WoW Women in EdTech: Alma Moya Losada, Lucy Antrobus, and Kelly Vero, co-founders of Aequaland
Aequaland is an inclusive educational platform for kids that puts self-discovery and emotional intelligence at the heart of its metaverse. Aequaland team is on a mission to create meaningful games that inspire change. They aim to encourage children to celebrate their uniqueness, follow their passions and become fully themselves. They want to create a better world through the games they make, to further equality and inspire and develop the game changers of tomorrow by becoming their own superheroes. It’s all about making learning inclusive and fun!
Meet the team behind Aequaland, our WoW Women in EdTech: Alma Moya Losada, co-founder & CEO, Lucy Antrobus, co-founder and COO, and Kelly Vero, co-founder and CTO.
Founded by women, funded by women and 100% female-led! Now, that’s really WoW!
Alma, it’s International Day of Education in a couple of days and for this occasion, we are thrilled to have you with us to tell us more about Aequaland, an inclusive educational platform for kids that puts self-discovery and emotional intelligence at the heart of its metaverse. Please tell us more, tell us everything!
Alma: Aequaland is united by women who want children to grow up in a world where they are not limited by biases or stereotypes, who are free to realise their full potential. We hope those same children positively impact our planet with the skills they gain 'en route'. We want to fill the gap in the current educational system to make it more fun and meaningful and offer learning around skills that are often not taught in the classroom, such as emotional intelligence, communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Enabling more rounded, happy, satisfied beings on earth.
So, where did it all begin? The company started with a B2C storytelling app. But after the first demo was launched; we realized that shifting the business to B2B was more strategic in the short term. First, focus on developing a great product, identifying improvement opportunities, planning and implementing actions to build the B2C. Last week, our second demo went live, and we acquired our first client, one of the leading international education providers in the world. Now, we are ready to build the most inclusive and playful platform for kids 6-11 years old in the metaverse.
What was the idea behind creating Aequaland? What inspired you to create it? What are the main challenges in today’s educational system that Aequaland is trying to solve?
Alma: The inspiration comes from a combination of my family, my professional experiences, and the state of play of education at present. A key trigger moment was when I realised that if you want to buy a toy as a little girl, your options are pink princesses and blue supermen for boys. I thought ‘what if we could create a safe and inclusive space for children to learn about themselves in all their colours and feel free to become whomever they wanted, without being cast by stereotypes from a young age?’. I started to investigate further… and Aequaland was born.
Today, it’s a massive challenge for schools to bring engaging digital learning into the classroom. We are supporting schools with their digital learning experiences. Assisting them to move from passive to active studying; from rational to emotional learning and from one-size-fits-all approach to customized learning paths. We are creating a gamified learning platform to make learning more engaging, meaningful, and personalized; working on the missing gaps in 21st-century education such as creativity, collaboration, and emotional intelligence; blending our learning experiences between the real and virtual worlds.
I think that we can all agree that pandemic has disrupted the way kids learn, but also the way teachers (and parents!) teach. What are some of your findings on the influence of COVID on (online) learning?
Alma: It’s scientifically proven that empowering teachers and students with online learning enhances educational outcomes. Students who receive personalized instruction perform better than 98% of traditionally taught students.
Also proven that primary schools that have embraced digitally-enabled learning report a 30% increase in competency scores. Gamification delivers the most positive learning outcomes and continual progress feedback enhances motivation and engagement. We see that adding gaming elements into the classroom resolves common classroom issues such as student participation, student engagement, and student achievement.
EdTech is a huge industry (as of mid-December 2021, according to PitchBook data, $15.73 billion has been invested into EdTech startups across 1,229 deals). Where do you see the industry going? What will be the key trends in EdTech this year but also in the years to come?
Alma: I believe that online education will become an integral component of every school in the world. I predict that gamification will become an even bigger element of the edtech space. It’s scientifically proven that adding game elements increase the grey matter and dopamine in our brains, making us happier and smarter. I truly believe that social-emotional learning will become a huge theme. In AI and robotics era, the workforce will be disrupted and what differentiates humans from machines is that we are emotional beings. I see a growing need for data collection and AI integration. Technology enables teachers to allocate more time towards higher impact activities and to foster an inclusive, immersive, and collaborative blended learning space. With the help of technology (data and AI), we can tailor and recommend training according to each child, making learning fully inclusive (personalized) and totally gamified (fun). Aka. Aequaland! ;)
Kelly, apart from being Aequaland’s co-founder and CTO, you are a game developer. In your opinion, how important is gamification in learning and why?
Kelly: Games are the DNA of how we learn. From knowing your two-times table to creating worlds and having tea parties, there are so many fundamental learning strategies that cover everything from understanding numbers and money, to building social networks. Games also protect us by placing good feelings, memories and recalling information that lives deep in our brains. Games are always the bad guy in the press and yet in more recent research papers, we have discovered the impact games have had on our lives from when we were children, pretty powerful when you discover that games are essential for healthy development in early childhood and beyond.
Aequaland is a women-owned-founded-led team. That is fantastic! Tell us more about your team!
Kelly: We’re a really happy accident. We didn’t set out with a plan to be women-owned-founded and led, but as we worked together from a distance during the pandemic, we realised that all of us have something very specific in our expertise to bring to a sector that is massively underserved by women outside of the classroom. On a totally personal note, I have found that working with just women as leaders have been one of the most refreshing experiences of my career. There’s nothing but great things happening at Aequaland and that feels so natural, as though we have always been working together as women, wanting to change the status quo and drive that narrative ever forward to what we can do as women together.
As stated on UNESCO’s website, education is a human right, a public good and a public responsibility. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to education and even less to EdTech. What can we, as a society, but also as individuals, do to make education more accessible?
Kelly: One of the key performance indicators of recent times in education has been the pandemic. The idea that disadvantage and social mobility are somehow impactful on education statements yet everyone is playing Roblox, Minecraft, or Fortnite was a bitter pill to swallow for me as a game developer. What were the children learning in those games and why weren’t they learning in class? When it dawned on me that we had stopped thinking about education from the perspective of children and young people regardless of social mobility, I knew that with Aequaland we needed to encourage play not just through the computer and games but also reinforcing what we learn in these places with what we do in our day-to-day. Education’s attitude is dated and we have to put the child first. Education will be more accessible if we stop focusing on adults and paperwork and assessment forecasts and parent’s evenings. Let children learn through play, however that manifests.
Aequaland is an inclusive educational platform for all kids. How do you celebrate the individuality of every child through Aequaland?
Kelly: Our characters! We’ve created a world with characters that our children can identify with but that they are not necessarily forced to adopt the attributes of. All our characters in Aequaland are our children - they are inclusive, unbiased and free to choose. From the backstories to the aesthetic we hope we can show the world through a child’s eyes.
Lucy, how can teachers and schools get involved with Aequaland?
Lucy: Ultimately we’d love to be able to offer Aequaland solutions to all schools! There are various ways to get involved. Firstly as an educational establishment that we deliver bespoke content to, secondly as thought partners who provide educational insight, and finally practical testing allies to get the feedback about our technology where it really counts - the students! We hope all schools will be as excited about our content as we are. I remember falling asleep in the back of a history class .. how a dynamic digital experience that sparks both creativity and imagination, and sheds insight on how we can support the world’s sustainable development, would have been a dream come true!
You are part of Microsoft for Startups program. How would you describe that experience?
Lucy: It’s a David and Goliath-style partnership! Meaning that we leverage the agility and innovation of Aequaland, with the breadth and expertise of Microsoft. This enables us to scale faster and reach out to different opportunities across the globe, right from the get-go. It is also a pleasure working with the Microsoft for Startups team who are core champions of our unique offering and keen to support us in the way that best meets our needs.
What’s next for Aequaland?
Lucy: We’re on a journey to build the most inclusive space for kids to learn inside the metaverse. We’ll be building an educational universe that converses planets on creativity and innovation, to diversity and inclusion, to sustainability and beyond! This year we’ll be working with different international education providers in the B2B space providing private bespoke content, then in 2023, we will launch our B2C offering, enabling our technologies to be available worldwide. Our ultimate dream is to make education learning and fun for everyone, and for each child to realise their inner superhero. What this means practically is that in the future we’ll target demographics of children who are marginalised in society in some way too - whether from backgrounds of addiction, depression, poverty, etc. We believe that access to creative play spaces such as Aequaland can provide a creative pathway for kids' self-discovery and learning and to a new brighter future. Imagine sparking the interest of a future Einstein, Nelson Mandela or Malala, in learning and healing our planet. That is part of our dream.
This interview was conducted by Anja Streicher, Chief Marketing Officer at Women of Wearables. Anja is passionate about improving women’s health and wellness, supporting women in business, education and children’s literature.