Clarify the situation

How old are “kids” referring to?

What would be the goals of this product? Is it a new idea focusing on Acquisition and Activation of new users?

 

Identify the Customers

Products for kids are used by three types of people

Kids

Parents

Teachers

 

It’s a unique situation because although the main user is the child, the purchaser is the parents. So the Acquisition and Activation should be focused towards the parents while the engagement aspect should be focused towards the child.

 

Report the needs of the customers

I want to walk through the goals of each segment of the customers and then focus on one person

1. Goals of the kids is to be entertained

2. Goals of the Parents is to keep their kids entertained, educated while being safe and within the boundaries of what the parents are comfortable with.

3. Teachers would want any product to aid in the lesson

The customer and the customer goal I would want to focus on would be the teachers. I believe educational products are easily targetable as they are also bought in bulk and if standardized in a school, can touch many students.

 

Expanding on the needs of the teachers, I’ll scope the scenario down to hone in on the right segment.

 

I will focus on the homeroom teacher teaching a class at the age of 5-12, the elementary school years, mainly because this is where children learn the foundational skills including basic knowledge and insight which AI can emulate with low cost today.

 

A classroom has students following the curriculum at different speeds and different levels, and AI can be handy assisting the teacher to ensure that these students’ questions are answered, their confusions explained without taking away the time and resource from the rest of the students.

 

L: List the Solutions

The AI assistant per student can be assigned per student with a screen and an mic input with an earphone output. Baseline it should have these functionalities

1. Automatically take diction notes by the teacher

2. Have outlines of the notes that the student can trace later if they missed writing the notes down

3. Understand the words in the notes so that the student can select it to listen back on the explanation of it later

4. Keep track of all assignments and their due dates

5.  Notify the teacher if a student is having a hard time specifically

 

To go forward, we can expand the AI product to deal with students with cognitive limitations

Dyslexia

Dyscalculia

Executive Functioning

 

C: Cut through prioritization

	Setting up the school with the product	Automatically take diction and outlines the notes	Understand the words in the notes so the students can dive in depth	Add features to handle cognitive limitations
Value to the Students	H	H	H	M, High for some
Value to the business	H	L	H	M (?) barrier of entry, barrier of exit, covering a niche market
Cost to the students	L	L	H	L
Cost to the business	H	H	H	H (Additional clinically researched features)
Risk to the user	H: If the AI doesn’t make a big enough impact as they had hoped to	L	L	M
Risk to the business	L	H It would be a waste of money if the teachers turned it off thinking that it hindered a student’s learning capability	L	H

 

I believe item #2 and #3 go in hand while #1 is the key to a market acquisition. Therefore #2 and #3 should be used as a value prop to reach the goal of #1

 

E: Evaluate the tradeoffs

Portability vs Staying at home

Longevity vs Longer Engagement and flexibility

Manageability vs Security

Investment into the Education Sector vs Return (market is smaller)

 

S: Summarize the results

I would first ask for some clarity around the what the age group of users, “kids” is. Let’s assume that it’s children in the age range of 6 to 12.

I will also ask who they expect to be the user of the product. Is it the parents, kids, or the kids’ teachers & school staff? Let’s assume that they say we can make that decision.

I will ask if they expect the product to be hardware or software. Let’s assume for the sake of this interview that the interviewer lets me decide the form of the product.

Finally, I would ask if they want me to focus on a particular area such as health, education, safety, etc. If I am given the option to chose, I will choose education as I think that it can have a significantly positive impact on their lives. I would also look for a particular objective. In this case, the objective could be something such as improving their learning experience.

Now, when I think about the kids group, there are a few needs that come to mind:
– They like to play and have fun
– Their parents would like to know what they are doing in school
– Their parents would like to be closely monitoring their children’s social life in school (e.g. who they are friends with)
– They commute to school every day by parents or school bus service
– They sometimes fight with each other in school
– They do homework in school and at home
– Each kid prefers to learn at a their own speed
– Each kid has a unique set of interests and talents

There are a few AI based solutions that can potentially help kids in the education space. Here are a few ideas:
1. An AI based voice tool that asks a few brainteaser questions every day to measure the child’s level of development and shares the results back with the teacher and parents
2. An AI based tool that listens to conversations and uses voice data in class to determine how well each student is doing on a particular topic or class and reports data back to teachers and parents
3. An alarm that detects when two kids are having arguments and informs their teacher. This can help reduce fights among the students
4. An AI tool that measures the quality of homework that the children do each day and determine what improves their quality in terms of location, time of the day, surroundings, etc
5. A friend recommender that takes kids’ school performance, preferences and interests, personalities, voice data to develop an understanding of the child and make recommendations on friendships between kids to teachers and parents
6. AI tool that manages and advises on speed of learning of each topic to the parents and teachers

Now I would rank these ideas based on impact on the kid, impact on the parents, impact on the school, and cost of implementation

1. Idea 1 – low impact on the child might not enjoy the activity, high impact on parents and teachers as they are able to build a better understanding of the child’s abilities , medium cost of implementation
2. Idea 2 – Medium impact on kids as it doesn’t require them to do anything and can make them happier in the long run, high impact on parents and teachers, high cost of implementation as there might not be enough data from voice to determine how well a student is doing
3. Idea 3 – Medium impact on kids, medium. Given that teachers are usually present in class, this service’s additional value is small. Cost of implementation is low.
4. Idea 4 – High value to the kid as the tool helps them communicate their preferred learning environment, high value for parents and teachers since the service can help them with their objective – making children learn better. Cost of implementation is High. We need to find an interface to pass the information to the servers. This can be hard (e.g. A watch or phone can determine location, time spent, noise level, etc however, you would still need a tool that determines the quality of the homework done. It could be data entered by the teachers or integration with teachers’ scoring and kid performance tracking software / tools)
5. Idea 5 – Medium value to the kid, parent, and teacher as they all benefit from helping kids make friends that are better matches for them. Cost of implementation is medium
6. Idea 6 – High value to the kid, parent, and teacher as it helps kids go through a better learning experience, learn at their own speed, and focus on their areas of interests. Cost of implementation is medium

Based on the evaluation completed above, I suggest that we prioritize Idea 6 as it will also enable us to add additional features such as idea 4 to it over time.

Here is how the MVP will look like:
A cloud based service that takes kids voice data in class, speed of completing courses and exercises from sites such as Khan Academy and YouTube, and information provided by teachers (e.g. exam scores) and provides analysis and recommendations to the teachers and parents via a mobile or web interface. The information will help teachers and parents observe each kid’s velocity of progress (knowledge accumulated per unit of time) on various topics such as math and science and compare the numbers to other kids in the school.

The product can evolve over time to a more advanced tool that can also recommend next topics for the kids to learn based on their interests and talent.