Unique, free education for every child on a massive scale. Meet Akily
After dedicating my energy and focus for thirteen years to a technology company that I co-founded with my husband, I made a major life decision last year and stopped executing on it. I didn’t have any plans in my mind and found myself discovering that I had an excess of energy that needed channeling. Fortunately, within a month I found myself discussing ideas with my current co-founder Natalia Ulloa, a developmental psychologist, entrepreneur, homeschool mom and friend who aspires to improve the state of education in the world.
What attracted Natalia and me to work together was this understanding of how restrictive and standardized our current education system is; this is especially challenging for children that do not fit the “norm,” and both Natalia and I experienced this first hand.
Natalia’s professional background was designing and implementing curricular adaptations for children displaying developmental issues, an experience that turned out to be a fundamental tool to help her son when he was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome at age three. And in my case, I struggled through high school and my twenties trying to work around and understand why I had so much difficulty focusing on long-term projects, dyslexia, inability to read fast, and other worries. Finally, I found out that I had ADHD.
Neurodevelopmental disorders are thought to be a negative thing through modern society because in general more attention is placed on the unpleasant outcomes of it, but often people with some of these disorders have incredible strengths that in general neurotypical people don’t have.
Based on our experiences, Natalia and I decided that we wanted to create something that could allow caregivers to know where their child(ren) is/are regarding development, work on strengthening what kids are good at and improve what might become problematic in the future all while fortifying family bonds.
Following a year of research, interviews, mockups, and getting our hands wet with machine learning, we found our product: Akily. An adaptive, free-of-charge, child development app that will provide 10 to 15 minutes of personalized, fun and easy to do periodic activities for parents to enjoy with their children.
Akily was created based on the following principles:
- Caregivers want to provide their children with all of the tools possible to navigate and have a fulfilling life.
- Caregivers want to know more about child development but have little time to explore all of the information that is out there.
- Each child is unique and deserves an individual path of development. Our activities and pathways are based on the SteppingBlock Method created by the Akily team to improve child competency while empowering independence in a natural non-forced environment.
- Technology and artificial intelligence can help us predict pathways.
Our primary goal is to democratize child development. We are so excited to think of a future in which any caregiver can have the certainty that they are helping develop in their kids all of the abilities needed in a world changing so fast that they can’t predict its future. This is the reason we are looking for engaged caregivers to be part of our open beta test. Download our app on Android or iOS.
