Bonnishikha Chowdhury, MBR Team

MBR: How did the idea of “ANTT Robotics” come into being? How had the idea been put into a business model?

ANTT Robotics: ANTT Robotics has created an ecosystem for learning basic programming for the students and teachers, using the element of personalization and gamification. This form of learning is the unique selling point of our product.

It began in 2015 during the founders’ graduation duration when most technologies were expensive and unavailable for school going students. With the lack of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) based learning tools, coupled with a lack of technology, innovation-based local products are mainly provoking to execute the idea. After validation and research, we have started our venture back in 2018 and registered under RJSC (Registrar of Joint Stock Companies and Firms) as a robotics company in early 2019.

The idea is mainly addressed to solve that global shortage of 85.2 million skilled workers by the year 2030, which represents USD 8.45 trillion loss worldwide. In Bangladesh, it will have a huge impact on the workforce. According to A2i (Access to Information) 5.5 million people, which is 47% of the workforce will lose their jobs due to automation by 2041. Those factors really make us concerned about building and launching STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) tools relevant to learning programming and robotics. We are chasing the impact for developing Modern skill sets like programming, STEM, IoT, Robotics, AI education which are becoming cardinal for the career growth of a student. Moreover, the 4th Industrial Revolution is changing the way of life in our society. We intend on providing our youth with the right equipment and proper training for Robotics and STEM learning. We are a Dhaka based unique educational platform designed for learning STEM, for researching and developing the product to enable it to be quicker and gamify the teaching of programming using robotics, logic, IoT based experiments, IoT hardware and data analysis.

MBR: What is the biggest achievement of ANTT Robotics in the last two years?

ANTT Robotics: ANTT Robotics is always strict about impact mapping along with business plans. We have followed the standard process of product development and deployment. We successfully showcased the ecosystem to facilitate the fourth industrial revolution in the region of Bangladesh. We have already achieved awards and grants from different International and National organizations like the “Ministry of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology, Bangladesh”.We were selected for top 07 startup in “Banglalink IT incubator 2.0”, for top10 startup of Bangladesh in Youth Co:Lab 2019, Champion in “Call for Nation 2020”, secured 3rd place and got an opportunity to participate in a 6 month incubation program in South Korea named “ideaTHON”. The event is co-organized by the Korea Productivity Center (KPC) and the Korea Invention Promotion Association (KIPA). In addition, the ICT Division and the Bangladesh Computer Council of Bangladesh, the Ministry of Justice of South Korea, and the Global Start-up Immigration Center of South Korea were partners of the event.

MBR: How was the response of people in the initial stage?

ANTT Robotics: Everyone needs a solution-oriented approach in their life. Parents need more support to build futuristic learning for their kids, and every parent wants their child to succeed in his/her career. Therefore, ANTT Robotics Team is doing complete integration of advanced skills in their education from the beginning of their study period to make them more salient in their careers where our initiative is focusing on spreading knowledge among children and building future generations.

In the early stage in Bangladesh, we have attended the one-month pilot program in 9 schools (physical class) where more than 70 % of students were highly interested in learning programming. After the training session, around 76 % of students found it easy to learn programming with practical tools. We trained around 3150 students in 9 different schools within this period.

In Tanzania, Africa we have taken a three months pilot program virtually, where 7 out of 10 students were observed to have developed ideas using the latest technology tools, and could do basic programming. They were also able to develop the COVID-19 Contactless Hand Sanitization process for their own schools.

We have designed and developed all our courses and services digitally from the initiation of the project. During the COVID19 pandemic, all education services had been moved forcibly to online platforms; this process boosts our operations. Edtech market is expanding after the COVID-19 crisis and our customer response is increasing day by day. Currently, ANTT Robotics has two B2B (business to business) academic institutes where about 300 students are getting service. Besides we have a community where about 5000 students are actively participating, developing, and learning STEM projects.

We want to control our lifestyle every day and we require its data. The Internet is the topmost technology that actually is a game-changer in this prospect. As students need to learn about career readiness skills, our product features are designed to assist a student to learn programming, IoT applications, electronics, robotics and STEM.

MBR: How do you think you can make the service more available to the younger generation?

ANTT Robotics: All tools and software are combining numerous emerging technologies like augmented reality, machine learning, digital books, IoT, embedded system, dashboard, graphical programming, modern programming language. We have designed our learning path into 4 groups: early state (age 8-12), primary state (age 12-15), secondary state (age 15-18), higher state (age 18-24).

Our primary concern is to make available the learning STEM tools and STEM curriculum to the students. This is why we have developed a partnership with STEM CLUB BANGLADESH to prompt and create awareness regarding STEM education. This collaborative initiative makes our service available to the students in a more effective way. All robotics tools are compatible with other available software like Arduino, SeedStudio, MIT Scratch programming, and so on.

After this pandemic, we are targeting to create a hub in all divisions and will partner with schools and colleges to prompt STEM education through STEM CLUB Bangladesh.

MBR: Currently, how many courses and workshops are being offered? And, what is the estimated number of students that joined the courses or STEM projects?

ANTT Robotics: ANTT Robotics is built as a unique service channel for dedicated users. The community platform is aimed to build awareness and learn the upcoming technology from experts. Workshops and Sessions are designed to provide the best gamification system to develop analytical skills, tech skills, and become problem solvers. The award-winning teams are directly mentoring through live virtual workshops. A Virtual Workshop is like a classroom providing hands-on learning experience through virtual communication. The mission of this program is to support the education sector during the COVID-19 pandemic and help to develop the tech education quo. After COVID-19 pandemic, students lost support for learning their way around technology hands-on. We have taken the initiative with experts, and all required equipment boxes are delivered to the home on an on-demand basis.

Currently, we have offered 09 courses, 02 robotics tools, and 01 programming app. Jointly we have arranged two national STEM programs where we reached 85,000 people and had more than 200 participants in the contest, and also national level STEM, Robotics, and Technology experts shared their experiences. We have already given support to one academic organization in Bangladesh and one international organization regarding STEM education. Besides this, we have reached 5000 under in Bangladesh.

MBR: What are some general challenges ANTT Robotics is facing and how do you mitigate those?

ANTT Robotics: With our service, we are contributing to both SDG 4 and 8. We admit to the slow process of success but as a result of our service, the career paths and choices shall be easier for most people as they would already familiarize themselves with the skills required for the 4th Industrial Revolution.

In the middle of digitalization and dealing with a lack of skilled manpower we are facing a huge lack of basic knowledge of the importance of learning STEM. Many students are completing their education without having proper modern skills which are actually affecting the employment growth of the country. However, there are some piloting initiatives taken in Bangladesh to create digital schools but couldn’t be scaled up due to lack of ICT trainers and equipment such as computers. Due to this challenge we have taken a collaborative initiative named STEM CLUB Bangladesh for promoting STEM education. We have planned to partner with academic institutes and provide the students freemium contents about STEM educations.

MBR: What is the core competency of ANTT Robotics Limited?

ANTT Robotics: ANTT Robotics is the only company offering a chain ecosystem of learning fourth industrial revolution skills using STEM and gamification learning. In the midst of local and international competitions, ANTT Robotics stands on an amazing balance of Community, Events, Courses, Devices & Services.

Our main competence is that all our products are being developed locally in Bangladesh and, we have been able to develop an ecosystem of STEM learning paths till undergraduate level.

MBR: What are the strategic priorities of ANTT Robotics at the moment? What are the future plans for the next five years?

ANTT Robotics: ANTT Robotics has come a long way and has only set realistic goals for the future of this company. The year 2020 has been significant for the company and we intend to keep up with the progress in our coming years. We have carefully laid out our strategy and we have set a number of adjectives for the next two years. Our vision includes a target of total 5000 users for whom we intend to provide a single platform for STEM learning. Launching a developed platform and advancing towards our official operation in Tanzania and two more cities of Tanzania are goals we wish to pursue. We would also be working to launch our Augmented Reality Based Periodic Table Game.

We plan to step up our game by increasing our user target to 5 lacs by the year 2022. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is another sector towards which we wish to expand our area of work. We plan to launch AI-enabled robots for programming in the same year and expand our affiliation in Africa. The goal we have come up with for Bangladesh includes setting up AI (Artificial Intelligence) and STEM labs all over the country considering educational institutions in rural areas. We have been very careful with our plans and strategies so far and we wish to work accordingly in the coming years.