Schools team up with startups and offer technological content – 09/12/2023 – Education

Schools are seeking support from technology companies to diversify curricular activities. In some, robotics classes take place with tools distributed by startups. In others, Google provides software and applications.

Colégio Ser, in Taboão da Serra, Greater São Paulo, is one of those participating in the Google Workspace for Education program, which grants the educational institution a set of products from the technology giant.

The initiative is available to schools that meet requirements stipulated by the company. The partnership began in 2017 through an intermediary startup and, since then, the school has rooms with Google computers for students from kindergarten to high school. With them, students access the internet and the company’s own tools, which is often recommended by teachers.

“In our meetings, teachers discuss how and when to use the available tools”, says João Vitor de Oliveira, educational technology supervisor at the school, which has 1,232 students.

According to him, teachers ask, for example, that students create educational websites with the content they learned. The tool used is Google Sites. There is also Matific, the company’s partner platform, which offers mathematical games — the Salesiano, Batista de Educação and Fundação Bradesco networks also use it.

These programs, according to the school, add an average of R$500 to each monthly fee, which varies from R$1,024 to R$1,714 depending on the grade.

20 kilometers away, at Colégio Oemar, in the Bosque da Saúde neighborhood, some of the 600 students go weekly to the robotics laboratory supported by Zoom Education for Life, an edtech on the market since 1996. Five years ago, the educational institution entered into a partnership with company and started receiving textbooks and Lego kits for robotics.

In space, students learn everything from doing simple math to programming a robot.

“We program the robot on the computer so it can carry out sustainable mining. When it doesn’t work, we go back to the system and change its steps”, says Duda Campos, 11, who was trying to take the invention to its final destination.

The sustainable mining she talks about is the objective of the activity. According to the school’s robotics teacher, Paulo Rodrigues, the exercises proposed by Zoom generally bring up problem situations. In this activity, the proposal was to program the robot to touch a sign referring to sustainable mining and not degrading mining, which was next to it.

“Each class has an activity. I evaluate the students through them. Our intention is for children to learn to work in groups and develop creativity and public speaking, as they need to present a solution”, says Rodrigues.

According to the school director, the Zoom material costs parents around R$350 per year, a similar amount to the mathematics textbook adopted by the school. In addition, the school needs to pay separately for monthly assistance offered by edtech to teachers. Tuition fees at the school range from R$1,290 to R$1,832.

According to Danilo Yoneshige, leader of the education committee at Abstartups (Brazilian Association of Startups) and former technology teacher at Colégio Dante Alighieri, in São Paulo, the main challenge for edtechs today is to generate value for schools without increasing monthly fees.

“In the case of robotics, the family would have to buy the material anyway, but, if we put additional content in the subject book, such as history, the family would not need to buy the history book. In other words, the challenge is not to generate new cost.”

According to Abstartups, Brazil had 556 edtechs in 2020. Last year, there were 813 — 22% were founded after 2020 and 36% offer services that directly impact students’ daily lives.