Introduction

Pixframe Studios, which leverages AI to help children develop cognitive skills, has received Bridge Funding to increase usability and scalability.

Pixframe Studios is a startup that believes that education is one of the main pillars to develop in human beings, especially at early ages. We are a team formed by specialists in education, design and engineering, coming from different countries, backgrounds, genders and ages, with a common purpose: to develop engaging learning tools that make the most of technology to help users reach their highest potential.

Pixframe’s main product is Towi, a platform based in neuroscience that helps children develop their most important skills for learning through video games. Thanks to the support of the UNICEF Venture Fund, we were able to use Artificial Intelligence to customize training paths more accurately for each child and we are starting to better identify the possibility of a learning problem in children, just from the way they play!

According to UNESCO, 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. This fact could threaten progress towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda. One of the top 3 causes of this problem is the low quality of education being delivered in the classroom. Neuroscience has proven that developing attention, memory and executive functions are a key for learning, reason and solving problems, but schools frequently do not have the necessary resources, specialization and time to assess and develop those skills

About Towi

Towi offers fun activities to evaluate and train fundamental abilities such as attention, memory, planning, mental speed, perception and inhibition. Towi can be used without specialized supervision, can be accessed from almost any computer, tablet or smartphone, tracks detailed progress of each child, and delivers instant reports for parents, teachers and education specialists to help identify the possibility of a learning problem. Our tools have been validated by researchers in different countries and used by more than 200,000 children.

During the first round of investment from the UNICEF Innovation Fund, researchers from different universities in Mexico studied the impact that Towi had on children. Researchers concluded that, after 20 play sessions, significant advancements in the development of skills were identified, even with a minimum frequency and duration of play (once a week for 20 minutes). In addition, our cognitive assessment tool demonstrated a high potential for neuropsychological screening, as it tests skills in a practical functional context with immediate results that are easy to interpret. Learn more about our research projects here.

Collaboration with UNICEF Mexico

Since 2020, we have had the opportunity to work with UNICEF Mexico to design, build and launch MatematIA, a platform that helps adolescents evaluate and develop their math skills, through a gamified experience, customized by Artificial Intelligence. After very positive results with the first 50,000 users in this project, we want to develop a new set of Towi’s activities to also help children under 12 to achieve a high proficiency level in mathematics, using the same model we used in our previous projects, and applying all we have learnt to build one of the most engaging and effective learning experiences for developing math skills.