Member Article

How an edtech app took off during Covid

Mental UP, the award-winning brain game application for children between 4 and 13 years (school years reception to year 8) with 5.5 million users worldwide has seen a huge uptake in use since Covid-19 forced school closures and turned a whole host of parents into home schoolers. Since mid March Mental UP has gained half a million new users, 40 million games have been played on its platform and its US web site traffic has increased by 500%.

With an average review score of 4.8 in the Google Play Store and App Stores, Mental UP was developed by game designers and academics incorporating innovative teaching methods to offer dozens of mind games with suitable difficulty levels to improve cognitive skills in a game format to engage children. In addition to the half a million new end users, Mental UP has gained an additional 300,000 users from targeting schools, educational establishments and groups with agreements in countries such as Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Brazil and has been featured by Apple.

Founders Resit Dogan and Emre Özgündüz met in their first year of study at the Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, where they both went on to take their Masters in Computer Engineering, continuing as academicians working on AI and machine learning. Six years ago they founded Mental UP and their global ambitions began in earnest two years ago when Mental UP was accepted into EDUCATE, the leading research accelerator programme in the UK for education technology run by the University College London Institute of Education. In December 2018 Mental UP secured its pre series A investment from Turk Telekom, IDA Capital (impact VC), and Capria VC (US based impact VC). This was followed, last year, with Mental UP joining the Department for International Trade’s Global Entrepreneur programme.

Lockdown presented an opportunity for us to engage with a much bigger audience on a global scale as the whole world suddenly faced common problems and challenges one of which was educating and entertaining our children during school closures, explains Dogan. In terms of the future, we have set ourselves some ambitious targets, we plan to reach twenty million active learners and a one hundred million dollar valuation in the next three years. We have much, much more that we think we can achieve with Mental UP and with ed tech, Dogan continues.
  Mental UP believes the ability to solve problems and think in new creative ways is as important as literacy and numeracy skills and they have devised a series of brain games that expose learners to new types of problems and the different ways of thinking required to solve them.  The app addresses five key skills: Attention, Memory, Problem Solving (Logic), Visual and Verbal and includes sub-skills such as counting skills, and geometry.  Importantly it provides a safe space for children as it does not include any adverts, harmful content or in-application purchases.   The premium version of the application provides access to over one hundred games (compared to twenty on the free version) and includes reporting to  help parents monitor progress, provide skills analysis and highlight strengths and weaknesses so that they (and teachers when they return to school) can easily track a child’s cognitive development and compare with same age groups.  

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mike Smith .