Overview
Background
We founded MindCraft Learning from the principle of “raising the field”. Our mission is to seek and develop opportunities to build the skills and knowledge of Africans and play our small part in the activation of the potential of the people of our land.
Our products include a subscription to curriculum-aligned e-learning material for school children, as well as custom design and development, and consulting on training design and delivery.
We also offer services to commercial learning and development.
History
Our founding members have a history in education, technology, and change management, professionally and personally.
Imke’s career has spanned a wide range of adult learning experiences ranging from ERP training design and delivery, through to elearning material development and publishing.
Adrian as a non-executive director has over twenty years in Information Technology. He has held strategic roles in business for many years, but his most recent experience is as the head of IT at a leading business school, where he is responsible not only for internal change, including establishing the L&D function but for driving the school’s digital product strategy.
Between us and the fun we have had schooling own children, we realized that karma has given us a strong signal and we were obliged to hear the call.
Our journey originated when we saw the need for alternatives to the traditional supplemental learning offered to kids struggling with their curricula. Once the company started forming, we started uncovering more and more gaps in the schooling system which were not being addressed, and more alarmingly severe problems with the new designs of digital material, being pushed through misaligned commercial objectives, which may well have adverse long-term effects on our children’s’ future potential. We quickly extended our purpose to attempt to compete with these offerings with our strong pedagogical and social principals and intend to make a small dent in the flaws.
We realized that although schooling was our formative purpose, there is also a long lead time before these kids start making an impact on our world.
Through our own professional experiences, we see the challenges being met by people entering the economy today. There are more and more matriculants or school-leavers who simply cannot make the adjustment to tertiary education or the world of work. Our backgrounds in adult learning and corporate technology positioned us well to support accelerated vocational development in business or the TVET space and we decided that while schools are our imperative, we can also help grow at ground zero.
Are we non-profit? Yes, we talk like an NGO, but a commercial business model seems to us to be the best way to allow us to deploy our skills to offer sustainable long-term value.
Come join us on your journey…
For Learning and Development in Business
We are a South African digital education organisation that values our customer relationships over everything else.
Our goal is to build a knowledge base with our customers that includes engaging training material built from small modules, helping you create a learning culture of just-in-time training. Our services are cost-effective, personalised, and professional. We are always available to listen and love to assist, even if you are not a customer.
We believe companies need training partners who have their best interests at heart.
Design Principles
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There is so much research data on learning theory that to the outsider it seems we still haven’t a clue. However, there are recurring themes that seem to transcend time and student age, and we believe technology can emphasise these.
No, we are not offering you the all-singing, all-dancing system, but as our suite evolves, there are things we hold close to our hearts:
Both adult and child learning theorists, from Malcolm Knowles to Lev Vygotsky, talk to socialisation and engagement as fundamental to learning success.
Fun: Having a reason to learn, and being engaged in the experience, are the Learning 101’s. And so many educators get this wrong.
If you have a child who plays computer games, take the time to ask them about a game and compare how much detail they have retained in comparison to the same amount of time spent stuck in a text-book. This principle applies to adults as much as children.
Collaboration: Humans are social by nature. Each of us has different strengths, which is why innovation in diverse teams is so powerful. The same can be said for learning… and where better an opportunity for diversity than the African continent?
Data: At face value, digital learning may not seem to be as engaging as a great action learning experience (for the extraverts at least) but technology offers us the opportunity to collect and analyse vast amounts of detail about the impact of learning on people, the quality of the material, and more broadly, the success of an intervention or project.
Practice what we Preach: Would you trust a business who bragged about education and did no development themselves? We are young and small, but we are young! Half our staff are interns who are developing our material under guidance. We hope to include more and more of these firecrackers in our permanent team as we grow and give them their own stake in the future of our business. Our culture is being developed by these youngsters.