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Looks like they made the classic Streisand effect mistake - attempts to clamp down on critical voices brought more attention to them. For a startup that ramped
by blueblisters 6y ago
Looks like they made the classic Streisand effect mistake - attempts to clamp down on critical voices brought more attention to them. For a startup that ramped up and exited so quickly, they don't seem particularly smart.
Notwithstanding the marketing, I don't think the product itself is egregious. Their primary sell is teaching logic ("coding") to kids through 1:1 tutoring sessions. Many Indian upper/middle class households already send their kids to in-person tutors at a very young age, and looks like Whitehat Jr found a niche that could cater to that market during the pandemic.
1:1 tutoring can be highly effective, creating a 2-sigma improvement in student performance (http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf). Of course, Whitehat Jr likely doesn't follow specific structured pedagogy to get this advantage, and maybe the target age group is too young to get any benefits.
- shmde 6y ago> Their primary sell is teaching logic. No their primary sell is to instruct things one by one by reading a literal script. They literally have a standardized script to read to the kids. Things like drag and drop icons and stuff on an already open source website code.org. They do not teach anything. They just tell the kid what to do and make them feel that its done by them. >1:1 tutoring can be highly effective, creating a 2 sigma improvement. Agreed, they do, but not when majority of teachers they recruit don't even need to know coding to teach coding. Some teachers are literally housewives trying to make an income during this pandemic teaching coding without knowing anything remotely related to computers. I don't think circumstances like these will create a 2-sigma improvements in students. ;)