My first question is, can AI provide a one-on-one coach to every child? Where learning becomes fun. Making learning fun requires personal attention. Today, the effort to learn is very high. Children are struggling. We need to revolutionize the ease of learning. Technology should make learning effortless.
The ARRC (Access Report Recommendation Curation), an AI engine developed by Parentof.com, performs all the above roles and is gearing up to do much more in the coming months. Swaroop Madavan, co-founder of Parentof.com, a ten-year-old AI ed-tech company based in Bengaluru, is all set to dramatically revolutionize learning, education, skills development and mental health.
In a two-hour-long chat with Benedict Paramanand, Editor and Publisher of SustainabilityNext, Swaroop shared his passion for education and how, finally, technology will soon make most learning and skill services accessible. It will improve education outcomes significantly and make the lives of teachers less arduous and more meaningful.
Swaroop says he is a teacher by passion and an entrepreneur by design. “In all the companies I have built, I have been teaching. I love working with children.”
Swaroop is a maverick. His education has nothing to do with what he is doing today. He was a karate instructor at the age of 12 and earned his first Rs. 500 at 13. He grew up in Nanjungud, near Mysore. He did his B.Com at Christ University, Bengaluru, where he was the president of the eco-club.
Swaroop started his first company when he was in his second year of college. His first company was called Quantum Leap, which has been in training. He says, “I have been fortunate to have had very good mentors at every stage of my professional life.” Edited excerpts:
What drove you to education?
I came across two statistics in 2015 that confused and confounded me. Edtech was getting funded heavily – over $300 billion was raised for solving the education problem. One in 3 internet users are children. With the internet becoming affordable, school education was getting democratized – one could learn from anywhere, anything and from anyone.
The natural result of this amazing trend should have been that learning outcomes should have gone up. Shockingly, it was declining. The world’s largest learning outcome survey/research by PISA showed a fall of 70 % in the last two decades.
Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), measures 15-year-olds’ ability to apply knowledge of Mathematics and Science to real-life situations. All OECD (Organisation for Cooperation and Development) countries are part of it. India joined PISA in 2009, but looking at its low ranking (72nd among the 73), it withdrew. It again participated in the PISA test in 2021/22 but, citing the pandemic, it withdrew again. Eighty-five countries, including China, which were also affected by the pandemic, participated.
PISA tests showed that while knowledge was getting better, the processing ability of that knowledge was declining. Creativity has been declining, and intelligence, too has been dropping. I fear that, thanks to AI, students and people at large may not think anymore. I found this alarming and wanted to do something about it.
What Changed?
It is interesting that the learning outcomes of traditional education have been rising in the last few decades. What changed? To me, earlier, the student-teacher relationship was stronger. Teachers knew the names of most of the students. However, in the current education system, the student-teacher relationship has become transactional. Education inflation today is one of the highest in India.
We thought we had found the answer in neuroscience. We asked the question – Why are you not able to learn? Why is a child weak in solving fractions? Why is it that visual spatial reasoning is not developing no matter what is taught? The bigger question: What skills are needed to enhance learning outcomes?
Aegis Graham Bell Awards
Parentof, launched in 2015, is today the world’s first AI-based cognitive intelligence platform. It won the Aegis Graham Bell Award for Innovation in Education in 2024. The award is for its AI teacher assistant as a solution to enhance the learning outcome of students. We beat many well-known organisations in the education space.
Since 2015, Parentof has collaborated with schools, education departments, and industry bodies to impact 1,000+ schools, 300,000+ parents and 60 plus institutions.
I am from the learning and development space. Naturally, I was driven to ask why there isn’t technology for one-on-one learning. AI could give you the knowledge, but it will not give you skills and abilities. That needs to be developed. We won the Aegis Gram Bell Award from GOI for this thesis.
We built the world’s first AI assistant. It can measure and develop the skills of students through data. It identifies skills that stop students from learning and helps solve them. We believe that if visual–spatial reasoning is not developed appropriately, no matter what is taught, students are not able to learn. Solving for that gap is the key.
Early learning suffers because neural pathways are not sufficiently built. Educators don’t understand this and expect every student to have the same learning ability. Once the problem area is identified by the AI, it helps in addressing it, and very soon, the results are visible. It is essentially a hardware–software match issue. Without appropriate software, how will the hardware work? This is the basis on which we launched Parentof.
From 2017–18 onwards, we looked at teachers’ capability in understanding neuroscience and the cognitive science of students. Not every teacher is trained in them. Teachers are burdened with administrative tasks. We needed to come up with solutions that directly work with children. We tested our models at NIMHANs and were happy that we obtained its certification.
How does your AI work?
It looks at how the child works in each situation. Then AI converts data into developmental science first. It looks at the child’s ability to draw and looks at whether the child’s fingertip is not developed well enough. It could also go into the behavioral areas. It can look at anger issues and anxiety issues and ask questions to parents. It can pick up the behavior of parents and teachers alike. It knows what questions to ask. It can also go to bio-senses like heart rates. And multiple cognitive elements.
We make it clear that the AI assistant is not here to teach mathematics. One can learn it on YouTube or in the class or at the tuition. We focus on the child’s ability to learn. Fundamentally, math is easy. What’s not so easy in the learning process. We assume that every child has the same ability to learn. This is not true.
The conventional way of teaching is to build muscle memory, there are many more abilities that a child needs to build, like psycho motor and cognitive ability, language and communication. All these are connected. This is what we dissected. In pre and post-AI intervention, we have seen 40 to 50 percent growth in less than 35 days.
It knows what type of gaming assignments to give to children based on the data it collected on them. It can use multimodal data to convert into developmental insights. Use those insights to make recommendations. Once it creates a report, it will devise a workout plan to develop the weaker skills like finger dexterity.
Mental Issues of Students
Schools today have one student counselor for every 3000 students. Instruments of assessment are not free and accessible. Report generation takes two to three days today. Constructing a therapy for a child comes with huge expense. It takes five to six days just for that. The Parentof AI engine does all this in under ten minutes. This product is also certified by NIMHANs.
129 million children worldwide have been diagnosed with ADHT. The attention span will be less than that of goldfish today. It is about 40 seconds today. There has been a 375% decline in attention span in the last two decades. It was 150 seconds in 2004, and it has come to 40 seconds in 2024. This study was done by Gloria Mark and published in the American Psychology Association. Her book is titled Find Focus Fight Distraction – Attention Span – A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.
The solution to attention span deficit, people think, is to reduce children’s screen time. This doesn’t work. Children are smarter. Punitive is not the way. What works is to develop their ability to self-regulate and control. Screen addiction is a massive challenge today for children and adults.
We have found that developing a skill is a neuro-psychological process. Playing is the best way to develop that. Today, children hardly get to play.
Our ARRC engine can increase the attention span from 40 seconds to 100 seconds in 60 days. It is done by our mental health assistant. It is free to use. We believe in equitable AI as much as possible.
We are developing many more products to solve attention span issues. Today, parents can go to http://safemango.com and learn how to help their children fight attention and other skill issues. It is not built as an interface for children. Parents get 60 days to reverse the attention span issue. This is live, and several schools are already using it. It looks at 24 parameters across four domains. AI will decide as to what to evaluate. It will soon be multilingual.
I believe AI’s time has come. We are very happy about how far we can take this. People are super excited about our wonder AI app. We are going a step ahead and building specific products for problems like attention span. It will be an overwhelming product with cognitive gaming and augmented reality. This product will be ready for launch in mid-2025.
Why Free
It has been kept free because we believe AI should be democratic, personalized and inclusive. We might charge a small fee later to cover our infra cost. We are looking at how to impact the masses through this. We are not spending on the cost of acquisition. We don’t want to go down the path of the current ed-tech companies that are struggling because of the high cost of acquiring users. We want the product to speak for itself until the point when people like the product. We are building for scale, just like ChatGPT and others are doing today.
Luckily, our investors are happy with this approach. Our approach is to change behavior through gamification. Children will not even know they are being treated.
How easy or difficult is it to replicate or copy your product? I want people to replicate. But it is not easy. How you collect data is the biggest problem. The larger challenge is not intent but execution ability. We had to raise $ 5 million to do this job.
Although we are a ten-year-old company, I feel like we have just started. There is no short-cut to this. I knew it was insane when I took it up. But someone had to go through this.
Future Plans
Our AI adventure started in 2018. Our first product was called MAI – Mother AI. It was AI for parents. We were way too early with this. A lot of schools subscribed to it, but we realized we had to work directly with students. www.safemango.com came out of this quest.
The technology we have built can work in any language; the diaspora does not matter. Since it is voice-enabled, people don’t even have to know how to read and write to use it. We want to build an AI product for every small learning and developmental need. We have 19 AI assistants in the pipeline, each one specializing in one learning outcome.
We have started offering masterclasses as well. We ran a lot of experiments with students, right from how they write. We did an event with Ruskin Bond to know how children are thinking while they write in 2022. All our masterclasses were free.
It was called the Great Indian Writer’s Challenge with Ruskin Bond to know writing skills and how they are using creativity. Our job is to see how to democratize this experience. Anyone can learn from anyone at any given point without losing one’s creativity.
Our AI assistant can also give every student a tuition teacher. Today, millions of students spend a lot of money on tuition. Here, their learning outcomes are far superior.
Today, India faces a massive skilling challenge because skilling was not part of the school curriculum. Our AI coach can solve the world’s skills problem in less than a decade.
We are coming up with a sporting assistant product, too. Most sportsmen today cannot afford a coach. They can have an AI sporting assistant as their coach.
