About the beginning of one’s own path in the educational business, about the outdated education system, about the All-Ukrainian mathematics competition Playmath, and about the impact of the war on the work, the PR manager of Vacuum Deep Tech Acceleration, Kristina Rozhkova, spoke with Natalya Limonova, the founder and managing partner of the educational startup GIOS, co-owner of the SNITE company , co-founder of the NGO Digital Future of Education.

Linkedin Site GIOS

• Why the field of education?
• It all started 10 years ago with my joint furniture business with my husband. When we were recruiting employees for the company, we noticed that young people came completely unprepared – they had neither the ability to work in a team, nor creative thinking, nor time management. We developed all this in them ourselves, conducting educational events for our employees. And all these skills need to be developed from childhood, because soft skills are needed at work. This was the first impetus to create an educational product. And the second and more important impetus was my own children. I have two sons and at that time I really did not like what was happening to them at school. Since in the first three years of schooling, children are very inquisitive, interested in everything, so it was with my sons. But then the “scratch” begins. The main thing for the teachers was to get the children to the VET, but I saw how they were losing interest, because of this I wanted to find a different approach to learning for them.

• And then your own path in the educational business began?
• So! First, I started a small Saturday-Sunday school, then it became a full-day school, and later I became a co-founder of a network of private schools in Kyiv and Lviv. It was there that we began to implement such innovative teaching methods, when children are interested in the process of learning: we saw how they reveal their potential, become leaders, take part in debates, etc. About 3,000 children studied in all our schools. But there are still 1 billion 200 million children who need to be educated. And here came the idea to create something larger. We realized that modern children can no longer be taught by the methods of the past. Seeing their psychological features, clip thinking, we came to the point that children should not be given long boring lectures or outdated textbooks, short bright information in game format that they see around them on social networks. Children also need real-life examples to understand the application of what they are learning.
  
  That’s why we decided to create a Gios platform that no longer has walls, no borders, no borders and can give this opportunity to children all over the world!

• What is the main mission of the Gios platform?
• Our mission and goal is to contribute to the modernization of the outdated education system and provide access to modern interactive interesting content to millions of children from all over the world.

• How has the full scale intrusion affected Gios workflows?
• Of course, it affected the whole country, including us. The first two days were a shock, from the third day all our employees rushed to volunteer. Who was in the IT army, who was weaving nets, who was in information support. Then we thought that we can do the best of what we know and realized that children still need support and education. That is why we opened free access to our platform for all Ukrainians, wherever they are: in our country or displaced. And for 4 months in a row, all training on our platform was completely free. What does it mean? That we have no financial flows if we opened everything for free. That is, yes, we helped our students, but we also have teachers on the platform, and we considered ourselves responsible for them as well, because many of them were in hot spots: in Kharkiv, in the Kherson region. And they very courageously continued to study, because in addition to online courses, we also have tutoring and school parts.
  
  And we had incredible stories: when in Kharkiv there was an enemy missile attack on the judicial house, and the teacher’s windows were smashed by everyone in the house during the lesson, and she says that she will now sweep the glass and continue the lesson. Our teachers are real heroes, the way they behaved in these conditions deserves respect! And we considered it our duty to help them.

• How did you manage to pass this period and what happened next?
• It was a very difficult period and I am grateful to all our Gios team that most of them stayed, tightened their belts, as the payouts decreased, as you understand, because there was not much financial support. And we started crowdfunding: we were helped by our friends, our clients who paid something in advance. And we didn’t just set sail, already in the summer we started scaling our project! Then we started selling our courses again, started our online summer camps for studying mathematics and developing analytical and critical thinking. And we started developing our project both in Ukraine and on the North American market. That is, it was a very difficult and responsible moment, but we understood that we needed to switch psychologically and continue to teach children and support our teachers and our team. We have done everything we can do since the beginning of the war.

• During the war, Gios launched the All-Ukrainian mathematics competition Playmath. Tell us about this experience, how was it?
• Playmath is a dual purpose project. First, yes, it is learning. Secondly, it is the switching of children from the existing psychological load and providing the opportunity to study in any conditions: even when there are blackouts; even when there is no offline connection with your teachers; in any city; when it is convenient for them; at a pace that is convenient for them; without losing progress. This is the opportunity that our platform provides. 
  
  The Playmath competition lasted for 6 weeks. More than 22 thousand children from all corners of Ukraine, there were even children from the front-line territories, from Bakhmut, from the Donetsk region. In total, from more than 30 countries! We were even shocked when we saw from which countries the children were connecting, not to mention Canada, America, Mexico and all European countries, there were children from Qatar, from Madagascar. Our children were now scattered all over the world and all of them had the opportunity to connect to the platform and practice.
  
  Since it was an all-Ukrainian competition, we were helped by our partners: the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, the Ministry of Digital Transformation, and the Ukrainian Startup Fund. They helped spread the word about Playmath as much as possible. And that’s why so many children from all over the world joined in, and there were some very amazing stories.

• What was the purpose of Playmath? And did it succeed?
• The main goal was to help in this difficult wartime, to switch the children, to give them the opportunity to work with pleasure and in the conditions in which it is possible. Initially, our methodologists believed that in 5-6 weeks, children will pass a maximum of 2-3 topics on the platform from their class that they pass at school. Since each topic contains several lessons, and each lesson requires a lot of attention and time – from 30 minutes to an hour. Our children take each lesson two or three times, we have this opportunity to improve their results.
  
  But no! When you give children something they are interested in and there is an element of competition (they competed for prizes – tablets), when it is clear, very simply laid out, then they simply work wonders! About a third of the children completed the full one-year course and even the topics they did not study at school in advance. They did this in a very short time and also wrote to us with questions that could be solved in order to earn additional points.
  
  At the beginning we did a slice of the kids’ academic knowledge and at the end we also did a test and saw that the kids’ engagement increased by almost 90% and their academic performance went from 22% to 55% in just 6 weeks! Can you imagine what can happen in a year if you study like this all the time? Even the children, when they gave us an interview, told us that earlier in school they had 7-8, sometimes 6s, but now that they have gone through the topics in advance, everything has become clear to them, they raise their hands all the time and get 11s, the teacher is in shock.
  
  And here we understand how the child still changes psychologically, gains self-confidence, reveals his potential. And even such “squeakies” who were sitting on the back seat and were afraid to raise their hand, now feel confident. They understood that it is not difficult, that there is no such thing as being a humanitarian and not good at mathematics. No, if you give it in an interesting format and accessible language, they will be able to understand and master everything. And that’s why there were so many cool discoveries for us.
  
  And the parents noted that it is important for them, first of all, they managed to attract the child to study, as parents always push their children and try to make them sit in lessons and fail. And here they say that in the evening the children ran to see the leaderboard to see where they were. They got up in the morning and ran to decide something in order to rise in this leaderboard. That is, those game moments had a very good effect.
  
  The second thing that the parents liked is that the child works independently, as children are not taught this at school. But during life, the child will need this – the ability to learn, independently search for information, master something. And they did it independently with pleasure, and this is such an achievement, I think.
  
  And the third is that the children mastered new topics on their own and it turned out to be understandable. That is, this is what the parents noted and what makes us happy – that we are doing a very cool thing.

• What do you plan to do next with your Playmath results?
• We want to make a big event – a webinar for teachers and parents. We will share the results of Playmath and show how our children can learn – with pleasure, independently, if we give them information in the right format with the right methodology and get them interested.

• Were there any funny situations during the All-Ukrainian Playmath competition? Tell me.
• There were several interesting requests from children and various “entrepreneurial” proposals.
  
  For example: children really wanted to get into the TOP-10 and win prizes in the PlayMath competition. We have a chat on the platform where children can ask their questions and even give us suggestions. Some of the smart people who had already solved all the tasks of their class (completed the entire annual course in 6 weeks!), but wanted to increase their result even more, wrote in the chat: “Who else can help solve tasks for extra points?” 
  
  There are also very sincere messages and questions to our chat support. One girl – a 5th grader asked if the boys in the class would like her more if she solved all the problems and knew mathematics better?

• How many registered users are there at the moment in Gios?
• There are now more than 144,000 registered users on the platform. We continue to work with our parents from the Playmath competition now, they are the last ones to enter our platform. And now we offer them training in the same style as they studied during the competition.
  
  Of these 144 thousand, about 20% of children are from different countries, because many of our Ukrainians have moved, we also opened an American locale of our project and we have about 300 sold lessons for the North American market.

• What is Gios business model?
• We have B2C subscriptions. These are self-study subscriptions with our course: they can be monthly or annual, it’s more profitable, but you buy a whole year of training for yourself
  
  The second option is school subscriptions. That is, the whole class comes in with the teacher. It’s free for the teacher, and the payment for the students is three times less than what they would just pay for individual lessons. So there’s price differentiation, so if a whole class comes in and joins their teacher, they have a discount, and it’s a very powerful digital tool. The teacher sees the dynamics of the class, he can give individual tasks to different groups of children, it can be in the form of homework or studying the material in advance. And then the completed tasks are checked by the machine, the teacher does not need to sit at night to check notebooks, the machine gives him a result that can be converted into a grade. And also many additional interesting features for teachers. Not only can they use our library of lessons, they also have the option to create their own lessons using our on-platform lesson builder.
  
  Well, the third direction is also B2C, tutoring. Our platform is also a marketplace for tutors, we connect teachers with students according to parameters and requests. In this direction, very interesting digital tools have also been developed in order to find the best combination and the most effective training individually for each student and build an individual development trajectory with the support of such a mentor-teacher.

• What competitions or events in which Gios participated would you like to tell?
• As the founder, I try to make Gios as visible as possible, so that we are seen and known about us. I always emphasize that this is a Ukrainian startup. And in general, I am proud of our ecosystem of Ukrainian startups, we have very talented people with creative projects, and we are also in this community and with the help of various programs – from Google for Startups, from the Ukrainian Startup Fund, with the support of USAID and other structures, we perform a lot at international conferences. In the last couple of months we attended a conference in Poland that was organized by Google for Startups, we attended Startup Grind Global in Silicon Valley in the States. By the way, there we were chosen to perform on the main stage, few startups have such an opportunity – to pitch in front of a thousand visitors, business angels, investors. And we had such an opportunity to show a Ukrainian startup on the international stage. After that, I already managed to attend the OMR 2023 conference, which is a digital and marketing conference in Hamburg, also with the support of our Ukrainian Startup Fund and the Hamburg startup community. And also among our 12 Ukrainian startups, we presented our Gios and were also chosen again to perform on the main stage in front of thousands of visitors. I communicated with business angels, investors and now in the process of negotiations with several. Since our users are now also in European markets, especially in Poland and Germany, we are interested in these markets as well.

• What future development do you see for Gios?
• We have already gone beyond the borders of Ukraine, but we want to be much more massive. My dream is millions of users, in 2025 I see 6 million happy users learning mathematics with pleasure on the Gios platform!

• Natalya, thank you for the interesting interview, maybe you want to add something else from yourself?
• I am also grateful to your Vacuum Deep Tech Acceleration accelerator, which supported us at Startup Grind Global, and also to the Ukrainian Startup Fund, which supports many initiatives. Thank you for the Dual Use project, thanks to which we made Playmath and for the various trips where our Ukrainian startups can tell the world about themselves! Well, I am very grateful to our team, who are inspired, who have passion and drive, who are very concerned about helping to change the outdated education system and help a whole generation of young people to learn with pleasure and reveal their potential!