Arludo is a socially responsible company with the mission of increasing interest in STEM topics and improving scientific thinking for students of all genders, ages, and socioeconomic levels, no matter how far they are from a major city.
What is Arludo
Governments are cutting education funding, student anxiety is increasing, and student performance in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) is at an all-time low. Add to this a shortage of skilled science teachers and it is easy to see that our education system is failing students. Recognizing that 94% of students own a smartphone and 45% of these can’t live without one, Arludo is using the resources that students are most drawn to – smartphones – in unique ways to become a leading innovative education company.
Arludo is developing a library of mobile applications that use the full range of smartphone sensors and cameras to create immersive social learning experiences in STEM. From single and multiplayer games, to group games that use augmented reality, to applications revolving around problem-based learning, each unique mobile application allows students to explore a singular topic. As these mobile applications require no teacher configuration and come with manuals and student worksheets that are tied to the curriculum, it substantially reduces teacher prep time, allowing them to spend more time with their students.
The mobile applications are designed to encourage students to work together, and as they interact, students collect scientific data that are displayed in real-time on a dashboard. Using these real-time data visualizations, teachers can easily lead class discussions about the topic being taught by working through the data students collected. Teachers thus quickly become science experts and students intuitively become data-literate scientists through meaningful social experiences.
Arludo’s Mission
Arludo’s mission is to increase interest in STEM topics and improve scientific thinking for students of all genders, ages, and socioeconomic levels, no matter how far they are from a major city. This mission feeds into our aspirations to see a culturally and ethnically diverse society become prepared for a technological future.
We feel that scientific thinking, data literacy, and social skills will help prepare students for a future in whatever profession they choose. Simultaneously, proficiency in these skills will also create a more harmonious population that can more critically make decisions together – an extremely important aspect as Australia becomes more diverse and undergoes a greater number of environmental and technological challenges.
Given that our students spend the majority of their formative years with teachers that care for them and guide them through their lives, we want our teachers to be able to spend more quality time with our children as caring nurturers that provide them with a variety of positive experiences. As a result, we will continue to create technologies that support our teachers in whatever they need to do.
Arludo’s Outreach
Arludo is a socially responsible company. Along with creating mobile applications for teachers to engage their students, we also run workshops for teachers and perform digital incursions into rural classrooms. We have run over 10 workshops and received anonymous feedback from 100 teachers. Of these, 96% felt Arludo tools were easy to use, 100% felt Arludo tools are useful in class, and 100% felt that Arludo tools improve student understanding.
In December 2017, we performed 15 class incursions with over 600 students. These digital incursions pair practicing scientists with Arludo products allowing even the most rural students in Australia to interact with and discuss science with real scientists. Some unsolicited emails from teachers include:
The boys thoroughly enjoyed your lesson and we had some interesting discussions around it the next day. Your lesson really highlighted how much boys love hands-on learning, problem-solving and collaboration.
I am a student teacher and I am using your ECOTAG app for an assignment. I really like it and I have mentioned it in my tutorial a few times, hoping to spread the word. Great job and good luck with the Apps.
Arludo’s Transparency
We cannot instill trust in our users if we don’t give them a reason to trust us. That’s why none of our games or apps require students to log in, and as a result, we couldn’t cannot collect any personal information.
What we do collect is anonymous player choices in the games, and we do so for two reasons. First, our games are designed as individual experiments and as students play, their choices and interactions are recorded and anonymously displayed in front of the class. This is to provide teachers with data to help them explain the topic students are learning about. The second reason we collect data is to understand which design aspects are not helping students so that we can redesign them.
These data will also provide anonymous research data for researchers from university institutions to better understand and explore learning theories in this rapidly evolving digital learning market. Because most learning data are owned by private companies and not shared with researchers, it means that the data cannot be used to improve education. We at Arludo feel this is a problem. This is why, as we grow, we are willing to share anonymous data with education researchers as long as they successfully apply for and receive Human Ethics approval from their institution.
We will never sell these anonymous data to any one, especially private companies.
We want to be fully transparent with our users, and as a result, if you ever have any question at all about anything we do, we’re happy to answer it.