Superman.
Macbeth.
Conformity.
Christian Theology.
The Great Plague of London.
These are just a few of the topics covered by Brillder—an online educational platform based in the U.K. designed to rewire edtech through gamification. With 15,000 users and partners that include the New York Institute of Technology, Brillder is poised for success.
“Essentially, Brillder is a publisher,” said Founder and CEO Joe Francis. “And we want to bring the values of academic publishing and educational product publishing to education technology.”
Joe has found edtech to be lacking.
“Edtech has lacked the values of the publishing industry,” he said. “So we’re trying to produce really highly-engaging, highly-intellectual and stimulating content for teenagers. But we’re trying to meet them on their own terrain—touchscreens and their phones and that sort of thing.”
Brillder offers educational assignments in a gaming format that teachers can set for students, and students can engage themselves. The target audience for this singular style of learning is students ages 16-18 and the entire process revolves around “bricks.”
Bricks are Brillder’s gamified learning units.
“Wherever you study—in the U.K., the U.S.A. or anywhere else—the content in bricks will be relevant,” reads Brillder.com. “Shakespeare, differential equations, phylogeny, glaciation—these are universal subjects which transcend any particular exam board or national curriculum.”
Key to the Brillder process are brills, the rewards used to incentivize players to play and learn. As a subscriber, you can redeem brills for cash.
Whenever a brick is played, a minimum score of 50% is converted into brills. A perfect score brings with it a substantial bonus, depending on the length and difficulty of the brick.
Competitions feature prize pots of a few hundred brills, with even a few players. With hundreds of players competing, the number of brills up for grabs is in the thousands.
“We want to create brillionaires,” reads Brillder.com.
- 3,000 brills enables players to gift a subscription to someone else, or to upgrade from a basic subscription to a premium subscription.
- 5,000 brills enables you to either to purchase a subscription or to cash in £25 (or exchange rate equivalent in another currency). You can also renew a basic subscription for 5,000 brills.
- 10,000 brills enables you to cash in £75.
- 20,000 brills enables you to cash in £200.
“If you think of the great publishing houses in education, paper publishers, yes, they have digital versions of their texts, but they’re not interactive in the way that we are,” Joe said. “What edtech as a sector lacks is a really high quality product. And that’s what we’re trying to be. We’re trying to be the high status, high quality product in education technology. That’s our mission.”
Joe has a prestigious background in education, having been the Head of English for about 20 years at the famous Eton College in the U.K. He has also served as headmaster at two private schools. And he served as editor of an education magazine called The English Review.
“I basically have had this kind of slightly dual career between writing and academic publishing, and being a school leader,” Joe said. “And Brillder brings those two things together a bit.”
Asked why he is the entrepreneur to make an endeavor like Brillder successful, Joe said, “I’m a bit of a maverick.”
He continued, “I think that education is obsessed with facts rather than thinking. And I think that I’m the person to do it because I have this curious background in academic and educational publishing, and in teaching.
“It seems obvious that touchscreen teens need really high quality educational products to engage them and you know, unfortunately, leisure and pleasure and social media dominate most lives in terms of the way teens interact with phones. If we can create something which actually rewards and stimulates people in a good way, then we’re turning the demons of technology towards, hopefully, the virtues of good education.”
And why is the timing right for Brillder?
“I’m a great believer in humanities subjects,” Joe said. “Edtech is totally dominated by science, math, physics, that sort of stuff. In fact, you can produce really good content about history, politics, literature, history of art, this sort of stuff. We are the only kind of platform which is really producing content related to humanities subjects. It’s a huge hole that has to be filled and this is the moment to do it.”
Visit brillder.com to learn more.
