EduTech

MashiQ aims to augment learning in a playful way

Published

2 years ago

October 30, 2022

MashiQ aims to augment learning in a playful way

Everyone fears exams as they are stressful. The rat race for qualifying competitive exams has forced today’s youth to prioritise rote learning as a way to achieve academic success. To ease the process of acquiring knowledge, 35-year-old Rouf Bashir from Anantnag has created a mobile application. MashiQ is a reward-based gaming app to make learning stress free and fun.

Rouf Bashir

An MBA graduate from University of Mumbai, Rouf says his interest in technology since his college days made him look for tech-based solutions to the problem students face in competitive exams. And the result was MashiQ.

Mashiq is basically the traditional wooden blackboard, a little bigger than the size of the slate, which was used with earthen ink to practice writing and other lessons by students in Kashmir schools half a century ago. Basically, a Persian word, Mashiq means practice and is considered symbolic to education in Kashmir.

“During initial times, the schools preferred MashiQ- a wooden slate where students were given daily tasks to complete, similarly in our app we have daily tasks for our users which they have to complete,” says Rouf.

For now, the MashiQ app is specified for the English language. There are multiple sections in the app where you can leverage your knowledge to earn real money.

Guess the word

Daily MashiQ

Exam

Battle Room – Tournament

v/s Opponent

A user can compete with others in a daily tournament and earn money by being on the winners’ list. A user can challenge other players globally & also create their own group of friends to compete. The level-based earning helps the user to make more money as they proceed to the next level.

A tournament is held daily where simple English questions are asked in the reward for a cash prize directly sent to the wallet. A user can redeem money by transferring it to their account.

In the Guess the word section, a user has to guess a word in the fastest time available to be among the winners. Redeemable coins will be directly added to the wallet if a user is among the winners.

In a Battle room, a user can create their own room with a group of friends or players across the globe and challenge them for a number of coins set by a user as the winning amount.

A student may take the tests for which they are preparing, such as the CAT, NEET, JEE, JKPSC, etc., in the exam section.

Why MashiQ?

To reduce the burden associated with education and assist kids in finding their own funding for their studies. A lot of students who want to support their education can easily take a few tests, and if they succeed, they can get prizes from the competition, which has a starting price of Rs 2000. In the app one coin is equivalent to Rs 1.

“We will create levels 1-10 in MashiQ, soon, where on the basis of level rewards will be given,” says Rouf.

“Live tournaments will be held among 1- 1000 rank,” he adds.

MashiQ concept was first conceptualized in 2014, but it was not implemented then. Rouf began working on it in July 2021, and recently, the mobile application was released. The main focus of MashiQ is to be less time-consuming and more productive.

“MashiQ is all about destressing exams by engaging more students and by making tests rewarding,” says Rouf.

“Students have a lot of fear regarding exams, and we want to make a step towards that,” he adds.

Aspirants who are preparing for exams such as 11th and 12th, NEET/ JEE can use their English vocabulary to redeem their knowledge in the app. Mock tests will be soon held on Sundays for the preparatory students.

Anyone interested in playing this game can participate in the app since there is currently no specific target audience and no age restriction. The student population alone may be one of the target audiences for the application in the future.

“We have users in MashiQ, who are 50-60 in age, they let us know through the emails that they love to be a part of this productive game,” says Rouf.

Although the application is currently free, users will eventually be charged. In the coming days, MashiQ will be able to get sponsors, and hence users will be charged some required amount.

Only 1/6th of the team’s revenue will be distributed to students as MashiQ develops for the benefit of the community.
Only 20% will be kept for managing apps, and the remaining 80% money will be paid back to the students.

“Though scholarships are available for students, the app provides the easiest way to avail the earned money without any hectic process,” says Rouf.

With time MashiQ will be a full- fledge educational app, and will introduce many top tutors to give their mock test series, as part of it. Where the tutor will charge not more than Rs 50 for it.

“The vision is to empower the students and self-finance them, where a student usually pays in thousands for mock tests here it will be for just Rs 50,” says Rouf.

The model will be such that a tutor will be given 40%, the rest 40% to the students and the remaining 20% will be a platform fee.

“The main motive is to create an easy environment around exams, and give back to the community,” says Rouf.

Being a digital platform, fraud is the fear, but MashiQ has a team to work for that and the phishing activity is tracked through a tracker. Withdrawals of payments are made using UPI IDs.

The least redeemable money is Rs 200.

“Hackers are present everywhere, however, if we focus on scams, we won’t be able to take anything,” says Rouf.

The MashiQ team consists of eight people, Adil and Huzaib, two co-founders, content writers, tech members and a digital marketer.

Everyone should engage in online learning, according to Rouf.
“One should embrace a comprehensive hybrid approach of online learning and earn,” says Rouf.

“Schools should adapt to an online hybrid model to be able to compete with other learning models used across the globe,” he concludes.

MashiQ has got some good reviews from users. One user writes, “Love the app for being so effective and addictive as well.”

Another user calls it the “Greatest application for learning and earning.” Other praises the developers’ “Great effort.”
“The finest way to get money while you’re idle! just put some thought into it to earn some money,” another user claims.

Up Next

Classrooms brim with learning anew

Click to comment

Education

Classrooms brim with learning anew

Published

1 year ago

May 27, 2023

BK Editor

CRY-RILM project unites kids with books

BK News

Inayat Parvaiz was a decent student in school, till the pandemic struck. His father, the only earning member in the five-member family, lost his job and was struggling to make ends meet. The young boy was forced to join his brother at a sand digging/extraction site near his village, Baniyaree Sharkie, in the Bandipora district of Jammu and Kashmir.

Inayat is among the millions of children across the country going through a huge learning lag, all because of the prolonged closure of schools during the pandemic. CRY and Rotary India Literacy Mission (RILM) carried out a study based on responses of 4000 children, in the age group of 7-14, from 4 states in the country – Jharkhand, West Bengal, Manipur and Jammu & Kashmir – to assess the quantum of loss, and also started a slew of remedial centres to assist the children make up for the lag. There are 39 such centres across the four states.

The CRY-RILM-Jammu Kashmir Association of Social Workers (JKASW) team identified Inayat as “out of school” and visited his father. They realized that the boy was willing to pursue his studies but could not do so, because of compulsions in his family. Although reluctant at first, his parents decided to let him attend the local Asha Kiran Centre in a flexible manner. He started attending classes and also started participating in various other activities. After his initial assessment, he was enrolled in Level 2 at the Asha Kiran Centre. But regular attendance and diligent efforts meant that the boy made an appreciable improvement. After his final assessment, he was mainstreamed into Class 6 at Govt. Middle school, Gund Prang. He attends school regularly and makes it a point to attend remedial classes at the Asha Kiran Centre to compensate for his deficiencies.

Classrooms brim with learning anew, the CRY-RILM project unites kids with books!

There are nine Asha Kiran Centres in three panchayat blocks of Bandipora district. Of the 565 children who joined these centres, around 16.81 per cent had dropped out of school because of the pandemic and related reasons and 64.8 per cent were found to be officially enrolled in school, but without age-appropriate learning levels. Around 44.1 per cent of the kids were found to be “poor” (learning levels at least two years behind their age-appropriate class) in basic reading skills and 45.1 per cent in basic calculations.

The stark ground reality in J&K mirrors the findings across the three other states in the country. Around 3.9 per cent of the 4000 children had been found to have dropped out because of the pandemic-induced school closure and more than 75 per cent of the children were found to be “poor” in basic reading skills and calculations.

CRY (North) Regional Director Soha Moitra is hopeful that change will happen, step by step. “The learning loss has been unparalleled, the exact ramifications of which will take longer to fathom and make up. In this post-COVID world, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to addressing the educational needs of children from underserved communities. Every community, every child and every context is unique. It is important to adopt and embrace contextually relevant and inclusive approaches that take into consideration the diverse needs and aspirations of children,” Moitra said.

Over the past eight months, the teachers at the Asha Kiran Centres in J&K have managed to bring back the children into some sort of a study environment, with regular classes, innovative Teaching-Learning Methods, extra-curricular activities and more. Students like Inayat, Tawfeeq Ahmed and several others have benefitted enormously from these classes and are showing appreciable improvement in the periodical assessments.

“The post-COVID learning assessment of 4,000 children across 4 states in the country, by CRY and Rotary India Literacy Mission, presents evidence on the severity of the learning losses incurred during school closures, and also charts out a path of recovery, phase by phase. It’s a journey full of lessons and experiences and a sustained campaign that has impacted not only the kids, but also the teachers, volunteers, parents and extended community. Kudos to the ‘change-makers’ who are making it happen,” said Kamal Sanghvi, Chairman, Rotary India Literacy Mission.

Apart from the classes, the project team has held community meetings with teachers of local schools, local panchayat members and parents, all to create a comfortable space that will help the children overcome their learning gaps and get back into mainstream education.

Tawfeeq’s father Javed Ahmed was initially reluctant to send his son to the Asha Kiran Centre. But he is happy that he had finally paid heed to the advice of the project team members who had visited him. A few months on, the proud father says: “Asha Kiran Centre me mera beta bahot kuch sikh raha hai. Use yahan aana achha lagta hai (My son is learning a lot at the Asha Kiran Centre. He loves to come here).”