Peter Minne, the co-founder of Ghent-based software company Showpad, and his brother are trying to ease the administrative burden of (pre-school) teachers with Smart Symbols. They are now receiving an investment of 550,000 euros from Imec.iStart.
De Tijd newspaper reports: During free moments, young children in class are sometimes allowed to decide for themselves what to do. They then choose an activity on a cardboard pictogram board and stick their own symbol or name tag to it with Velcro. As these activities are usually linked to learning objectives, it is important that teachers can see at the end of the day what each pupil has done. ‘But observing and evaluating during lessons is often still done with pen and paper, which is not always convenient and often results in double work,’ says David Minne, who used to be active at Catholic Education Flanders. ‘Moreover, nursery teachers already have many administrative tasks in addition to their daily classroom work.’
Together with his brother Peter Minne he founded a learning platform for nursery and primary education in 2020. Smart Symbols replaces the cardboard board with a digital choice board that tracks which activities a child has chosen. Teachers can easily monitor those activities and also adjust pupils’ behaviour via a dashboard if necessary. In this way, signals of deviant behaviour would be identified more quickly, the Minne brothers believe.
More than 200 Flemish schools are already using the platform. Every day, more than 8,000 pre-schoolers would interact with Smart Symbols.
