Blog Articles

It’s not very frequent to see traditions and modern science being on the same side. So, we got very curious when we discovered that both science and traditional belief system may have a similar take on the genius potential of babies.

For example, the Indian tribe of America teach horse-riding to their two-year old babies. The legend of Abhimanyu in the great Indian epic of Mahabharat vividly narrates how he esoteric war skill in his mother’s womb. This is all tradition. Right?

Look at the education, last 130 years or so, we have seen Maria Montessori, Froebel of Kinder Garten, Steiner of Waldorf and John Piaget, all come up with popular theories and methods. While there are some interesting differences among them, they all agree that

1. All babies have immense potential
2. The earliest time to start with their education is right at birth or even earlier
   Then modern neuroscience that has the benefit of state-of-the-art scanners, the sensor technology and computing power to study the human brain, too agrees about the immense potential of the babies.

The experts at the Harvard Center for Developing Child suggest that constant “Serve and Return” or in other words, frequent interactive communications with infants significantly strengthen their neural connections and pave the way for a higher level of intelligence. Cognitive Scientist Laura Shultz from MIT narrates very eloquently in her 2015 TED Talk, how surprisingly logical babies can be.

Dana Suskind in her famous book, Thirty Million Words, demonstrates how the number words that we speak with babies in zero-to-three age can dramatically alter their capabilities.

So, after we learnt all this, the natural question was, if everything points towards a single direction,

why are we not able to turn all our children into geniuses?

And forget the genius potential, why majority of children do not pick up reading in the early primary school1?

And why don’t we start the education right after birth?

Won’t it be awesome for human society if all our children became geniuses?

The answer perhaps lies in economics. It’s not viable for institutions like play schools and nurseries to offer the right zero to three developmental education at an affordable cost. So, if you are a school that decides to offer, cutting edge, zero to three education, you will have to first offer lots of personal care because that’s what babies would require. Second, to be effective, you will have to offer personalized learning.

Both personal care and personalized learning in a nursery kind of set up would be expensive. How do you finance that?

So, the onus shifts to the parents and family. Even they find it difficult because

1. They lack the academic understanding of how to carry out these learning activities.
2. The effort required for a parent to research the methods and then arrange all the materials is simply daunting.
   And that’s why we can’t turn all our babies into geniuses. An opportunity lost!

So sometime back we decided to solve this problem and ended up building Bablr. A Learning System for Zero to Three Year olds that heavily leverages digital technology.

To create Bablr, we followed five steps:

1. Taking a lead from the neuroscience, we created a framework for efficient, power packed “Serve and Return” interactions that can help build the foundation for higher intelligence.
2. We then curated tested practices from methods like Montessori and other popular traditions. And organized them within the Serve and Return Framework to create what we call “The Genius Curriculum.”
3. Because serving everything from the Genius Curriculum to every baby won’t be meaningful, we designed software algorithm that personalizes the learning activities for each baby.
4. We then created effortless and cost-effective activity interfaces and materials that the parents can conveniently use with their babies. Here we leveraged the sweet spots identified by the latest research. For example, we generally think that screens may not be good for babies. Research offers a sweet spot here. Turns out, a show and tell with digital materials and human voice is highly effective with babies.
5. We packaged all this and made it accessible to all parents using internet and tablets. The objective was to democratize.

It is our belief that our design will make a difference at two levels

1. Because of the personalized nature, Bablr learning will result in better development of each baby and therefore higher motivation for everyone to use it.
2. Because it is easy to do, more and more parents will do it and be consistent with it. This consistency will again drive better results and therefore higher motivation.
   One baby at a time, we hope to build a revolution that will change the world.

To uncover the genius in every baby is our mission.