To make learning more fun,a number of start-ups in the city are developing cartoons,online picture cards,videogames and toys. Some of these are already attracting investments and plan to enter the market by the end of this year. Entrepreneur C Yogeshs venture,My Toyworld,is being incubated at NID. But he has declared in his blog that his product is coming to your neighbourhood. His business model is largely based on collecting old toys,sanitising them,dismantling them and placing them for children to re-construct. Then there are plans of educational toys as tall as six feet,motion-controlled videogames and so on. We are preparing a guidebook as well, Yogesh said,adding that the viewpoints of parents,academicians,psychologists and teachers have been taken into consideration in the project. The firm plans to create franchises,with partner entities providing space and his firm filling it up. Another start-up is using syllabus-based videogames to supplement textbook learning. Abhishek Vaidyanathan,who founded Gamechanics,is currently developing a 3D game on the life of Mahatma Gandhi,which he said strictly adheres to the textbooks used in schools. Another game he is developing is a 2D game on planets,where a character flits from one planet to another guided by a narrative on the planets features. Meanwhile,Amit K Sahoo,founder of Sriyanika,has visited about 20 schools that middleclass children attend in Gujarat,Tamil Nadu and Orissa to screen educational films and cartoons as part of his post-launch research. These start-up firms are targeting a market that Yogesh describes is bigger than the population of the United States over 400 million Indian childrenand which grows by about 40 million each year.
