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PlanetSpark, an E-learning company, has over 2,000 tutors and 22,000 children trained so far on its platform. Students coached by the startup have gone on to become Youtubers, podcasters and published authors across 13 countries including the US, Middle East, Europe and India.
This humble venture started in 2016 by XLRI graduates and hostel wingmates, Kunal Malik and Maneesh Dhooper, to disrupt the unorganised private tuition sector in India. PlanetSpark sought to transform traditional KG to Class 8 tuitions by combining physical teaching with mobile technology.
It had a slow start but witnessed dramatic rise in demand for edtech with pandemic wreaking havoc across the globe. The platform pivoted completely to online classes in October 2019 adapting to the current times.
With over 2,000 tutors and 22,000 students trained so far on its platform, the Gurugram-based startup aims to make children between ages of 4 and 16 years confident communicators.
PlanetSpark’s initial focus was on English and Math but eventually decided to completely focus on communication skills based on its consumer insights.
Co founder Maneesh in an interview said“Earlier we used to call it English and Math. About 80 percent of our classes used to be English and some of the teachers used to take up Math. Later on, we changed the offering and made it more diverse. We initially came up with this insight that English is a very strong need and English programme had different components like grammar, reading, writing, and communication skills.”
He further added “Then we started observing that consumers are opting for a small segment, rather than opting for the entire offering. And when we looked at the data the overwhelming majority wanted one segment which was communications skills, and which is what drove us to this. Communication is a much larger market and hence we started focusing on it.”
Today PlanetSparks offers live 1:1 classes in public speaking and creative writing for children aged 4-16 years.
“Our approach towards children’s communication skills development goes beyond the theoretical framework. We spent 3 years to design a curriculum that could make ‘public speaking’ and ‘writing’ interesting and application-based for K-12 kids,” continued Maneesh.
PlanetSpark claims that its curriculum is broken down into 4 segments: Fundamentals such as articulation and body language skills, Practical applications including 11 different types of speeches, 7 different types of debates, the art of storytelling, Mindset development to help children with logical reasoning and creative thinking so that they can craft an argument better and build a positive attitude to become generally confident in life and Personality development through training on skills like negotiation, influencing, and social skills that add to their overall personality.