Interview with SKIDOS – Creating Confident, Lifelong Learners Through Play

About SKIDOS:

SKIDOS is a platform of educational games for kids aged 2-10 years, trusted by over 2 million parents around the globe. Our mission is to create confident, lifelong learners through play & we do this by fostering an alternative approach to education, through 21st Century Skills. Since our founding in 2015, our mission has been to make education fun & enjoyable.

Q1: How did SKIDOS fare in the COVID pandemic?

COVID-19 forced a majority of schools & offices to shut down around the world, forcing parents to work from home while taking care of their kids, a responsibility led by playschools, kindergartens & elementary schools up to that moment.

SKIDOS’s Founder & CEO, Aditya Prakash recalls “Parents had to rush to the help of ed-tech products which could both help their child learn new skills while also keeping them constructively busy. SKIDOS learning games were designed to help parents for exactly these two reasons. As a result, we experienced an exponential demand for downloading & using our games. In 2020, we tripled our user base & saw consistent growth across all our key markets including North America, Europe & Australia.”

We also had to adjust to working from home as we shut down our offices in March 2020. However, it was not as difficult for us to switch to remote work as we were already using tools & processes which allowed us to work from home. In fact, in 2020, we onboarded 25+ SKIDONIANS to join our mission, completely remotely.

Talking of the product, our Chief Product Officer, Ole Ivanoff says “During the pandemic, our team worked wonders to expand globally & reach new markets to provide more parents with an exciting way to engage their kids in learning. We added French, Italian, German, Portuguese & Dutch & are planning to add more in the coming months. Furthermore, we keep adding new games & are constantly working towards providing the best learning content for kids.”

Q2: With the growth you highlighted in the previous answer, what’s next for SKIDOS?

We are working on many exciting initiatives to transform the way we see education for kids. One of them is, of course, to constantly improve our product to make parents even happier with our apps.

“Our aim is to get more games out there with top-of-the-class learning content so that parents have an easier way to support & motivate their kids in their learning journey.” – Ole Ivanoff

We are working on increasing the number of games we offer to around 75 as well as adding tutorials for our learning content.

Secondly, if you look at traditional ed-tech, not much has changed in the past 25 years. You have a jolly host on the screen trying to encourage the child with funny remarks & suggestions. We are planning to employ new technologies like AI & AR to be able to efficiently transfer an understanding of new concepts to kids.

Thirdly, & most importantly, in order to be true to our vision & mission, we need to move beyond mobile educational games to other product lines which can help families with kids develop 21st-century skills. This means we will continue to develop & improve our existing portfolio of educational games while also working to launch new products both for the screen & off the screen.

Learning should be much more than an experience of the mind. We want to promote social interactions & physical play as well. There are enough people sitting on chairs in this world already.

Q3 You keep mentioning 21st Century Skills, could you tell us a bit more about this?

The term “21st-Century skills” was coined in the 80s & they comprise a series of skills, abilities & virtues that are needed to thrive & succeed in a globalized digital society. Critical thinking, problem-solving, cooperation & creativity are just some of the skills we focus on developing within our games.

In the current environment, these skills are not systematically taught in traditional schools. With the world changing at such a fast pace, these skills are essential for our kids to be successful in the future. The world demands people to be able to gain new knowledge & skills at a much faster pace & interact with people in new jobs that don’t even exist right now.

Our kids need to learn how to learn. They need to be more self-aware & solve problems creatively, to be great team players & leaders of the future. 21st Century skills are the tools to achieve that.