Our Story

Inspiration

Hi there!

My name is Waweru. I am a Kenyan, a parent, and a Nairobi resident.

A while back, I began building Kinaa and this is a look into the what inspired me and the journey that it has been.

Now, having been a teacher in rural Kenya and also witnessing parents in Nairobi raising children in Grades 1-4, I noticed a pattern that is an experience of thousands of Kenyan parents; they all struggle to find a good way for their child to engage with school content during the free time they spend at home. 

This is especially in this digital era when attention is divided across different forms of entertainment and activities. 

The specific problems I have seen are;

Just as a wise person would do, I first had candid conversations with diverse parents to find out if they were experiencing similar struggles. You can call this my own version of market research. 

As I had suspected, my findings were that parents could relate to each other. And an added bonus was that the conversations became the inspiration behind Kinaa School. 

I decided take up the initiative and build a solution to the problems that I identified with the knowledge that it would also serve other parents. I believed a good chunk of parents would be interested in the final product.

Now, getting started was not hard but in the excitement, I truly underestimated the work needed. I thought I could build Kinaa in seven months but it ended up taking one and half years working back and forth with software developers and teachers. 

Why did it take so long? Well, it is because I have perfectionist tendencies. 

I realized I needed to create an excellent platform that worked for both leaners and parents. And for this excellence to be achieved, I had to allocate more time to development activities and content creation. 

It was definitely a great challenge with endless sessions of testing and prototyping. Eventually, I got the team to touch on every critical aspect that I believe make Kinaa great.

First, even though I began by building the core functionalities, I learnt that I had to make the platform user friendly and carefully curate the content. This paid off because during testing, I found that children moved around the app easily and ended up being productive by engaging in several of the CBC-based learning activities.

Second, I had to make the learning fun and stimulating. This was necessary because children nowadays are used to stimulating content on platforms like YouTube. I did not want them to feel bored. So, via a combination of games, quizzes, cues, and related features, I achieved a platform that offers interactive learning in a way that matches what children might be used to already.

I also add what I think makes Kinaa special, a progressive and comprehensive way to cover the content covered in school. 

What I did here was simple yet powerful; I got teachers to generate content that parallels Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) strands from Grade 1 to Grade 4. I then packaged the content in a way that it can be served to a child in small bits every day. 

When using the platform, a child can therefore start at Grade 1 - Strand 1 and progress smoothly over the years to Grade 4 - Last Strand. The switch between grades is seamless.

Also, because my aim was making a use-at-home platform, I made sure the content could be covered by a child doing it for only about 20 minutes a day. Again, this was an impressive feat because the entire platform’s content - quizzes, games, and activities - is highly curated for both learning and entertainment. 

Even more impressive is the regularly updated content. I created the database such that it can always take in new content and fit it right into the app so that learners can experience fresh materials. The thought process here was that if the Kenyan curriculum changes, the platform would remain useful as content can easily berefreshed.

Another cool thing is that, understanding that children have different ability levels, I came up with an ML-basedalgorithim - with the help of the development team - that serves content in a personalized manner. So, each child will find the content challenging yet fulfilling as it will adapt to their knowledge and skill level.

Finally, I made it such that one parent can add upto 3 children that can use the platform concurrently. Also, the parent gets the ability to see performance reports for each child at a frequency of their choice - daily, weekly, and monthly. In addition, the reports will show the weak areas of each child - they can share this with the teacher!

As I end this, I have to mentioned that I never finish describing each individual feature but I hope you get the idea of what Kinaa School offers.

My nephew seems to enjoy it and that is a great review by itself!

So, sign up your child and let the fun learning begin.