "STEM4Girls can do anything" (exclusively through accessing Qykno through the STEM4Girls channel), and "Pioneer" (being the first of a hundred users in her geographic location to visit Qykno). To claim them, she creates a profile, lists her interests and hobbies, and discovers the "challenges" page.
Challenges are sponsored competitions and contests by non-profit organizations, small businesses, and big brands that have been vetted by Qykno's curriculum development team. In order to qualify for a challenges and win prizes, scholarships, internships, or a one-to-one meeting with a local mentor, Jennifer learns that she has to gain a few more badges. Several badges and their attributed Careercards have already been suggested to her when she created her profile.
The Geoscientist card is linked to the biology, physical sciences, and earth science subjects that Jennifer's interests were matched to using our semantic keyword-based tagging system. She discovers that she can play games from her school or home computer to complete missions and earn badges, or she can take the scavenger hunt track and earn the "Shake it Up" badge. Each badge is backed by a lesson plan created by our curriculum designer and supported by real-life professionals in the field.
Through Qykno, students like Jennifer create long-term engagement with their career path, by "playing out" each step along their journey of self-discovery and self-directed learning. With the help of teachers as our primary referrers and influencing school-wide adoption) to Qykno, we plan for Qykno to be used in classrooms as part of a teacher's instructional plan or a supplemental tool that motivates and engages their students. Teachers in turn get metrics about which paths their students took to unlock Careercards (i.e. scavenger hunt vs. virtual player).
Very few edtech tools are BFKs (BUILT FOR KIDS) and address the BIG problem of student motivation and engagement in and outside the classroom in a small but scale-able way like Qykno does.
To access the STEM4Girls storyboard (exclusive to Changemakers), visit http://bit.ly/stem4girls, username is "guest" and password is "stem4girls".
What is innovative about your initiative? How is it a new contribution to the field?
Student motivation:
What we've learned by studying the physics behind student performance, is that kids who fail to connect scholastic achievement with professional opportunities are more likely to grow disinterested in higher demanding school work and short to long-term goal-setting - no matter the incentive. We believe that the key to knowledge is exposure by bringing a world of career possibilities right at their fingertips.
Viral user acquisition: Make not being on Qykno "uncool"
In addition to teachers as our primary referrers, Qykno's Careercards create multiple viral points of entry for new users who are pulled in by watching a cool paleontologist video on facebook, playing the latest "zombie rats" game for our Sanitation Careercard, or learning that a peer was discovered on an American Idol-like contest exclusively on Qykno. Teachers and mentors do the pushing, content does the pulling.
Ubiquity: A classroom in every room
People say schools are the problem, or that the problem is in the home. Therefore, Qykno is designed to be a ubiquitous learning tool that hosts subject related content (e.g. educational games) through our Careercards. Through our platform, users gain access (in and out of school) to the career exploration experience.
Micromentoring: Redefining mentorship in the 21 century
Entities like Kiva created a new class of change called micro-donors, and Catchafire with micro-volunteering, a micromentor is a professional with access to Qykno. They interact with our users through content they can post and create.
What stage is your project in?
Operating for 1‐5 years
Tell us about the community that you engage? eg. economic conditions, political structures, norms and values, demographic trends, history, and experience with engagement efforts.
One of the most important aspects of Qykno is its scalability. There are two markets Qykno has identified that are in need of serious disruption, and it culminates in the classroom.
The difference between a high performing school and a low performing school aren't just the teachers in the classroom but the kinds of resources each classroom in that school has access to.
So a typical school with a majority of students from under-served communities, more than likely has fewer access to tutoring services, advanced after school projects, and online tools.
The classroom of the 21st century is crowdsourced. When a young person enters the classroom, they should feel that their classroom is giving them access to a world of possibilities backed by resources. Qykno makes the classroom of the future into a reality by crowdsourcing professionals as subject-related mentors and experts in their field.
So on one side, Qykno makes Career Day, Every Day by introducing mentors back into the classroom the way Career Day used to before massive budget cuts, on the other side is Qykno's business model that opens up the classroom to non-profits and other opportunities for engagement. We'll explore this opportunity later on our entry form.
Our typical user persona is a public school student who is (1) searching for a high school to enroll in, (2) looking at ways to improve their student profile while in high school, (3) searching for a job, internship or program, (4) college-bound and looking for a college that matches their academic and personal interests.
We roll out careers through theme based "channels". Qykno channels focus on targeted content segments spread out across a limited set of careers.
In the United States, less than twenty per cent of engineering and computer-science majors are women.
The first content channel released with our launch will be STEM4Girls. STEM4Girls will feature ten Careercards representing ten different STEM related fields. Content will highlight women in STEM careers sharing their stories and the how-tos of their success. In addition to organizations like Girls Inc, Level Playing Field Institute, National Council of Women in Technology and many others, professionals will be able to share content (links, videos, articles, books, and so on) seamlessly through their designated "mentor" access to each card.
Our goal is to inspire, engage, and connect young girls to STEM fields, in addition to helping them roadmap their own journey through our game mechanic (completing missions, earning badges, unlocking Careercards).
Qykno presents an opportunity for both small and large scale entities to "get in the game".
Share the story of the founder and what inspired the founder to start this project
Kalimah Priforce is passionate about innovation that transforms children's lives in and outside the classroom. At 8 years old, he held a successful hunger strike against his Bedford-Stuyvesant group home to add more books to its library. At 14, a chance meeting with Dr. Lorraine Monroe, an education innovator in Harlem NY, sowed the seeds of his dream to be a world-class educator, but it wasn't until October 1st, 2000, when his 18 year old younger brother was shot and killed that he formed a lifelong commitment to innovating education.
For the past twelve years, Kalimah's progressive and inclusive "our kids, our future" approach to youth development has stood at the intersection of technology and the classroom, and has made him a favorite among K-12 youth, parents, teachers, technologists, and private to public partnerships as a highly regarded presenter and visionary.
He has held several key positions in the non-profit and corporate world before venturing on his own at 22 when he co-founded the Thurgood Marshall Club of America, a youth-led startup between the Gallup Organization, the CUNY Institute for Virtual Enterprise, and the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund that focused primarily on student capacity-building through leadership incubator programs.
He holds a CUNY BA degree in Global Business Strategy & Urban Youth Studies that has included coursework from Shanghai University, Universita per Stranieiri, and University of Oxford. Kalimah’s bootstrapping adventures as a young minority tech entrepreneur are chronicled in his blog “Hackademia.”
Social Impact
This Entry is about (Issues)
Please describe how your project has been successful and how that success is measured
Qykno was recently into the NewME Accelerator for minority-led startups. We will be launching a beta of Qykno at our demo day in August. We're very excited!
We were 2010 Kauffman Labs finalists and 2011 Echoing Green Semi-Finalists.
How many people have been impacted by your project?
Fewer than 100
How many people could be impacted by your project in the next three years?
More than 10,000
How will your project evolve over the next three years?
After our first year of seed funding, we plan to raise over 1.1 million in angel capital to extend Qykno's offering to include cloud-based portfolio-creation and growing Qykno to operate in other countries and in different languages.
Sustainability
What barriers might hinder the success of your project and how do you plan to overcome them?
Security and school adoption will be our biggest barriers, as a main driver for our business strategy is that Qykno will operate behind school firewalls.
Our biggest issue will be content, content, content.
Our content strategy exists in phases, the first phase involves tapping into the personal network of Qykno team members. That provides us with 200+ career profiles. In conjunction with our personal recruiting solutions, there will be opportunities to bolster our content availability by providing incentives for user generated contact.
We are working with retailers to provide coupons, deals, and prize contests to inspire user generated content.
Tell us about your partnerships
We will be testing our demo at five undisclosed learning environments: two public schools (one inner city, another science-based), one charter school, one private school, and one in a homeschooling district.
We have developed partnerships with both public and private sector entities. One of them that we are at liberty to reveal is the Teach for America network. Two of my advisory board members are TFA alumni and TFA fellows are excited about getting their hands on an innovative tool that will boost student motivation in the classroom.
Current annual budget of project, in US dollars
$250,001‐500,000
Explain your selections
We've crowdfunded and crowsourced amongst friends and supporters who believe in our mission to Make Career Day, Every Day. We're meeting with angel investors to raise seed funding. We're also apply to incubator programs that provide seed funding in exchange for company equity.
How do you plan to strengthen your project in the next three years?
In the next three years we'll be focusing on content creation by leveraging partnerships with organizations, our mobile development to provide Qykno users with a ubiquitous learning experiences, and implementing programs that link our users with not just career possibilities for with opportunities tailored to their existing interests.
Partnerships and Accountability
Please tell us more about how your partnership was formed and how it functions. What specific role does each partner play? What unique resources does each partner bring to the initiative?
If you mean "partnerships" within my team, I have several co-founders and team members who help me to carry out Qykno's mission.
We have developed partnerships with both public and private sector entities. One of them that we are at liberty to reveal is the Teach for America network. Two of my advisory board members are TFA alumni and TFA fellows are excited about getting their hands on an innovative tool that will boost student motivation in the classroom.
How are you building in accountability for students' successful STEM learning outcomes? Please provide a summary and examples.
STEM learning outcomes will be measured by their site activities. Our metrics will identify which content our users watch and enjoyed, how much time they spent immersed in our gaming environments, and which links and resource suggestions they found useful.
There will also be opportunities for them to submit content to the site that will demonstrate their proficiency in STEM.
For example, a 14 year old girl wants to learn about what career opportunities exist that include her love for computer technology and programming. She plugs in keywords like "computers", "technology", "video games". The next screen will comprise of suggested video trailers based on her listed interests while in the background, videos are also filtered based on information collected from her facebook, her zip code, and career industries/profiles that might be targeting her demographic.
She sees a video she likes, notably it's another woman who works as a top executive for a technology startup she is familiar with. She can choose to watch the video in its entirety and or select a situation game that allows her to build a virtual startup along with other users who share her interests or play the role of a Lara Croft-like adventurer stuck in a binary dimension who uses computer code to advance to the next level. She is also presented with resources that range from recruiting drives from degree programs, a museum exhibit located next to her (and when she checks-in with our mobile app she can collect rewards for her visit that show up on her roadmap/gamer profile), or enroll in a computer science-fair hosted by her local government.
Qykno's learning outcomes come from "out of the box" approach to advancing STEM proficiency using career literacy.
We have an in-house curriculum developer who foresees that there is a lesson plan behind our achievement system.
Needs
Investment, Human Resources/Talent, Marketing/Media, Research/Information, Pro-bono help (legal, financial, etc.), Innovation/Ideas, Mentorship.
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add needs that may not be listed.
We believe that building a product for a kid is very different from building one for an adult. An ecosystem is vital to successful development of a child even in the engineering of a product for them.
Our advisory board began with Dr. Lorraine Monroe, education reformer and founder of the Frederick Douglass Academy and has now expanded to include not only educators but product development specialists, leading thinkers in gaming mechanics, and writers. Our advisory board now reaches from coast to coast.
Great advice is more valuable than money.
We believe we are very much on the right track but we are eager to find mentors who can ensure that we are doing things as effectively as possible.
Offers
Please use this space to elaborate on your selection above and/or to add offers that may not be listed.
