Yumcha Studios launches free multilingual quiz for children
Yumcha Studios, Singapore-based edtech startup, has launched a free online quiz: ‘10 WAYS KIDS CAN FIGHT THE COVID-19 CORONAVIRUS!’ in partnership with ArcLab, a leading nano learning platform, and EduSpaze, Singapore’s first edtech accelerator.
The quiz uses characters from Yumcha Studios’ bilingual book-and-app series, Little Dim Sum Warriors. With contributions from teachers and educational organisations in different countries, the quiz is currently available in eight different languages, including Bengali, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), English, Indonesian, Korean, Malay, Spanish—and even Singlish! They are now making an open call for partners and translators to help translate the quiz into more languages to ensure more children have access to the quiz.
“The WHO declared a pandemic while we were in the middle of EduSpaze’s accelerator programme,” says Dr. Woo Yen Yen, CEO and co-founder of Yumcha Studios. “We were all feeling a little helpless, so we thought, let’s leverage edtech’s accessibility with what we do best at Yumcha Studios—make silly comics for learning—and help kids feel like there are some simple yet important actions that they too can take to flatten the curve.”
Using humour to promote learning
Humour is everywhere in the quiz—for instance, a question asking ‘when should one wear a mask’ has “so you can look like a ninja” as one of the options. Every screen features cartoons by veteran comic artist and Yumcha Studios’ co-founder, Colin Goh. “We really wanted to impress upon kids the importance of not just things like good hygiene practices and social distancing, but also values like rejecting bigotry,” says Goh, “and humour just makes things more engaging and memorable.”
To help kids who may be stuck at home, Yumcha Studios is also making all their Dim Sum Chums bilingual mobile apps completely FREE TO DOWNLOAD on iOS and Android devices worldwide during this period of time. The apps work in tandem with the Little Dim Sum Warriors series of bilingual storybooks and are aimed at building kids’ confidence in using English or Chinese as a second or foreign language expressively.
With each app, kids can:
● Listen to the stories performed in English and Mandarin;
● Record themselves and compare their performance with the default recording;
● Learn key words through pictures and translations;
● Practice what they’ve learned through fun interactive activities.
