Alquimétricos LAB — Grant Report #1 (+launch!!)

Project Update

Alquimétricos was founded in 2015 as an open-source initiative to bring STEAM educational resources to low-income communities, especially in Latin America. Over the years, the project has gained scale, prizes, and followers, becoming an international community of educators, designers, makers, communicators, and visual artists.

Thanks to the GFTW initiative, we now have the Alquimétricos LAB digital platform (https://lab.alquimetricos.cc/), which offers content such as videos, PDFs, and handouts, with instructions and tutorials to be applied in the classroom, in various pedagogical projects, or at home.

Our aim is to build a case study on Web Monetization of the platform through Coil, contributing to the sustainability of the project and benefiting a Brazilian ecosystem of public schools and social institutions.

Progress on objectives

The general objectives of the project refer to:

• The creation and launch of the virtual educational platform, with free and paid content.
• The Social Call is intended for the public without the possibility of purchasing the premium version, which will be able to apply for a no-cost-full-access subscription. In addition to the implementation of WM as part of the sustainability of Alquimétricos, along with the integration of other products and services.
• Research on Brazilian WM market potential especially focusing on purpose-driven cluster whose end-user will not necessarily be the paying customer.

A prototype version of our platform with free content was created and pre-launched in September 2021. In addition, we carried out visits to schools and workshops with teachers from the public education system in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in partnership with the 6th CRE - Municipal Education Department of Rio de Janeiro. The response to these actions was very positive and we are very confident that we are on the right path! We are also establishing an ecosystem of territorial, virtual and institutional partnerships, such as the Brazilian Creative Learning Network (RBAC), the International FabLabs Network and movements focused on the OER (Open Educational Resources).

On 10th March 2022, we launched the Alquimetrics LAB platform in its planned full version and the Social Call for Training in STEAM Education for teachers working in vulnerable communities. This Call will select 50 educators belonging to schools and other educational institutions to have free access to the platform via Coil with all the features and content that WM subscribers have. We also created more content focusing on the premium users, for monetization through subscriptions. We are analyzing alternative subscription and monetization methods to offer to Brazilian

Registration is open from March 10th to March 31st and the teacher training program will take place from April 25th to July 25th, 2022.

In addition to the official launch of our platform, we also participated in OEWeek 2022 - Open Education Global, on March 11, 2022

Regarding the sustainability of Alquimétricos, our team is constantly looking for new opportunities and funding sources. One of them is the partnership with the Municipal Secretary of Education of Rio de Janeiro, with the possibility of implementing the Alquimétricos LAB methodology in more public schools. We are also awaiting the results of other public tenders. If you think you can help with this, we’d be pleased to listen to your suggestions! fernando@alquimetricos.cc

Key activities

The main activity developed was certainly to consolidate the work team with which we managed to put our virtual platform on the air. In addition, of course, to all the activities that this implies, such as: wokflow design, research, web development and WM integration, elaboration of pedagogical content, and filming of videos and tutorials for the platform. Other activities carried out: preparation of the Call for the Selection of Professors and deployment of the platform's legal architecture (such as terms of use with legal monitoring, code of conduct, privacy policy), marketing and communication actions, development of partnerships, network management social, administrative and financial management of the project.

Communications and marketing

Our team consists mainly of professionals in education, design, web development, management, communication, and marketing. This last area is responsible for creating the entire project's dissemination strategy, management, and promotion of social networks, through the segmentation of paid traffic and evaluation of metrics, as well as campaigns that also include email marketing and the production and publication of content on the different media channels. The links to the platform and social networks are:

• Alquimétricos LAB
• Instagram
• Facebook
• Youtube channel
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Landmarks

• On August 12, 2021, we held a workshop at Fab16, the largest digital fabrication virtual event to date.
• On September 10, 2021, we held the launch webinar for the alpha version of the platform.
• On October 22th, 2021, we got to know that the Ministery of Culturre in Argentina would grant us funds to translate the platform to Spanish and expand the field work.
• On the 3rd, 10th and 17th of November 2021, we carried out a training of Alquimétricos LAB for public schools, from the 6th CRE - Municipal Secretary of Education of Rio de Janeiro.
• On March 10, 2022, we held the webinar to launch the official version of the platform.
• On March 11, 2022, we participated in the Open Education Global OEWeek with the talk “Open STEAM Resources: Beyond Ebooks and Academia. The Alquimetrics case”.

What's next?

The next steps are to fine-tune the free vs monetized web experience/Coil, to select the candidates registered in our Social Call, and to carry out the training for selected teachers. Throughout this process, we will carry out tests with the users selected by the Selection Call to measure the opportunities that WM has in the Brazilian educational market with a social focus.

In addition, we will send Alquimétricos physical kits to some influencer teachers, so that they can rapidly showcase the building experience in the classroom and go beyond the limits of the virtual, as well as sharing their videos and pics on the platform as well as the social media.

What community support would benefit your project?.

We would like to expand the partnership with other community participants to strengthen the joint development of solutions, mainly focused on Web Monetization and the discovery of new interest groups and paying audiences for our project. Platforms like Cinnamon, Kult and Write.as have many resources that can be integrated into our platform and represent a great opportunity to migrate from mainstream services like Youtube or Facebook to native initiatives of the WM ecosystem.

We’d love to reach the Latin audience of WM. All Hispanic and Lusophone projects are welcome to participate and propose joint activities. Other WMzed social projects who happen to have an indirect user-vs-customer funding flow like ours are also people who we really want to talk to. =D

We also need referrals from experts in WM integration for the new version of the platform. If interested, get in touch with us!

Regrets

None, actually, but the path to success is never smooth.
We failed frequently and diversely. The team members and roles suffered not a few changes and the personal vs collective vs institutional synchrony and synergy are Nirvana states difficult to acquire. More than once we needed to stop everything we were doing and rethink how we’d actually solve some challenges we didn’t count on. Pandemic is still there creating a lot of chaos and pain, so it’s always important to be patient and accept that the human factor and human nature will always be there before us.
Because of administrative issues, we lost our shot to achieve a proper project launch in 2021, so we needed to make it after the holidays in March when the Brazilian back to school takes place. New launch times demanded new work cycles and to make personal and collective plans to fit again.
Overall, we achieved a satisfactory product, which will have plenty of time to show us tons of improvement opportunities and how many details we missed.

Additional comments

We launched an Argentine public notice and now everything that happens in Brazil will also be translated into Spanish and replicated in different parts of Latin America and Spain, tripling the global volume of public reached by the project.

We want your feedback! What do you think of our project? In your opinion, is our value proposition clear?

Finally, we thank you for this opportunity, as we are learning a lot from all the experience and exchange! The contribution received was also fundamental for the realization of Alquimétricos LAB and we are very happy with it!

Want to be part of the movement? we certainly do!

Bonus track

We share with you one of the new contents of our platform, the construction of the Geodesic Dome! Feel free to wander around and watch the video