In an interview with TechGraph, Mridul Ranjan Sahu, Co-Founder of CuriousJr said, “In India, the coding and programming markets have always attracted the curiosity of professionals seeking a successful and competitive career path.”
Read the full interview:
Could you help give a sense of how far CuriousJr has come in its two years of existence? From when it began to where it is now?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: CuriousJr started in 2020 with the idea of enabling students without laptops to learn to code on their mobiles. The team is envisioning and innovating coding on small displays in order to enable students to study and code on mobile devices. Currently, the app has over one million downloads on the Play store.
We further aim to create the most trusted learning platform that offers technology-assisted, impact-based learning to 500 million kids across the globe by 2030.
What does CuriousJr look like these days?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: Students can learn multiple languages on mobile like Block coding, and JavaScript along with concepts of computer fundamentals. Very soon more languages like Python, HTML, and CSS will be launched.
We are in process of building a classwise practice-oriented curriculum so that quality education can reach the masses.
What is the state of online code learning platforms in the Indian market, especially for Gen Z?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: In India, the coding and programming markets have always attracted the curiosity of professionals seeking a successful and competitive career path. These benefits seem to have worked their way to children who have displayed a keen interest in learning to code. Coding has been shown to help children improve their cognitive, problem-solving, and soft skills, in addition to their curiosity.
Many national and international businesses have responded by introducing courses that teach children how to code and become technological inventors. Coding and programming, a fast-growing market within the Edtech space, has already gained traction among the GEN-Z.
How do you feel “CuriousJr” stands out from WhiteHarJr, edX, and others who are already in this space?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: CuriousJr is working to make coding education more accessible and affordable. We are focused on making coding accessible for everyone by innovating practice-led coding on mobile phones and making learning effective with vernacular content.
India has 88% of students out of 270 million who do not have access to laptops. To help everyone learn to code, we need to bring innovative solutions that are compatible with our system, hence CuriousJr solving for the masses to learn to code. Mobile brings in scalable solutions that have the capability to educate more than 100 million students at a time. CuriousJr’s goal is to bring 100 million K-12 students in the next 5 years onto the platform.
We have identified and devised a 3-step learning process in which students learn in bite-size content, code on the code arena, and publish their creations on the CuriousJr App Store. Also, students can follow the guided learning curriculum to learn more about coding in a structured way. Students do love the learning process and like to use apps and games with their peers.
How do you see technologies, namely AI, machine learning, and cloud, with regard to their relevance in online courses? What will the future look like?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: These disruptive technologies are the way ahead. It is very important to start incorporating these concepts into the curriculum according to their relevance, catering to different age groups. They have the potential to impact the growth of an individual, their future, as well as the economic growth of the nation. As common as it sounds, it is true that the future looks very bright.
What were the challenges while building CuriousJr finance during the pandemic?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: The team had to deal with COVID-19 and its impact on both mental and physical health as a result of the pandemic. Simultaneously, we had a vision of providing the best option for kids to learn to code while keeping accessibility and affordability in mind.
Despite how difficult the pandemic was, we were successful in our mission to develop a mobile-first platform that allows students to learn to code without the need for a laptop. We are really proud today, and we are aiming for the stars with our next goals and projects.
What has the response so far been to a code learning service on your platform?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: The response has been very overwhelming. We have a total of more than 7 lakh registered users on the CuriousJr app. We have more than 180K students learning to code on mobile devices each month. We look forward to taking it to 500K monthly students this year. Run Code is a metric we track which tells us the number of times a code has been run on CuriousJr. Students have run code more than 14 million times on CuriousJr and published more than 350K apps on the CuriousJr app store.
What is the roadmap for CuriousJr going forward?
Mridul Ranjan Sahu: We are exploring various other vernacular languages, such as Marathi, Telugu, Bengali, and Gujarati, and hopefully, in three to four months, we will be able to add them to the app. In the next five years, we aim to be a part of 100 million young coders and provide them with the finest learning experience ever.
