He Wants to Build a Children's App That Solves the Education Problems Schools Can't | 100 People With Ideas

But it isn't that easy.

When Huang Zijian looks back on his childhood, he remembers never getting to spend time on what interested him, and then drifting into a college major he disliked. It is the same regret most adults carry, with one difference: Huang Zijian feels it more fiercely. He is certain he hates this kind of education, "pragmatic, and with no respect for the individual."

Huang Zijian is not an education theorist. He knows the internet far better than he knows education. He helped found Tudou, where he was chief product manager, then went to Tencent as director of strategy. He is now the CEO of an internet startup.

But Huang Zijian believes he has views on education. He keeps returning to the "childhood revolution" of 19th-century Europe and America: to turn "adult-centered" education into "child-centered" education, a set of unusual schools appeared, and most of them urged going out into nature to "learn in smarter ways."

What counts as a smarter way has been argued over ever since, but the champions of the childhood revolution were sure of one thing: it was not the existing school system. Huang Zijian stands with them most of the time. These are the questions that make him curious: How do you stop the pleasure of learning from draining away? How can a young learner take more initiative in the face of a teacher's authority?

But when Huang Zijian, carrying a bit of "curiosity" and a bit of "mission," got ready to do something about it, he gave up on nature and picked the internet. Two years ago he co-founded a company called Moqi Technology and built three children's apps — Chinese Character Kingdom, English Kingdom and Math Kingdom — released one after another starting in early 2014.

Eight million children under the age of five use these three apps. They study math, English and Chinese characters, and they also draw, make short films with animated props and voice recordings, and write letters to cartoon characters to practice expression and communication. On top of that, they connect on the platform with children in other parts of the country and see each other's ideas and work.

"The education questions schools can't answer, mobile apps maybe can" — that is how Huang Zijian sees it.

None of this is easy, and it may have carried compromise from the very start.

First he has to convince parents. Parents usually hold enormous power over whether their children touch electronic devices, and they worry constantly that a child will sink into them — afraid the screen will hurt their eyes and, at the same time, blunt their interest in the real world.

Open almost any parent thread about children's apps on Zhihu or Douban and you will find that most parents are wary of them.

Zhihu user Li Na wrote: "Personally I think being able to sit down and really read matters even more in this era, for children and for us alike. I have always felt that reading internalizes something in a person, makes them calmer. I never want to depend on some app on an iPad to teach my child anything."

And these children's education apps do look a good deal like mobile games: an imagined park, with Mina and Mia as the leads, taking users through one level of the park after another, finishing one stage of the journey after another. Besides the levels there are original picture books to read, drawing, short-film making and letter writing. The two original cartoon characters, Mia and Mina, turn up in those places too, keeping the children company while they learn.

The point is to use stories and cartoon characters to keep children coming back for years. You don't need formal user interviews or research to see that.

But that game-like air deepens what parents fear, and that is exactly the problem in front of people like Huang Zijian — getting parents and children to treat the iPad as a tool for learning rather than a toy. Huang Zijian says that in the Tudou years the question was bandwidth; today the equivalent of that "bandwidth problem" is cost and perception.

Even so, this children's education startup does satisfy much of what parents want.

As their names say, each app carries one specific learning "task" — Chinese characters, English, math — tasks that carry the shadow of school, the core subjects schools push hardest.

From the beginning the team thought about how to turn the curriculum into a game and how to make the material talk back to a child. In other words, the courses had to meet standards and also strike a child, fast, as fun and easy to use. Huang Zijian says that was not the purpose of launching the apps. But he admits that releasing apps under specific school subjects makes them easier to get downloaded.

To a large extent, getting a child to learn English, math and Chinese characters is why users download these apps. The team also built learning reports for parents to consult. Beyond that, they don't plan to put parents' demands first. Some narrow-minded parents, for instance, think learning English means preparing for the TOEFL, and that is a flat contradiction. Sometimes "the habits of the adult world attach themselves to it uninvited."

Ten years before Moqi Technology and these children's apps, Huang Zijian already knew his co-founder Qiao Liang. Back then the two took part in a nonprofit children's library project in Shanghai. After that, Huang Zijian says, his "hatred" was stirred up.

Qiao Liang holds more systematic views on education. She has a doctorate in child studies, and others in her family have worked in education research — her maternal grandfather, for one, was a student of the educator Tao Xingzhi.

On that project Huang Zijian saw, for the first time, several hundred picture books from around the world, among them Ophelia's Shadow Theatre. He remembers it hit him hard. In elementary school he had once been told to leave the choir because he couldn't keep the rhythm; in these books, children were urged to pick up instruments and bang and clatter away on their own, learning music the way you play a game.

That is when Huang Zijian began studying educational thought. Now he can reel it all off. He gives special weight to a system from the middle and later 20th century called Reggio Emilia, which absorbed the ideas of the child psychologists Vygotsky and Piaget and holds that children have 100 languages — words, movement, images, drawing, building and construction, music, and more. Children can know, think and express on their own, and they can also discover, imagine and invent.

Children should not live surrounded by adults, Reggio holds; teachers should step in less, and learning should happen through interaction.

But between late 2015 and early 2016, with version 3.0 of the product about to ship, the team split over a question: can child users really create content at the same time as they take it in? Some on the team believed it, some doubted it.

That split would decide whether the product moved toward the traditional receive-it model of learning or toward a community model in which creating is learning. In the end they chose the second.

They built features to make it work, so a child could copy and learn from other children's drawings on the platform. Every drawing keeps a record of its strokes. Watching the moving trace of a good drawing, a child who cannot draw can pick up the technique. Copying is how they get better. So in the 3.3 update of Chinese Character Kingdom the team introduced a new drawing file format to support the feature.

From the launch in early 2014 through August 2016, the three children's apps took in more than 14 million drawings and short films that users made with the tools built into the products.

Users have their own kingdom ID in the "My Kingdom" section. The drawings and videos they make can be shared out on the platform.

When a child in a remote inland region opens the app, beyond meeting Mina and Mia (the cartoon characters) and learning to read characters, do sums and recognize letters, they can also reach children in developed regions, see each other's work and learn from one another. Huang Zijian thinks that is an epoch-making thing.

To be fair, Moqi was not the first company to try this; the ones before it just could not keep going.

In early 2015 Xu Yifei, founder of the children's education team Zebra Knight, published an article called "Why Is Making Children's Products So 'Hard'?" in which he cited figures from Engineer Dad, a platform for sharing children's apps.

Over the previous three to four years, the number of children's product teams counted by Engineer Dad had peaked at close to 200, but by 2015 only 30 to 50 were still active. Xu Yifei said this field, so appealing on the surface, is brutal in practice.

Some countries pay for apps more readily. The Swedish children's app developer Toca Boca began shipping apps in 2011, every one of them paid. By May 2014 the company's more than 20 apps had reached 65 million downloads, all of them paid.

In China, where people pay less readily, development teams die easily.

As an internet product, Huang Zijian believes, one that forms a community also stands a better chance of surviving.

Investors, too, would rather put money into a social product; they believe such products hold users more tightly and grow faster.

Huang Zijian of course hopes new features can solve this. As CEO, he has no choice but to be anxious about user growth.

"You have to see the shape of this market clearly. And whether your own product has caught the match between product and market — product-market fit. If you've caught it, you won't be so anxious."

Unlike his dissatisfaction with the current education system, on this Huang Zijian is less sure. He says it is like a seafarer setting out to find a new continent: before departure, how does he win the crown's backing? Neither you nor he knows whether it will work, whether that new continent is really there.

The first angel money came from Wang Wei, the original founder of Tudou. There was no product yet at the time, but after talking the idea through with Wang Wei, he invested. The Series A came from a US-dollar fund, which held fairly long-term expectations for the product.

The child-centered philosophy, the founders' backgrounds, and the fact that mobile products can take input through voice, touch and camera at extremely low cost and effort — on that basis, investors backed them out of belief.

Raising money after that was not so easy. Through the process, plenty of people did not believe in a children's app like this.

Some told Huang Zijian that with a founding background like his, it was a waste not to go build a big social product. Their view was that early childhood education is too narrow a market, too small. And the users are too young to handle any system, which makes the product hard to build. Others simply took what he was doing for a game and figured it would not live long.

Huang Zijian does not accept these views. He is confident about solving the problem of making learning fun for children. But he also thinks the product model meant to bring a revolution to education has not taken shape yet, and has not produced much of an effect. So Moqi Technology has not spent heavily on promoting any of the three apps.

According to App Annie, setting aside a few chart surges that followed Apple's recommendations, the three Moqi Technology apps rank like this: Chinese Character Kingdom sits at No. 22 among all children's app downloads in China, the highest of the three.

Math Kingdom ranks 146th among children's app downloads in China. English Kingdom does worst of all; its best showing ever was No. 49.

For mobile apps to solve the problem Huang Zijian raised at the start — that will not be easy.

Images from app screenshots and Pinterest