Sari Hurme-Mehtälä and Jenni Vartiainen from Kide Science

Biography of the speakers

Sari Hurme-Mehtälä completed an undergraduate degree in Business Communications and Marketing at the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and an executive MBA at the Management Institute of Finland. She then worked as an Account Manager, Marketing Manager and Strategic Partner for several companies, including Samsung and ProSiebenSat.1. She is now the CEO and co-founder of Kide Science, a Zanichelli Venture’s portfolio company that provides high quality STEAM education to pre K-12 children through pedagogical innovation.

Jenni Vartiainen completed a Master’s degree and PhD in Chemistry Teacher Education from the University of Helsinki. She then worked as a University Lecturer and Researcher in the same university investigating young children science education, multiliteracies and playful learning. She is the co-founder and head of Pedagogies and Research of Kide Science.

Question 1: Kide Science has been recently recognised as one of the 100 most impactful innovations in the K12 space by hundrED and one of the 50 most innovative EdTech startups across the Nordic-Baltic region by HolonIQ — these are phenomenal achievements! Can you tell us a bit more about your company?

JV: Kide Science is a three years-old business. Prior to that, we carried out several years of academic research. We started our journey by trying to discover how young children are engaged towards science and how we can improve it from a pedagogical point of view. After the completion of our first piece of research, which included several empirical studies with families of young children, the parents wanted to continue to be involved with us. So then Aino Kuronen, my co-founder, and I realised we had an incredible business opportunity in front of us.

SHM: With Jenni’s research skills, Aino’s pedagogical thinking, and my entrepreneurial hunger, we worked very hard to validate what we know is at the core of Kide Science: the pedagogy. But then the business part of the work came in: what’s the best business model? What’s the best distribution channel? And are we doing it exactly for the parents or for the children? How do we engage our teachers? In these three years, we tested many ideas, e.g. selling Kide Science as a hobby for an after school programme, selling it to learning centres, kindergartens, nurseries, preschools, and only after several iterations we decided that we wanted to scale it up. The biggest demand was from the educators who didn’t feel confident enough to teach science to young children because they didn’t have the required scientific background. Additionally, it takes a lot of time to create lesson plans and the pedagogy for young children is totally different. We then built a platform and today Kide Science still works as a platform for teachers. They start with the online training and then they get access to all the lesson plans, which have detailed guidance on how to deliver engaging hands-on science lessons with young kids. We perform at our best with children aged 3–6 years old, but we also have good experiences to apply the lessons for between 7–10 year-old. We feel that the most impactful work starts with the younger ones and this is something that you haven’t seen a lot of internationally.

ZV: What an interesting story, Sari! I understand from your comments that the teachers play a very important role in Kide Science. Can you tell us more about them?

SHM: Our teachers are fascinated by the Kide Science platform. If it was just up to them to decide whether to use Kide Science or not, probably most of them would! But in some cases, the buyer and the decision maker is the kindergarten principal, the nursery chain owner, or even the parents that would want their kids to have science education in the early years. Then the parents might ask their kindergartens teacher to incorporate the Kide Science methodology into their curriculum, which opens the room to conversations with senior stakeholders in the nursery school. We are not just a basic science education program. We have strong research-based pedagogy and we incorporate our scientific insights into playful, kid-centric learning protocols, where teachers are the facilitators who help kids explore the world around them.

ZV: I can definitely see it’s not something that anyone could wake up one day and do it. Before delving into the scientific backing behind Kide Science I would like to learn more the business side of Kide Science. What could a parent do if they were interested in Kide Science but their school didn’t provide access to the Kide Science methodology? Is there a way for them to access the platform?

SHM: We have a solution for the parents. It’s something that it’s not in our core offering, but we want to build bridges between educators and families. If you are from a country where you don’t have access to Kide Science, you can also do several science activities at home with our platform. It requires a lot more time from the parents as well, because it’s not as simple as giving a tablet to a child and let him follow through the tasks. There are plenty of resources and guidance for parents who can upskill themselves and have meaningful sessions with their kids. It’s not something that you just press play, and then some magic happens; you need continuous effort being put in to make the learning stick.

ZV: Thank you for sharing all of this with us. How can Kide Science penetrate through schools? What would you do if you wanted to convince a school to use your methodology?

SHM: We first have conversations with whoever is in charge of the curriculum. If the opportunity aligns with their value and their pedagogy, they ask their teachers if they would use it. Most of the times, the teachers are very enthusiastic about it as they don’t have to juggle tens of platforms at once. Then we negotiate our price with the directors and the financial executives. There are actually quite many different stakeholders. But anybody could either buy a licence from our website as a teacher, headmaster or parent.

ZV: That’s interesting. I appreciate that having so many stakeholders means that the way you sell Kide Science is completely different depending on who you are speaking to. The teacher is probably more interested in the user experience, the head of pedagogy is more interested in the impact on the children and the head of the nursery probably cares about financial returns. I appreciate these are not easy conversations!

SHM: I also want to spend a few words talking about our Development Team. Our team looks quite different compared to many other tech or education-related start ups. The biggest portion of our team is made up of teachers and pedagogical developers. So in that sense, we have a really strong background from the research. Our teachers think about how to solve a teacher-specific problem and they create the content for themselves! We always say that our asset is not a digital technology, but out pedagogical knowledge and model. We use technology as a lever to solve our daily problems.

ZV: This is such a pivotal thought. Technology serves a purpose — it’s never a solution by itself and Kide Science embodies this thought perfectly.

Question 2: At the core of Kide Science, there is the idea that young children can learn through playful activities, in what is known to be a “play-based learning environment”. Can you share some of the scientific insights that are at the foundation of Kide Science?

JV: We think that our playful approach to learning is at the core of our offering. We see playfulness in learning differs quite dramatically from some educators and institutions. According to some definitions, you refer to playful learning simply by allowing your kid to use toys to help them count (e.g. how many cars can you see here?). To a certain extent that is play-based learning. But for us, it means a lot more. Play-based learning involves your imagination and it’s key that we adults build a world together with the children where they can take the role of a little scientist. In children’s imaginative world, they can be anything they want! For example, if they imagine to be a policeman, they start doing all the things that a policeman would do: help the traffic, catch illegal activities and help families in the neighbourhood. And that’s exactly what happens when they pretend to be a scientist: they start thinking exactly as they think a scientist would! And of course, the teacher helps children to understand what scientists are in very simple terms, which at a fundamental level, means that they ask questions, they wonder, they collect data, they develop hypotheses and create new things. It’s very important that we allow children to step into the role of a little scientist; they can develop their scientific thinking without even realising it!

SHM: I would also like to add that most of our learning happen through stories. Our main character is a robot called Hoseli. He is usually in trouble and the children have to help him figure out how to solve his problems. Kids are not just learning, but they are also trying to help Hoseli. In their journey through a fantasy world, they act as scientists and explore the world around them.

ZV: I can imagine how young kids might find role-playing a scientist very fun! Can you give us an example of some research questions you might have developed and answered?

JV: The largest piece of research I carried out is my own PhD thesis, a design-based research project. The main goal of a design-based research project was to create something concrete that solves a problem that exists. This research produced our pedagogical model. The question I addressed was: how do we engage young children in science education? More in specific, I focused on how to create the playful environment that is conducive to scientific learning. How can a child manifest scientific thinking through play? Not surprisingly, there are quite sophisticated processes that children can engage in when they are allowed to act in this kind of playful environment. They can suggest ideas on how to answer a specific question; they can ask questions like “can I test this?”, or “can I do this in a different way?”. There is no teacher saying how you should do this step. For example, critical thinking skills are put into practice in these scenarios.

ZV: It’s interesting that you mention critical thinking skills. We find that this skill is more and more in demand in the current job market. Can you give me an example of a scenario that you might have created to test whether critical thinking skills were developed through play-based, scientific learning?

JV: Well, first I would like to say that I’m qualitative researcher. My data collection method is mostly video-based. I put two or three cameras around groups of children who are working on some tasks and I try to create a very authentic learning situation for them. I try to get rid of all the laboratory environments, so that when they behave as naturally as possible. Obviously we asked for parents’ permission to carry out such experiments. After that, I go through these videos, second-by-second, to figure out what happens: what are the children saying? How are they interacting?. One of the methods I used for my research is called multimodal. This means that I don’t only listen to children, but I also very carefully look what they do. What are their gestures? What body parts they use to interact with other children? At such young age, we can’t expect them to be able to explicitly say everything they want. One of the biggest mistakes we do with kids is to try and put everything in words, but it is just not like that.

SHM: My children are enrolled in Kide Science classes and it is incredibly fascinating to hear how they ask questions to each other: it seems as if they rehearse science processing skills in anything they do really! They also question why a phenomenon is as such; for example, why is water more transparent than white? Why do salt and sugar taste differently? These may seem simply questions for us, but they really help us make our children think critically just like scientists do!

Question 3: There has recently been growing interest into microschool models as an alternative to traditional schools. Microschools tend to show highly mobility, smaller class sizes and alternative learning methods, such as outdoor classes or personalized curricula. What do you think about the rise of this trend?

JV: This is an interesting concept. I never encountered the term “microschools”, probably because it is not something scientists in my area of expertise focus on. Although I am not too familiar with the concept itself, there are a few topics that have some parallelism with what I research. For example, the use of diverse learning environments is emphasised in both the microschool model and the Kide Science methodology, and it is highly recommended for a good learning experience. It’s extremely important that you have a visual representation of a particular scientific phenomenon you are studying. For example, if you are observing how water changes shape according to its temperature, place an ice cube in a room and see how it changes its state. If we combine experiments into everyday lives experience, the learning stick a lot more. More importantly, by creating a real-life experience, children understand that this doesn’t just happen in laboratories; it happens everywhere. This is in fact one of the biggest challenge in science education: science remains locked in laboratories and students don’t understand how that is applied on our daily lives. Another interesting parallelism is the idea of smaller group sizes. With a group of 7–8 children, it is a lot easier to create personalised help for the kids. This adjusting mechanism happens in inquiry-based learning as each student might be at a different stage of their learning process: some might be doing qualitative observations, others might be gathering quantitative data. Everyone is doing something different that helps them learn and think just like a scientist.

ZV: Do you think that such learning framework can expand the educational gap between those who can afford to pay for such services and those who can’t?

JV: There is a definitely a risk to it. In education, equality is the power word and you don’t want to widen those gaps even further especially in countries where we have strong private and strong public school systems side by side. It’s very important that we put children with different backgrounds in one place. We know from socio-cultural learning theories and from Vygotsky that children can help each other to enhance their learning experience. We should be paying particular attention when we create new educational systems. Schools must follow standard educational curricula that are created for very good reasons. It is very risky if private institutions started to drive their own agenda in contradiction to what is the general understanding of science, of how our world functions.

Question 4: Most public schools are adopting online learning tools to deliver educational content and Kide Science recently started experimenting with online classes too. What are your insights from this experience?

JV: The first online learning study I conducted happened in 2014. The model was as follows: children performed science experiments at home with their parents. They got instructions through video guidance and parents and children carried out the experiment together. From this research it was very evident that parents are able to help their children to do scientific activities at home. What was shown as a challenge in the research was creating parents’ interest. Parents might appreciate how much their children enjoy the experiments, but they might feel exhausted after a day of work and might not have the time to learn with their children. The developmental guidance from the research was to explore both the parents’ and the kids’ learning experience. At Kide Science we tried to include adult’s interest in our pedagogy through jokes that touch adult sense of humour or through stories that allow also parents to have an “Aha!” moment. We are doing initial analyses on our work so I can’t back up these findings with solid scientific insights just yet. To give you more background, in our analysis we are using something called engagement theory. To be able to support children in effective ways we have to consider three types of engagements: behavioural, cognitive and emotional. Behavioural engagement relates to what the children are doing. What body parts are they using? How do they interact with parents and teachers? The cognitive engagement has to do with their previous learning experiences; how are they connecting the dots? How do they apply previously gained knowledge? Finally, with the emotional engagement we try to understand what emotions we can awake in our children. Are they having fun? Are they excited? In distant learning settings, we have discovered that behavioural and cognitive engagement seem to be surprisingly effective. What we lack, though, is the emotional connection. When children and teachers are in the same room, we are in a play-world all together. When one child finds something exciting and shares their learning with others, they also get excited and everyone is suddenly very engaged. In distant learning, it’s a lot harder for children to interact with other children. This is why we need to make sure that the parent can create the emotional response that is fundamental to learning and that the kids would get in school. The parents should support the feeling of joy and excitement.

Key takeaways

1. Kide Science is a heavily-research backed business that finds its roots in young children’s science education and playful learning.
2. The play-based learning experience at Kide Science helps children look at the world from a scientist’s point of view through imagination, story-telling and role-playing.
3. Early research findings show that distant learning can be as effective as in-person learning on a behavioural and cognitive engagement level. However, connecting with children emotionally has been proven to more challenging.

Closing statement

We thank Sari and Jenni for taking the time to speak with us; if you want to read more about Kide Science, visit their website. Early Childhood is our 4th series of publications on Medium. While you’re here, why not have a look at our previous series on “Rethinking HE”?

1. Christopher Persson, Executive Chairman of The London Interdisciplinary School
2. Lucinda Crossley Meates, Head of Operations at Job Smart Edge at The University of Sydney Business School
3. Christian Rebernik, CEO and co-founder of Tomorrow’s Education
4. Akiba Covitz, President and CEO of Foundry College
5. Dana Stephenson, CEO of Riipen