In the vast majority of families, homework, and particularly revision, is a source of tension. This was the case for Pierre-Alexis Voisin and his partner Antoine Pointillart, as well as for their relatives and friends, when they began to ask them about the topic.
So, they came up with the idea to create Baobab, to allow children to revise in a fun, motivating, and effective way through an app, while ensuring that parents can stay informed without having to monitor the revisions like police officers.
“ The tone we wanted to give to Baobab is one of alleviating guilt. We are all parents, we all go through the same thing, we are all in the same boat, so we are certainly not here to judge ,” emphasizes Pierre-Alexis Voisin.
Specifically, the app starts with the child's lesson, which they will photograph, even if it consists of handwritten notes that are hard to read. This lesson is then analyzed by the app, which extracts the key elements to remember and creates a personalized, fun, and motivating learning path. This path begins with small revision cards, allowing learning in small chunks rather than facing the entire lesson at once.
The child then moves on to a kind of warm-up to grasp the content, in the form of multiple-choice questions and simple exercises, such as fill-in-the-blank texts or, for foreign languages, pairs of words to match in both languages.
Finally, there are open-ended questions that require a bit of writing, closer to what the teacher will ask on exam day.
The child can do all of this independently. “ The motivation comes from the gamification we have integrated into the app ,” explains Pierre-Alexis Voisin. “ A child who works earns small coins that can be exchanged for collectible cards and avatars .”
“ But there is also this motivation that comes from the child having learned well, being able to do it alone, and feeling proud of themselves. And that creates motivation for the next revision .”
Baobab has also partnered with the Content Square Foundation to offer additional support for children with dyslexia and other dys disorders, providing reading assistance features, such as spacing out characters and lines, highlighting syllables, and offering a choice of suitable fonts.
This assistance ultimately proves useful for all children. “ We have children who sometimes, when they are tired, activate the reading assistance mode and then turn it off when they feel a bit better, a bit fresher. So it goes much further than just for dys children. It actually addresses everyone ,” concludes Pierre-Alexis Voisin.
