Startup Story #47: LetsPractice – Digitising Your Child’s Practice Material

 

As technology is slowly taking over teaching methods, many children still struggle to grasp certain concepts due to the lack of practice or understanding. LetsPractice is an entry into the educational space using technology to test concepts of children between the first and ninth grade by handing out worksheets, tests and revision sheets digitally. “All children are different. They have different grasping levels. I started making worksheets for my children and it helped them a lot. But, what works for my children may not work for other children. We want to test concepts and we have four lakh questions in our database,” explains Nanda Ramaswamy, Founder – LetsPractice.

Nanda Ramaswamy

Started in 2015, this venture, through its software gives the power to the parent to pick and choose what kind of questions they want their children to answer. Practice material for boards like CBSE, ICSE, IGCSE and SSE is provided for subjects like mathematics, English and Hindi grammar, science, history, civics, geography, physics, chemistry and biology. “This eliminates a lot of paper as well as the need for parents to send their children to private tuitions. We started out with parents and now we’re moving to schools. This will enable the teachers to focus on the teaching. We’ve come up with a set of multiple choice questions that get sent on an app. When a teacher completes a chapter in class, it is logged on to the app and the children in that class are mapped to the teacher. Once the teacher is done with a lesson, she just has to go on the app and click a button that will send out questions to the students,” clarifies the entrepreneur who worked as an IT professional for over a decade.

Schools don’t need to put in any investment to get on board with this and it also helps them analyse how students are performing in each subject or each teacher’s class on an average. “The schools save a huge cost in terms of printing, distribution and correction as the answers are already stored. The schools see how students and teachers are performing. It is automated since all the data is onboarded by us so now the teacher has lesser burden on him or her.”

Working with three schools spread out in Pune and Chennai as well as catering to more than a 100 parents, LetsPractice has come a long way in a short span of time. As the sole founder, Ramaswamy faced a few challenges especially when it came to convincing parents of this. “A lot of parents prefer to send their children to tuition teachers and outsource the learning process. If the marks aren’t satisfactory, then they have someone to talk to.

In LetsPractice, they’re completely involved. Once they are involved, they find it very easy. Getting through schools is also quite difficult unless you have contacts there.”

A key learning for this entrepreneurial journey says Ramaswamy, is listening to the customers and taking feedback from them. “We keep in touch with parents to know how their child is doing. We always welcome bad feedback. We have also started sitting at parent-teacher meetings in schools we’re associated with. A dissatisfied parent will cost us a few other customers while a happy parent will ensure that many more parents come on board.”

Vijayta Lalwani