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This Edtech Startup Wants To Teach Kids How To Be Social Change Agents

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Picture: Fabiany Lima, co-founder & CEO of Timo Kids, pitching at the Parallel18 demo day in 2016.

Parents today have started to worry more and more about their children’s attachment to mobile devices. In fact, a recent report revealed that children today spend nearly 9 hours a day consuming media. Because of this, many parents have started to wonder what can be done to monitor the type of content their children are consuming, and what type of products could actually have a positive effect on children’s educational intake.

Timo Kids is one of these products. Timo Kids is a socio-educational technology startup which creates content with the goal of teaching children about different topics. They deploy their content in various media formats, and cover issues such as bullying, health, and sexual harassment. The Brazilian company is available in over 190 countries and has been translated to Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Italian. The team recently raised their seed round, and are in the process of expanding their product offerings around the world.I sat down with Fabiany Lima, cofounder and CEO of Timo Kids, to talk about her inspiration in starting this company. Her idea for Timo Kids stemmed from her experience with her twin daughters growing up in a modern world. Like most children today, they were spending an increasing amount of time on their mobile phones and the internet.

 

 “When I started to check the information that they were receiving and also how much time they were spending watching TV and on their Smartphones, I got very concerned. I also noticed that they were starting to ask a lot of questions that I found difficult to answer. There was also sometimes conflict in the way that I thought about a subject compared to their father. So I thought, if I am having this problem, a lot of parents must be having them too.”

Credit: Fabiany Lima
Lima with her two twin daughters, who were a major driver in creating Timo Kids.

She knew that to create a product that would reach children, she would have to meet them where they are. For that reason, she decided she wanted to develop a mobile app that was both engaging and entertaining, but that would have positive messaging and educational content on it.

 

She also recognized that it had to be a product that would prove to be useful for parents and educators so that they could utilize it to engage with the children in their lives. Soon after, she started to build a team to develop the Timo Kids app and hired illustrators to start creating some of the animations attached to the educational content.In this process, she explains some of the challenges in developing something targeted at engaging kids. For one, they realized that the way parents and schools disseminate information to kids is different. To address this, they decided that they needed to create different types of content for both audiences.“We decided to create different modules, that can be used either at home or at school. The app is targeted at parents– they can use it with their kids in a fun, playful way while prompting conversation about different topics. Teachers use the School module, so the content is more academic than on the app. For example, class activities and homework, so they can measure the learning acquisition.”

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