Over the past year we built StoryChopsticks - an online Chinese learning service to inspire children living in non-Chinese majority environments.
As a Chinese parent (by race, not nationality) with young children living in a heavily Westernised Chinese-majority country, Singapore, we learnt first-hand how important it is to have highly engaging content, creativity-based pedagogy, and teachers who build upon our learners' imagination.
Our own children have very low interest in all Chinese (non-English) content. Most Chinese language content are of low quality, tell traditional stories in a staid manner, and built upon the foundations of rote memorization.
To convince our own kids to learn Chinese, we make up our own stories and materials and, through play and acting, convince them to gain interest to learn the language. We refined our approach by experimenting at preschools, public libraries, and in-person classes.
We now deliver our pedagogy online to more than a hundred students every month using our own original stories together with physical books and flashcards built-in grammar to their doorsteps. Our young learners love our service and we have > 90% retention rate consistently.
Technology-wise, we glued together a marketing and course delivery system with Wordpress, Moodle, Zoom, Gather.town, Zapier, and a lot of hard work with a team spreaded across Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Egypt, and Indonesia.
As a second time startup founder (the first back in 2008 with a NLP startup [1]), it feels surreal to be able to focus on the problem and the customer together with domain experts (ex-preschool teacher with 20+ years of experience as cofounder), with so much of the tech stack already taken care of by somebody else (eg DigitalOcean, Closte, Stripe etc) and achieve five digit MRR within a year.
We are currently trying to solve a few challenges:
* How do we get children to learn in a highly-motivated self-directed manner? If you have seen how young children pickup and learn Roblox, you will be amazed by how second-nature it is to kids.
* How do we deliver online learning off-screen?
Thank you for checking us out. Any feedback, critique, or ideas for (online) early childhood education will be super for helping deliver better online lessons (on/off screen).
