Guadalajara, Jalisco. In the midst of the pandemic and despite the economic repercussions that the health crisis and confinement brought, the Jalisco startup specialized in robotics IBot4Fun won an international competition promoted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) to implement its educational model in Guatemala. .
“We went through all the stages of the competition, there were more than 450 companies invited in the first filter, we were among the eight finalists and, in the end, we were chosen as the company to develop the first alternative education pilot in Guatemala seeking to remedy the lag in the areas of reading comprehension and mathematics,” the founder and CEO of the technology company, Ana Habib, told El Economista.
The pilot project will be implemented in 300 Guatemalan students, 150 of them will receive the program and the remaining 150 will not, in order to compare the results.
“We are also training 28 teachers with our program so that they can replicate this project among their students,” Habib stressed.
The company that was born in 2018 as a business consultancy focused on innovation and technology issues for the mining and hydrocarbon industry, developed in 2019 a pilot program to promote STEM education in Latin America (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics for its acronym in English).
In 2020, in the midst of the global health crisis, IBot4Fun opened its first own school in the municipality of Zapopan, but due to confinement, it implemented summer courses for the entire country with online robotics classes.
With the economic reactivation and the face-to-face return in educational institutions, the startup plans, in the second half of this 2022, to launch the franchise on a national scale.
“Socially speaking, we are preparing them (students) for industry 4.0, which is not the future, it is present and there is already a lag… We are generating professionals who have to be in the labor market in five years,” commented Ana Habib.