Regina Kgatle, founder of Educade Photo: provided by Regina Kgatle
All too aware that video and games have a bad rap in some quarters, young entrepreneur Regina Kgatle started Educade to change some of those perceptions. In this new venture, she is converting arcade games into learning games, hoping to both make money and start a movement.
Regina Kgatle didn’t have to look far for business inspiration.
Her parents owned and ran an entertainment centre in a township in Hammanskraal, Gauteng, attracting kids from all around the community. They also rented out the machines for school and other events in the area.
By all measures it was a successful business. Except perhaps one. Hardly a day would go by, Kgatle recalls, when there wasn’t an irate parent at the centre complaining about the amount of time their children were spending there playing games rather than doing their schoolwork.
That memory nagged away at Kgatle. In time, however, it turned into a business idea: why not retool arcade games with educational content that, yes, appealed to kids, but also kept their parents happy?
By 2012, aged just 20 and having just started her studies in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Cape Town (UCT), she had coded her first game, aimed at primary school learners and comprising short lessons with multiple choice questions. The content wasn’t just a thumbsuck. Kgatle had sat down with teachers and had developed the game with both the national school curriculum and private school curricula in mind, including the highly rated Singapore-Cambridge GCE Advanced Level examinations.
“One of the things I was trying to do was try to make up for the gap in the quality of education that many children in our country are getting,” says Kgatle, 24. “I also wanted to introduce those children from state schools to material in the private school curriculum.”
That first game soon became a formal business, which she named Educade, a portmanteau of ‘education’ and ‘arcade’. She added a green innovation, manufacturing her arcade machines from e-waste.
Acclaim followed soon after Kgatle kicked off her venture. In 2013 she made the Mail & Guardian 200 Young South Africans, a list of young South Africans shaping the country’s future. That same year she and some 200 other youth leaders were invited to Kuala Lumpur under the umbrella of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit, where they discussed the use of innovation and social entrepreneurship to address pressing issues. In 2014, Facebook flew her to the US where she received an award recognising young students changing lives through technology.
Kgatle has since developed two more games, also aimed at primary school. King Luki – borrowing from her traditional name, Luki – is about the adventures of a young black girl facing familiar South African creatures (like lions and crocodiles) that she must defeat by answering maths questions; and Memory Racer, a racing game that tests memory skills. She pilots the games by taking them to schools, tweaking them according to kids’ responses.
For now, Educade has a couple of income streams. There are the arcade machines themselves, which can be placed at entertainment centres, shopping malls and shops. They can also be rented for parties and events. And – with corporates in mind – the machines can be branded with logos and the like.
Educade has also spawned a not-for-profit initiative known as #67games. For this, Kgatle has challenged amateur and professional game developers in the country and beyond to donate 67 open-source educational games, aimed at primary school children, that will be distributed to 67 under-resourced schools on Mandela Day 2016. In addition, she hopes to launch a series of long-form game jams where game developers can share their experiences and encourage STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics) literacies. “We argue that all of these muscles are flexed during the game-making process, and that games can aid in demystifying technical systems,” reads the #67games mission statement.
In the meantime Kgatle is exploring just how far Educade can go. In 2015 won a place on InnoTech, a bespoke programme that aims to take black-owned start-ups from concept to market. The programme is run on behalf of Telkom FutureMakers by the Bandwidth Barn in Woodstock, which forms part of the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi). Through InnoTech, successful start-ups are provided with R20 000 in angel funding, office space, internet and telephone access, and business training.
With this support Kgatle is looking to develop games for other platforms. She’s eyeing the lucrative mobile games market, valued at US$ 25 billion in 2015, almost seven times bigger than the console market. There’s a niche waiting to be tapped into, she believes. “Gamers of all ages are hungry for South African content, and we can create great opportunities for South Africa’s game developers.”
That’s a vision even parents can’t find fault with.
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