We came up with the idea when we studied art at Utrecht School of the Arts in the Master of Arts program. We were involved in a project that explored the potential use of technology in a kindergarten setting. The purpose of the project was to see if technology could help with interactive language education, where traditionally the teacher would have to work with various materials to stimulate interaction from the children.  The game was especially focused on children with Dutch as a second language. Via this project we created a first prototype of the game which subsequently got tested at various participating schools.  The schools were enthusiastic.  The concept worked, but teachers wanted more content and material so that they could continue using it throughout the year.  Also, they wanted to be able to use the tool with a broader mix of children—older, younger, faster, slower kids.  That was in 2007, and it was the first time that the idea of founding a company to expand the material and further develop the technology came up.  

 

At present we are at the stage where we have an intelligent tutoring system that can adapt to the child’s needs.  It provides statistics for the teachers so that they can assess children’s progress at an individual and at a group level. Also, you can adapt the content so that Haas can work with specific educational themes, for example, the weather and the seasons.  

 

The technology itself isn’t that complicated.  The front end is Adobe Flash and the game engine combines a number of different existing engines.  The main challenge is the link with education and the tutoring system.  That’s why it is so important that we partner with educational experts and that we test the tool in school settings.  For example, one of our key partners in the development of the game is the Expertise Centre for Dutch Language Education Nederlands.  They’re working with us for the language learning objectives and they’re doing an effects study too to see if the tool really works.  

This may come as a surprise to some, but the main barrier to adoption that we have encountered is not the government or the schools.  On the contrary, the government supported us financially thereby recognizing the product and its sustainable business model, individual teachers and schools both express their enthusiasm regularly. The main obstacle today is the fact that the established educational publishers are unwilling to experiment with this type of technology for this type of target audience.  We suspect that they’re struggling to deal with these concepts in their business model.  Their whole model is based on mostly ‘offline’ physical products connected to a didactical method that get updated periodically.  It would take up to five years to integrate Haas in their methods but you can’t work with technology in that way. It’s a different cycle; a different world in fact, and they don’t have the in-house expertise to deal with that.

 

As a result, our main distribution partner is not an educational publisher but will be an ICT supplier to schools. Otherwise the products would possibly have been released when already outdated; thereby taking away a great opportunity for teachers to benefit from IT tools like Mijn naam is Haas in the classroom.  

We think that there is huge potential for these types of educational technologies.  A key challenge is that we’re still in the starting blocks of really integrating IT in education.  Sure, governments across Europe are supporting specific IT initiatives in education but we still lack an integrated vision on how education will change as a result of technology.  

 

Technology will change the role of teachers and will disrupt many of the classic methods and models, much of which is ‘fixed’ in regulation.  Change will be difficult.  

But in our experience, government certainly has been supportive.  It is thanks to the support of the government—via subsidies and partnering educational agencies—that we’ve made it this far.  We’re now at the point where we have a product that is ready to scale up to international market and to diversificate the product range even further.  But the fact remains that our target market—children aged from 3 to 7 in the Netherlands—is reasonably small.  We can’t expect to recoup our development costs in that market; we have to rely on government support for the initial realisation. With more opportunities abroad we feel that we can keep expanding the universe of Haas. 

We realize that we’ve probably chosen a difficult route by targeting schools, but it is a matter of principle for us.  We also are developing a distribution channel for the home market but our priority is to get this into schools, and to show that it works.  We want to work with teachers in schools to explore the opportunities in these types of technologies; we want to bring that innovation into the schools.  Also in terms of funding, by relying on subsidies instead of private investors, we have retained our autonomy and are able to commit to our work in schools. Private investors would probably have demanded more rapid commercialization in the home market.  But we’re on the right route, and the IPON Award was a huge recognition for us; it shows that the educational sector values our work; and we embrace that responsibility.