Making Learning a Fun, Engaging and Social Experience;TheDreamNotion Way

We all lead a stressful life and over a period of time our performance levels get affected. Bangalore based startup DreamNotion seeks to provide products that transform one’s everyday environment into a more prolific atmosphere providing psychological incentives to drive performances.Backed by extensive research in related domains, primarily gaming design, psychology and social media, the company endeavors to provide products and solutions that will alter the mundane milieu into a productive and creative setting with enhanced individual productivity.

DreamNotion was started by Karan Sachdev and Sandeep Kelvadi. They quit their high paying IT jobs to pursue their dreams.

The beginning

The idea of Dreamnotion was formed back in August 2010. The idea was to provide a solution that would aid in improving the engagement levels in schools and thereby positively impacting the quality of learning.

They were inspired by the love for games among people of all ages. This gave them the idea to come up with a product that drew inputs from the psychology behind goal oriented games and aided learning and development.

Choosing the name was through a systematic and evolutionary process. “We wrote down all the areas of interest which were common between us and then just played around with words till we got DreamNotion Innovations,” said Karan.

The Founders

Both Karan and Sandeep come from a computer science engineering background. They studied together at P.E.S.I.T, Bangalore.

Sandeep went on to complete his MS (Information Systems) from New Jersey Institution of Technology. Post that, he joined a promising healthcare startup that dealt with cognitive assessments. In his spare time he travels a lot and is a freelance photographer as well.

Karan joined a startup that provides virtualization technologies to Fortune 500 companies, right after graduating from P.E.S.I.T. He shares a love for travelling with Sandeep.

Xplore: The social learning platform

With Xplore, DreamNotion entered the education sector. It is a social learning platform and plans to make learning a fun, engaging and social experience.XPlore provides a network to promote learning activities and facilitates delivery of content and measures the progress made. XPlore puts the focus on the students and treats them as unique individuals rather than mere numbers in a report. It acts as a bridge between the teacher and the student and provides students with the necessary motivation required to take part in and finish a project/assignment/homework given to them. “With XPlore one can motivate and reward different types of students in different ways. So every student has his/her own path to success,” said Karan.

DreamNotion used standard Web technologies like Javascript, AJAX, HTML5 and Ruby on Rails to develop XPlore as they are widely popular technologies and have great support.

Other offerings

DreamNotion’s main aim is to help schools understand technology better, simplify it and help them adopt it. There are plenty of learning tools available today; a lot of them free, that schools can use to improve their learning environment. “DreamNotion provides technology consulting to help schools choose the right tool, conduct workshops and training,” informed Karan.“Using our experience in building XPlore, we will help businesses integrate gamification concepts into their websites and products. Individuals or companies looking to take advantage of social media can look to us for helping them set up a social media presence and integrating their website and apps with social media networks,” he added.

Early Challenges

“Lack of resources forced us to think of different approaches to solving problems. Splitting roles and responsibilities helped us tackle issues better,” said Karan.

Time management and multitasking were some of the other challenges the duo faced initially. “Lack of prior experience in different areas resulted in us spending many hours reading and researching on topics like education, pedagogy, psychology, game design and business related issues,” added Karan.

Views on EduStars

Speaking about the EduStars campaign, Karan said, “Edustars is a great platform for early stage education startups as it helps in connecting startups to VCs and industry experts. It also serves as a platform for entrepreneurs like us to share our experiences and learn from each other and gives us exposure to early stage startups which helps us gain traction.”

DreamNotion moving forward

The belief that DreamNotion can solve some of the problems that the educational system in India is facing, through their innovative products, keeps the duo motivated.

Five years from now the education sector will see more participation from the private sector, bringing in different and newer approaches to learning. Technology will also play a key role. Dreamnotion plans to diversify its offerings within the education sector from the current K-12 focus to include higher education, vocational training and sports academies.“Learning opportunities at every corner, meeting new and interesting people and the creative freedom in solving challenges that come your way,” answered Karan, when asked about what they enjoy about being entrepreneurs.

YourStory.in believes that startups like DreamNotion can bring real change to the educational setup in India. We will be keenly following their progress.

Watch out this space for more updates about DreamNotion.

To learn more about DreamNotion, visit http://www.dreamnotion.com/

If you are an education startup that is looking for access to mentors and visibility, then please apply for the EduStars Program.