LIX teaches STEAM to elementary students through robotics and project-based learning. A 2015 documentary about three girls winning a Google robotics competition sparked demand from parents and teachers. The startup now offers an online community with courses and activities for $30 yearly, and plans to expand into Mexican schools with physical toolkits and teacher training.
Chapters
Hi, we are Lix. I want you to remember when you were in elementary school with this face, saying, "Am I going to use the things that I'm learning?" Now let's imagine the next educational spaces where kids can learn with hands-on activities, where kids can enjoy learning, and where kids can be little scientists or little engineers. That's what we are doing at LIX. We are using robotics, programming, design thinking, and making activities to teach in a related way the curriculum in private and public schools. We are doing this through an online community to teach STEAM and to foster the innovation and creativity in the kids. We are doing this through an educational technique that is called STEAM, that has the objective to teach in a related way science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics through a project-based learning, with the objective to develop in their kids the skill set of this century known as 4Cs: collaboration, critical thinking, communication and creativity, with the objective to find the element of the kids. As Sir Ken Robinson says, the element is a meeting point between natural aptitude and personal passion. So we started LIGS, that means builders in the Mayan culture, 3 years ago in 2014 as a traditional robotics and programming club 4Kids, where we prepare kids to participate in international robotics competitions, where we also develop summer camps, workshops, and different courses at summer camps in Silicon Valley, tinkering and maker camps in Mexico. In 2015, one of our teams of 3 girls of 8, 9, and 10 years old participated in an international robotics competition of Google, it got it to one of the most important robotics competitions in the world, and they won, being the first time that a Latin American team won this competition. After this, Google and J.J. Abrams produced a documentary called Moonshot, where they talk about the history of one of our students, talking about the importance of our methodology. This documentary was directed by Orlando Bonencelos one of the Oscars winners in this year. And because of that, we started to receive a lot of traction with parents and teachers asking us how they can introduce their kids in this kind of projects. So here is when we started to analyze different alternatives to teach online to different kids. So we started to develop different courses with our kids but we found out that the kids weren't enjoying this kind of activities. So we started to analyze different possibilities and we start to develop different webinars talking about the things that we were doing at LIX, about the robotics competition, about our courses, and about different projects that we were developing. We have in just 5 webinars, 200 people. And we found out that these people that were attending our webinars, they wanted to start their own robotics club. So we started our online course to teach these people how to start their own robotics club. Here is a graphic of the last 3 months. We have sold to 13 people $500 in sales without any investment in marketing. So we have been continuing doing our webinars because it has, it has been working as a great channel for us. And in the last 3 months, here is our graphic of which people have been attending our webinars. We have, have 700 teachers, 250 entrepreneurs, and 500 parents. All of them are educators of kids in elementary school. There are 30 million elementary school students just in Mexico, where there are 800,000 elementary students as high-end, or 4,000 schools. What we found with our webinars and what we found with this customer discovery is that these people, they don't have time to develop activities and they are looking for activities to teach robotics programming and maker activities and they want activities to teach the subjects of CEP's curriculum. They don't want anymore after-school programs. They want to introduce this to their curriculum. Our focus right now is to develop our online community to teach STEAM, where people can find courses, activities, curriculums, and projects that can help them to teach STEAM. This will be as a yearly subscription of $30. Next year, in 2018, we will implement our methodology in the private and public schools where kids can have access to our online platform, a workbook, and a toolkit that will help them to develop these kind of projects. We will also develop an on-site professional development, and this will be a yearly subscription for the kids that the parents will pay. Our marketing channels that are helping us to today are Facebook groups, schools, webinars, documentaries, social networks, ambassadors, bloggers, and press. This is Lixteam, that is formed with Ángel Carrillo, that is helping us to scale our project, Evelyn Lozano, that is developing the Steam content, Luis Emilio Cordero, that is helping us marketing, and our staff that has helping us with our on-site courses. We have also these mentors: Verónica Tena, that is helping us in the business model; Dr. Gabriel Pliego, that is helping us in the methodology; Gustavo Vigueras, that is helping us in the business part; and Luis Vargas, that is helping us in the edtech innovation. And here are our partners: that have been helping us to achieve our dream since our beginning. Our dream is to have an impact in 1 million Latin kids. Now I want you to imagine more kids like them achieving their dreams. Imagine more kids that we can empower and that we can inspire them for the future. For sure, They are going to change the world with their passions. Thank you very much.
