2. What was the vision behind Utorial? I want to make sharing knowledge and skills easier and bring it inline with technology. Text and video as learning tools are of course good, but you can’t challenge or discuss with a video or the written word… You can’t contextualize the information to your own specific scenario. And often, you might ‘learn’ but do you really understand? The site is now aimed at teaching and learning academic, business and lifestyle subjects - anything that people are willing to teach and learn… but the idea started when I was trying to learn one simple subject - to play guitar. In this age of long work hours (and recently for me: new born twins), I was struggling to find a Tutor who would fit in with my spare time. Plus it seemed archaic that I was confined to learning from people within a small geographical radius of where I live and work. I needed to learn at 6am or 10pm - and from the right kind of person I could engage with - and this was only achievable by opening up the pool of potential Tutors beyond my sphere and to everyone else around the world. With a bit of research, it was clear that for whatever reason no one else had spotted and solved this problem.

3. What were the biggest challenges you faced during Utorial's development? This is my first venture, so pretty much everything has been a challenge - albeit an exciting one. Putting the right team together was the hardest of them all though. Plus, the idea started out pretty simple but to deliver a proper solution, the design, UX and back end got way more complex than I expected. The site is looking incredible though and it’s robust, so I’m glad the extra time was spent.

4. What are the plans for your target market and other market as well? One of our biggest goals is to make knowledge shareable with the whole world - regardless of wealth, geography or upbringing. As a start, we’re talking to charities about enabling our community to choose where a % of our profits are sent. The charities are international so they’ll be helping people in developing countries (especially children and women) as well as people in their own country. If anyone reading this is part of a charity in this field, we’re keen to hear from you! Ongoing, I want to make it possible for those same undeserved people to receive access to Utorial so they can see, hear, engage and learn from people around the world - that’s a medium to long term goal. 5. What are your future ventures? It will be in renewable/ green/ conscious business. There are a lot of solutions being developed for private energy production - I’m keen to take a look at the other end of that system and develop an affordable, residential water-treatment system. By combining this with existing solar panels and wind turbines and thermal heating, we could be pretty self-sufficient (OK apart from the internet!).

6. Tell us about your journey as an entrepreneur. There really isn’t much to talk about yet - I’m new at this. I can say with confidence though that it’s the most exciting adventure I’ve been on - it’s been fantastic. 7. What are your views on the education market. Any suggestions or tips for EdTech entrepreneurs? It’s incredibly saturated, so any new ideas need to be game-changing. Also, even if you’re starting out with an MVP, I’d really recommend spending at least a little time/ money on design and UX - there’s a lot of sorry looking sites around.

On the other hand, children are always interested in playing videogames and its proven that they allot their complete skills and reflexes when it comes to gaming and in the process and end up spending hours on it. It's fun for them. So wouldn't it be great to blend games and maths together to teach and learn?

Enter Mangahigh, an online maths resource which uses fun games helping children learn without realising it. Designed and developed by Toby Rowland of Blue Duck Education, Mangahigh makes use of innovative and fun online Flash based web games and takes learning maths to the next level. Mangahigh has tons of fun activities like quizzes and games which can be taught to kids between the ages of 7 to 16, covering the full school curriculum.

Teachers can easily setup an account/free school and start creating classes, pick out a lesson and assign it to a class or a particular student. The challenge comes up on the students' to-do list and they can start playing. The account comes packed with student competition, data and analytics to track your students progress. All the student data is stored online and it makes grading and marking a piece of cake thus getting rid of the tiresome paperwork. Students can also compete within their class or other schools. Mangahigh even helps to identify students who are performing great and the ones that are struggling. According to research using Mangahigh helps students to achieve improved test scores up to 50% and also boosts their confidence and ability.

The games features rich graphics and sounds to keep children interested and enable them to grasp difficult concepts in an instant. Apart from games and quizzes Mangahigh also packs a lot of features like the Gradebook which allows teachers to see how all the students are doing across the curriculum topics in a jiffy and also a News feed which offers a feed on class performance to the teachers. Rest assured, with Mangahigh, instead of chasing students to learn maths, students will be chasing you eager to learn more maths. And yet again Mangahigh proves that learning can be a fun thing than a chore. What's more, Mangahigh's basic package is 100% free.

Check them out and learn some maths!

mangahigh.com