MateRate: The State of the Art in EdTech

With the onset of online learning era, the Ed-Tech Industry is mushrooming rapidly in India. MateRate, a mathematics-centered IITD Ed-Tech start-up has received accreditation from Singapore International Foundation, GDC - IIT Madras as well as WEE Foundation (supported by DST & IIT-Delhi) for its ingenious adaptive learning solutions. MateRate is a B2C online education start-up that was launched in 2020 by an IIT-Delhi alum to enable tracking the learning trajectories of students in the K-12 segment and to cater to the problem of exiguous learning among youngsters. We interviewed Shreya Arora, the core team member of MateRate education to delve into and gather exclusive information about the start-up's working basic principle. This IITD based start-up has validated its current business model by analyzing consumer behavior through 150+ customer meetings at GDC I-NCUBATE based on the Innovation Corps program of the National Science Foundation and has completed a pilot testing of the first iteration of the product with over 5000 users.

The core team comprises of Abhishree Arora, Shivam Jain, and Shreya Arora. Abhishree handles business development manoeuvres and product management aspects, while Shivam is the technical lead who supervises Abhinav Marwaha, Janhavi Prabhu, Aakash Goel, Aniruddh Premdas and numerous others adept at web development. Shreya directs curriculum and user experience design domain. The team now has expanded into an extensive group with several interns from esteemed colleges, like IITD itself, working with the core team.

The principal intent of the start-up is improvising students' learning outcomes and a four step process is followed for the same. The premier step is recognition and highlighting of conceptual gaps through exhaustive diagnostic assessments designed by the team. Once precisely diagnosed, the root cause of shortfalls is analyzed extensively. The mistakes are classified into misconceptions, missing concepts and silly errors. Through this root cause analysis, a targeted approach personalized according to students' unique needs is carried out for resolving conceptual gaps. Subsequently, the misconceptions are noted and the curriculum provides enhanced focus on those specific topics. Silly errors are obliterated by mindful practice, which is regulated by regular assessments. Students overcome missing concepts via strengthening conceptual understanding through the adaptive learning modules. The modules are insightfully engineered to ensure strengthening students' conceptual understanding with greater retention of concepts and aiding them in developing critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities.

The present education system is replete with shortcomings and loopholes. Misconceptions arisen in conceptual portion, unless precisely pinpointed, can be perplexing to dissolve completely without aid. A novice learner would find it arduous to re-read the entire material and dive deeper into the cause of the misunderstanding unless guided. Furthermore, there exists a large collection of supplementary learning material, and referring to them all at once leads to confusion and intermixing of concepts, defeating the initial purpose. Moreover, a precise balance between concepts and practice is pivotal. Excessive focusing on concepts will effectuate lack of problem solving skills while directly tackling problems might leave conceptual gaps. This balance is taken care of in the Materate product, which focuses on a targeted approach for students to improve their conceptual understanding within a short span of time with appropriate assessments alongside.

One search gives us a ton of data and learning platforms to choose from. Uniqueness is what sets apart novel start-ups from companies deep rooted in success over time. The uniqueness of MateRate stems from its targeted approach to enhance skills by unravelling the root cause of mistakes while ensuring concept reinforcement in a meticulous manner to allow enhancement of mental capacity of a student. The aspiration of the team is to enable an ecosystem of changemakers by imparting quality STEM education and ultimately transforming students into creative and critical thinkers.