Erase All Kittens (E.A.K.), an online gaming platform for kids, especially girls, has recently raised $1 million in a seed funding round led by Twinkl Educational Publishing.
The round saw participation from first investor Christian Reyntjens of the A Black Square family office and angel investors, including one of the founders of Shazam, a platform to discover songs, lyrics, and artists from across the world.
Erase All Kittens provides kids aged 8-14 with knowledge of both computational thinking and professional coding languages, to prepare them for 21st-century degrees and careers. With a huge focus on creativity, the platform aims to bridge the gap between learning the concepts of coding and being able to apply practical knowledge.
According to E.A.K., coding education tools for children have been largely built by men and so naturally appeal more to boys. With most teaching repetitive coding, in a very rigid, instructional way, the company says that it tends to appeal more to boys than girls. Realizing this, E.A.K. came up with a game, after R&D of two years, designed to teach kids and girls as young as eight skills such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript through highly gamified, story-driven gameplay. The company claims that 55% of its players are girls, and 95% want to learn more about coding after playing its game. E.A.K. is currently being used in over 3,000 schools, mostly in the UK and US.
Speaking about the platform, Dee Saigal, Co-founder, CEO, and Chief Scribbler, Erase All Kitten, said, as reported by TechCrunch,
“We’re designing a coding game that girls genuinely love – one that places a huge emphasis on creativity. Girls can see instant results as they code, there are different ways to progress through the game, and learning is seamlessly blended with storytelling...Whilst researching our target audience, we found that one of the biggest obstacles for girls still begins with gender stereotypes from an early age. By the time girls reach school, this snowballs into a lack of confidence in STEM skills and lower expectations from teachers, which in turn can lead to lower performance — a gap that only widens as girls get older.”
While the existing EAK game (which teaches HTML skills and how to create URLs) is free, the company says that its new game will teach HTML, CSS, and JavaScript skills and it will be a paid one, further boosting its product’s business model. According to the report, the new game will be sold to schools and parents, globally. E.A.K. will also be carrying out a one-for-one scheme, where for every school account purchased, one will be donated to underserved schools via partnerships with tech companies, educational organizations, and NGOs.
On funding, Jonathan Seaton, Co-founder, and CEO at Twinkl and Director of TwinklHive said,
“We’re really excited to partner with Erase All Kittens, as a digital company Twinkl recognizes the importance of preparing children to succeed in the digital age and we believe through this partnership we can really make a difference. The team is particularly excited about helping further Erase All Kitten’s mission to empower girls and give them the same opportunities to learn to code and build their own digital creations. Ensuring that all children have equal access to opportunities to learn is at the heart of Twinkl’s vision and a key motivation in the development of this partnership for both organizations.”
E.A.K. is teaching children to code in a totally new way. With Mario-style gameplay, interactive dialogue, quirky characters, and kitten gifs, the platform makes learning the coding language fun for complete beginners and kids aged 8+. Instead of just learning computational thinking, it allows children to learn to code by building and fixing real levels as they play online. As the game progresses, it enables them to learn how to use their new skills to build their own simple creations on the web. Children can play the game and learn on their own or alongside their parents and teachers.
