Why Byju’s has stayed the course in educational games | Divya Gokulnath
19.11.2023 - 16:53
/ venturebeat.com
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Divya Gokulnath and her husband Byju Raveendran — the founders of Byju’s — have put India on the map when it comes to edtech companies.
They started Byju’s in 2011 with humble roots. Now they have more than 30,000 people working for them…
I caught up with Gokulnath at the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, after she gave a talk on the main stage about education, technology and new approaches to learning opened by AI.
Raveendran used to teach math offline to 25,000 students at a time in a big stadium in Bangalore, and both founders believed that digital learning could be so much more efficient. They launched their online learning products for high school students in 2015, and now they’ve taken the offline products to online learning via Osmo. In 2018, Byju’s became India’s first edtech unicorn. During the pandemic, the company had challenges with accounting issues and layoffs.
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Now the company is all-in on digital edtech games. Gokulnath said is a fan of virtual reality games which can increase engagement and visually teach kids principles about math when other methods don’t sink in. But she also sees the limits and costs of technology as a barrier that can stand in the way of progress.
Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.
GamesBeat: What did you talk about on the main stage?
Divya Gokulnath: We spoke about what does it take to build a unicorn. I was also talking about AI and education. You cannot talk about edtech without talking about AI and ChatGBT4 and what it can do for you and how it can make learning better.
GamesBeat: And how you can cheat on tests with it.
Gokulnath: That’s the first thing that everybody thinks about. But we’ve changed that to how you can learn better, but using it for what you should use it for and not what you can compromise learning for, which is cheating. Which is why, you know, I think the reason is because we’ve always learned in the right way. And answers used to be just what, not just why and how minute we change it to that. This question of copying and giving the answers just doesn’t arise anymore.
GamesBeat: Nice. Yeah. And what was your unicorn answer? How do you become a unicorn?
Gokulnath: You know, I don’t think there is an answer to that. I feel it has more to do with the trait of personality of wanting to leave a positive impact. Wanting to create value, wanting to leave behind a lasting legacy than it has to wanting to chase a valuation number. Right.