Interactive education for young students boosts engagement and productivity

By Himanshu Jana

Omkar Pimple, the founder of Myracle.io, thinks that the global education system has remained stagnant with time, leaving younger learners with a limited chance of engagement and interaction. To help young learners engage more with their education, Myracle, an XR-based education application, was launched. The app not only transcends complex hardware requirements but also has the potential to reach places where stable internet connectivity is a big challenge. In this Start-up of the Day episode, Omkar talks about his innovation and its positive impact on young learners.

What is the problem that you are solving?

“The problem we saw in the last two and a half years was that the education methods need to be built for today’s and tomorrow’s needs because they neither engage nor scale well. Methods like textbooks and lectures scale and reach many children, but these methods fail to engage students. The students need more interest before opening the textbooks or within the first sixty seconds of a video lecture. Moreover, science labs require infrastructure, equipment, and trend personnel to be fully established. Thus it has a different reach. Even modern equipment, like VR headsets, needs to scale better because they are expensive and uncomfortable for regular use. So the ideal solution is something that engages effectively and scales infinitely. We realized that there are no solutions in the market that fulfill these two parameters, which is how myracle.io was born.”

What was the motive behind starting this company? 

“I used to teach English and Mathematics to my friends from a very young age. Even during my college days, I taught engineering subjects and gave guitar lessons. When you can transfer a piece of knowledge to someone, you will be able to clarify the knowledge for yourself even more. This made me enjoy the teaching and knowledge transmission aspect. Apart from my professional experience in various technological domains, I was equally devoted to research, especially the intersection of education psychology, data science, and immersive technology. I subconsciously wanted to be involved in the education sector, and from there came the motive to start myracle.io.”

What is the technology behind myracle?

“Myracle.io works in four simple steps. Firstly, the app tries to understand the environment, essentially the scanning step. Then the scanned data is analyzed in real-time and fed into a transformer that transforms the environment by overlaying a layer of digital information. The final step includes the essential part of active learning. Though AR and VR solutions of today mainly allow visualization, we go one step further, allowing students to interact and thus manipulate virtual objects in their surrounding environment. We aim to stimulate the users’ visual, auditory, haptic, and kinaesthetic senses. By focusing on these multiple senses, we have seen improvement in knowledge retention, memorability, recalling, and applicability.”

How do you plan to scale your product?

 “Our approach is to make this accessible to every student possible. People often think an XR-based solution like ours is expensive and made for rich people, and I say no, that is not how it is. I have family members living in rural areas of India who do not have continuous access to electricity or an internet connection. It is not a better world than we built if our technology is not accessible to everyone. So we refrained from relying on complex hardware and simultaneously built an AR experience that would run without a continuous internet connection. Thus we can deploy myracle in any corner of the world.”

Are you focusing on specific markets?

“We need to focus on the market with an appetite for innovation and the substantial volume to consume it. Given that India has half a billion people under the age of 20 with an average age of 29, our impact is huge. So our initial focus is on the young students based in India who our innovation will positively impact. On the other hand, Germany has built systems that have been very equitable socially and historically. The country knows the holistic way of building things and has a certain sense of quality. Germany has an ecosystem of investors, builders, and thinkers, which we find very valuable in today’s global world. Once we have established ourselves in India and Germany, we plan to move into other global markets such as south-east Asia and Africa.”

With children being your primary user, are you worried about data privacy issues?

“Data is very crucial, and we understand that fully. We think parents are an important stakeholder in the education system, so we always keep them in the loop. We ensure parents and students understand the implications of using technology and do not get scared by them. Moreover, we refrain from misusing any user data.”

What has been your biggest obstacle till now?

“The education sector never had an incentive to innovate globally, not just in Germany. Though slowly changing, the entire structure is still rigid and inflexible. Introducing something innovative like myracle in an aging system has its share of problems. We have tried to help the students and approached teachers and schools to be a part of this revolutionary process. Though it has been a complex puzzle, we have made substantial progress.”

Have the students benefited from the app?

“We used our app for demonstration purposes in one of the schools in India and ran a statistical analysis. Before engaging the students with myracle, we asked how much they understood about atoms on a scale of one to ten. They were not confident enough, and most said four or five. But after the myracle session, we asked the same question; most said nine or ten. We ran an assessment afterward, and all of them scored very well. So the feedback was positive. Moreover, we always conduct before-and-after assessments for every student to understand their improvement.”

Start-up of the day Archieven – Innovation Origins

Spread all over Europe, thousands of start-ups have the most innovative ideas. Innovation Origins puts them in the spotlight every day.