The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk (Part 5)

SM: For your first product, what was your target segment?

NE: It was middle school. We went after the pre-algebra and algebra crowd. We went after math because we knew that math and science would be critical problems for the country. Additionally, it is very easy to measure if you get an answer right or wrong in math. We also noted that everyone else was focused on the early childhood years and early childhood literacy. Algebra is not done well in middle school and early high school.

SM: Your assumption was that to succeed in the game, kids would have to know enough about pre-algebra and algebra, right?

NE: Correct. You get into a philosophical debate about how to create these types of games. You can have anything from education in the playfield, which is where the subject is tightly integrated with the game experience. You will also have disassociated games, which is what we are doing now. This is where you will move through an environment and see a math problem.

What we started out creating, and what received tremendous critical acclaim, was education in the playfield. Imagine you are moving your character around a 3D world where you might see a grid on the ground that has numbers on it. On the top left you will see a x,y,z coordinate system that has an arrow which represents where you are. When you go to (20,20) on the (x,y) coordinate system you move to (20,20) in the world. That gives the student a visceral understanding and a clear idea of how the grid system they see in the book translates to the real world.

There were a couple of problems with that. First, it was expensive. You can’t re-use that environment for multiple concepts. The second problem was that it actually played as a video game. People who played it loved it, but it played like a video game for 40 hours. In schools you have 45 to 50 minutes in a class. The third problem was that teachers were not ready to accept it. They did not understand how students were absorbing the math content or where the video game ended and their responsibilities began.

Teachers had to be able to see something they identified as math often enough that it was not just a game. That is why we started going to multiple choice questions and actually showing the equations. In addition, we realized that we could not teach a teacher how to play a video game. We had to give them reports, so we built a web-based portal which provides proficiency reports.

SM: Are the games themselves online?

NE: They are downloadable games that play in multiplayer mode. A classroom of students can split into teams, or you can play classroom versus classroom, school versus school. That gives us a social aspect, which is huge for the kids.

SM: You came to the marketplace in spring of 2007. What kind of traction have you had since?

NE: It has been great. We had cash flow break even last year. We had the single player game done in the fall of 2006, and the multiplayer suite was done in the spring of 2007. The multiplayer product has been successful in the school market and the consumer market.

SM: Can you describe the adoption cycle?

NE: In the fall of 2006 we had beta versions of our multiplayer games. We decided to build an advocacy group. We targeted 13 districts to become partners in the refining process. Educators listen to other educators, so we chose 13 districts that were known to be on top of the trends and that also sent staff to speak at a lot of conferences.

New York City put our games into two classrooms, and they found that 50% of the kids in the classes achieved their achievement by an entire level. They found that result to be remarkable and put the games into 30 schools the following year. At the end of the year we held a tournament and brought 30 kids in, one student from each school, and put the games up on a screen. The Department of Education brought in 600 students who had played the games, and the competition sounded like a football stadium. New York City saw that, thought it was remarkable, and decided to move us into 160 schools representing 50% of their middle schools.

This segment is part 5 in the series : The Long Road to Edutainment: Tabula Digita CEO Ntiedo Etuk
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