KooBits: A Fun and Friendly Platform to Learn Math

KooBits is a fun and friendly platform to learn math. It helps children build math skills at their own pace using gamification.

This math platform outperform any conventional method of instruction by featuring more than 10,000 words problems in more than 700 math skills which replaces the need for costly and heavy books.

Most importantly, teachers and parents has full transparency so they can monitor their kids and see how they are progressing.

Educational Explainer Videos for KooBits

From quite a lot animation style like silhouette animation, motion graphics, etc — KooBits choose cartoon for their explainer video. Let’s watch it first:

Sentoso Budiyanto started out teaching as a private tutor at the age of 15.

It was his family’s economic situation which forced him to work for extra money.

He became passionate about teaching, and his knowledge and skills sharpened over time.

Unlike most people who think math is a monster, Sentoso had fallen in love with it in second grade.

Kids are playful in nature, and he understands that they should not be forced to learn math at an early age.

They should learn by playing, and that is one of the values that he believes in.

A chain of events led to KooBits Indonesia in 2007, which he started as a way to meet his goal to fill his home country with people committed to lifelong learning.

Although his entry into the world of education was not exactly what he wanted, he fell in love with the field and now owns the KooBits franchise in Indonesia.

Interview with KooBits

As a start, can you introduce KooBits to the readers – what it is and what it does?

KooBits is a digital learning company that started off in 2007.

Its first products were a digital library and digital journal for kids. With that, kids can compose their own journal/diary with many interesting pictures, music, or narration.

Early 2014, KooBits launched its newest and flagship product, ProblemSums, which has an emphasis on helping Primary students excel in math problems.

ProblemSums is also a digital learning platform, web-based, and has many interactive and social features.

It motivates children by providing 10 daily challenges which are generated by the KooBits system, peer challenges to create a competitive atmosphere, and homework which can be assigned by teachers or parents.

All three features reward students with points which are digitally summarized, calculated, and displayed online on the leaderboard where all kids can monitor their rank.

ProblemSums is designed to create a learning habit by giving children a bite-sized portion of math problems each day, rather than assigning a larger amount over a limited period of time and creating stress and tension.

However, top students don’t need to worry about overly easy math problems because KooBits have partnered with APMOPS to provide olympiad level questions.

Can you guide us through the process a little bit?

First of all, KooBits aim to work with schools, even though retail is also available. Why schools? Because competition needs a community to work, and school is the best environment to achieve such a goal.

When a school agrees to invest in KooBits, KooBits will register the names of the school’s students in order to create a personal account for each student.

KooBits will also endorse the math teachers with teacher accounts which they can use to monitor the students’ activities or to assign homework.

When all the accounts are activated, students can start practicing, playing, and improving for a year before the accounts will require renewal for the next level.

Students can log in anywhere, anytime, using any means of smart gadget with an internet connection. ProblemSums replaces the heavy and expensive books by compressing them into a tiny portable gadget in your kid’s hand.

Get to Know More with KooBits

What do you think is KooBits’ greatest strength?

Its greatest strength is probably the ability to intrigue children to slowly but surely like math.

It has repackaged math so nicely and in such a fun way that kids begin to learn math without associating negative feelings with it. This way, the overall performance of a school will improve.

Schools cannot resist this. One by one they start incorporating KooBits as their extracurricular add-on.

Of all the things you mentioned, the gamification format is definitely an interesting way to learn math. Can you give us an example of the games?

Yes, like I mentioned above, kids at that stage or age are very fond of competition and games.

They often use their gadgets for non-learning activities, so KooBits intelligently bridges these two gaps. How about learning while playing? So KooBits creates features that provoke competition and a leaderboard to further boost their pride whenever they see their names on it.

Imagine playing online games and competing with your classmates, but somehow this is math.

You can also join special events like Boys vs Girls, School Wizards (school vs school), Hero of the Day, Zodiac Race, etc. All are carefully engineered to cater to the kid’s enthusiasm in competition.

Based on your knowledge, is there a difference between Singapore and Indonesia in terms of the curriculum and syllabus in learning math?

Definitely. Even the start of academic year is different.

That is why KooBits is committed to the this issue. However, in term of the curriculum, ID and SG are very different. For the time being, partners in ID focus on schools with a Singaporean curriculum first.

It is indeed segmented, but still very promising. We dream of tweaking the system so that the curriculum and syllabus can also answer to the local/national schools in the near future.

KooBits enables children to be more social, with the ability to interact with local and international users through a series of challenges. Apart from the social interaction and the fun, the challenge can also spark a competition between the children.

Why Use KooBits for Your Online Learning?

What do you think the parents need to do to make sure the competition stays healthy for their own kid?

Parents need to understand that The score is not everything. The score does not reflect hard work or intelligence.

Thus, parents should never agree on spoonfeeding the kids with the final answer, just to get the kids to the top of the leaderboard. Also, parents should encourage kids by accompanying them whenever they are playing KooBits.

Not only helping parents, KooBits can also be a part of a school’s curriculum. According to you, what do the interested schools have to prepare before welcoming KooBits to help the children?

Absolutely nothing. Hassle free, no training needed, no preps at all.

Schools only need to give us the names of the students who will be using KooBits. Please note this only works with Singaporean schools because KooBits is already aligned with Singapore MOE syllabus.

KooBits allows parents and schools transparency to keep their kid or student on track while using the software. Can you explain more about this?

Yes, since we are serving on a digital platform, everything is recorded digitally and is live.

Teachers have a teacher’s account and all statistics and reports are there. Parents can have their kids’ username and password to login, so they can check their kids’ activeness through the system dashboard or assign HW manually.

The Future of KooBits

We understand that KooBits use English as the main language. In the future, will it be available in Indonesian as well?

Let’s cross our fingers and hope it will happen in the not-so-distant future. I want it to happen.

As an addition, other than math, is there another subject that you think will be less of a headache for the kids in Indonesia with the help of a service like KooBits?

I cannot think of anything else but English Study, Science and maybe Geography.

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