Access is critical for human progress.
Access has been the key enabler of any human progress. Access to knowledge, access to places virtual or not, access to goods, and access to people are the foundations for any human endeavors. Inventions like paper and movable type have democratized the access to knowledge. Building roads and efficient transportation have boosted the economy connecting faraway supply with demand. Internet, computing, and mobile devices have shrunk the world for anyone to access almost anything from the smartphones in our palms. Facebook, LinkedIn, and WeChat have connected people and allowed much easier access to people so that many more people can join hands to do meaningful things together.
The below figure (from Nate Silver’s the Signal and the Noise) visualizes how printing press, steam engine, and the Internet have dramatically transformed the world economy.
So working on providing access and its efficiency are fundamental to bringing dramatic progress.
K-12 education innovation is hard in today’s school system
In this article, we focus on access to innovative teaching for our children. Such access is among the most fundamental ones that have profound impact for our lives and future.
Fast innovation requires quick iterations of experiments. It starts with formulating the new idea, implementing it, evaluating it in a real-world setting, then improving the ideas and implementation; and iterates towards perfection. The quicker one could iterate, the faster the innovation is and the greater advance we make.
Unfortunately, in today’s school system, there are many hurdles for a widespread, rapid experimentation of innovative teaching: Schools must work within government-imposed constraints. There is a very limited budget for education R&D: “the US invests only 0.2% of its education budget on R&D versus the top tech companies that routinely spend more than 10 percent”. Because it is free and ubiquitous, public schools remain popular with or without innovation.
Although K-12 education is so important for our society, it is one of the few sectors in our lives where innovation is too slow to take off.
Innovation in K-12 teaching is much easier for after-school and summer
Nevertheless, K-12 innovative teaching is happening today. In the form of summer camps and after-school enrichment classes, we’ve seen the most exciting and practical topics being taught by some very passionate instructors: Children get to access leading edge technologies and learn 3D modeling and printing, perform creative story-telling using virtual reality, build their confidence and public speaking skills through theatre performances, get engineering skills from old-fashioned carpentry, cooking, sewing to modern digital age attractions like Minecraft programming and robot building and competition, learn life lessons and build characters from martial arts, board games, and sports, be immersed in music, art, and learn the dance movies from classical to tap dancing or break dancing, learn history and its impact on technical inventions from the path of Marco Polo. Even traditional topics like math and English are made special.
There is a fundamental reason that these enrichment programs are so creative and engaging. It is because they are optional instead of required. If they weren’t effective and valuable, parents would easily drop them. So, the very goals of these programs are to be different from regular schooling, to be designed to appeal to children’s interests, and to be meaningful for learning all at the same time.
Access to innovative teaching for K-12 is HARD
Despite the fact that enrichment education is a 22 billion dollar industry with both strong supply from innovative teachers and enthusiastic demand from eager parents, the “roads” are very difficult between classes and children’s calendars. Take summer camp planning as an example: Parents need to visit many camp providers’ websites obtained from friends or through google search, manually find programs that satisfy their children’s ages, interests, driving constraints, and schedules at each provider’s website. Often parents put together a spreadsheet to piece classes from different providers into a coherent schedule across the 10 weeks of the summer—that is quite a puzzle to solve. After figuring out this schedule, a parent needs to go to each provider’s website to create an account and password and to fill out lengthy registration forms over and over again. This process can take weeks to finalize and is simply painful.
In another example, it is a common and great practice for parent volunteers (PTAs/PTOes) to bring wonderful after-school enrichment programs to our children right at our schools. School is the most convenient place for such programs for both children and parents, removing the need for transportation. However, managing after-school programs is a complex operation including selecting providers and programs, coordinating with enrichment providers on programs and locations, interacting with parents for registration, managing class volunteers and granting scholarships, maintaining up-to-date rosters to be on top of our children’s whereabouts after school hours, and managing payment to enrichment providers. Such complex operations turned some schools away; they resort to simpler after-care arrangement. Many PTA volunteers expressed that they’d much prefer a great assortment of after-school enrichment programs rather than after-school care, but the amount of work is too daunting.
These two examples point to the fundamental deficiency in access to innovative teaching for American children today.
Solution: Building the “roads” for better access to K-12 innovative teaching
I am Helen Wang. I am a mother of two elementary school aged boys. I am also a world-renowned computer scientist. I have experienced the pains from the lack of efficient access first-hand. As a passionate parent and technologist, I’ve taken on the burden of enabling efficient access for enrichment education. To this end, I started 6crickets.com to solve this problem.
The way we developed the wild west was to build the roads and infrastructure, then vibrant economy and an ecosystem ensued. Similarly, we are putting the “roads” and infrastructure into enrichment education to boost the entire eco-system. To support low-margin, small enrichment education businesses, 6crickets provides a free online registration for their websites, making a much smoother “road” between their classes and their customers (6crickets.com/registration). To bring them new customers, 6crickets builds an online market place — a search engine for children’s activities, a planner for parents to synthesize search and schedules from different providers into a coherent family schedule, and a booking service to allow registering classes across providers using a single registration form (6crickets.com). The search engine, planner, and the booking service are efficient “roads” connecting classes to a child’s calendar, offering class-level marketing for providers and great convenience for parents in solving the class scheduling puzzle and signing up for classes across providers in one go. Parents raved: “6crickets saved me so much time: the best planner possible”. By streamlining providers’ operations and marketing and minimizing their cost, these talented teachers can focus their time and resources on what they are great at and what they are passionate about — creative teaching. Teachers raved: “6crickets has taken the headache out of the registration process for my business.”
We also build the “roads” to schools and enable easy access to great assortments of after-school enrichment right at schools with ease and no cost. The more choices to access, the more competition there is, the better the enrichment education our children receive. 6crickets gives a free one-stop online registration portal to any school that organizes after-school enrichment (6crickets.com/afterschool). The portal lets parents see all the programs offered at a central page, and register for classes (free or not) using a single registration form. Enrichment providers are automatically and instantly paid at the time of class booking. For enrichment coordinators and school administrators, there is also a central page to view all the rosters in real time from different providers. Schools and PTA volunteers raved: “6crickets has made our enrichment sign-up process SO much easier. We used to send home paper registration forms to our 500+ students, then spend a week sorting through them to do data entry, make rosters, and process payments. No more! The paperwork problem is solved, and now we can focus that energy on organizing amazing classes for our kids.”
We are at the beginning of building the infrastructure and the “roads” and “transportations” for enrichment education to make innovative teaching much more accessible to offer and to take. We will continue working with partners on removing hurdles like teacher hiring, facility rental, limited school space, transportation, curriculum individualization and optimization, and funding. One day, we aspire to have an advanced enrichment education ecosystem where anyone with creative ideas and the passion to teach children can do so easily and impact as many children as possible. If you have great ideas for us or want to join our journey, please email us at info@6crickets.com.
