MUMBAI - From a multi-billion-dollar education startup to wired-up mannequins, technology is helping to revolutionise the way Indian schoolchildren are learning - provided their parents can afford it.
Major foreign investors are ploughing funds into India's growing"edtech" industry as they seek to capitalise on the world's largest school-age population who face fierce competition for university places. It is just one of dozens of startups betting that kids are eager to learn differently from rote memorisation techniques that are used across much of Asia."We wanted to make education fun," said Manish Dhooper, the founder of New Delhi-based Planet Spark, which uses"gamified" teaching methods.
Its online education sector is projected to be worth US$2 billion to Asia's third-largest economy by 2021, according to research published by accounting group KPMG two years ago. "We want to be the largest education company in the world," founder Byju Raveendran, 39, whose stake in Byju's is now thought to be worth almost US$2 billion, told AFP.
At a state-run school in Mumbai, teacher Pooja Prashant Sankhe is using technology in a rather different way to change how her pupils engage with lessons.