Meet Darya Yegorina- Teacher, mentor and co-founder at CleverBooks, an EdTech platform that encourages students and parents to understand the power of technology in the education sector.
Darya’s uses the power of creativity and innovation to inspire future leaders through teamwork and state of art strategy for results-driven companies. Her biggest passion is education and technology. She is also committed to supporting future skill-development and helping one kid at a time.
With a dream to influence change and help transform education, she decided to become a teacher, never thinking that in five years upon graduation during an internship at school, she would face a brutal reality of being pushed to teach with the same books she had at school herself. The books her parents studied with. She realized that to make a difference and help educators embrace 21st-century learning to fit the demands of the rapidly changing job market, you need to become an expert and advocate in technology having a deep understanding of current and emerging tech trends as well as skills that will be required to operate in the future workforce.
CleverBooks, as Darya puts it, was founded by two ‘women’ and ‘mothers’, referring to her business partner. The company delivers EdTech products based on Augmented Reality (AR) technology that brings learning to life at home and in the classroom where they can see, hear, and touch the knowledge. The company’s aim is to empower kids aged 5 to 12 to find a purpose and sustain motivation to learn through an interactive discovery and fun experience. CleverBooks sets the standards in Augmented Reality to fit kids’ 21st-century learning demands.
Today, CleverBooks influences Digital Transformation in the Education system worldwide. It is present in 62 countries, with over 17000 students and 4200 teachers using CleverBooks STEM EdTech products based on Augmented Reality (AR) technology. It brings learning to life where kids can see, hear, and touch the knowledge.
Till date, CleverBooks has been featured in multiple international media including Forbes and Inc. Magazine, Reimagine Education as a Bronze Winner 2020, enrolled in one of the biggest EU funded projects HORIZON 2020 and Erasmus+ to participate in the research on the topic of AR in Education.
Their main product is a digital collaborative space for K-12 STEM education called the Augmented Classroom. It is a GESAaward 2020 winner and the winning project of European Digital Innovation Challenge 2020 organized by the European Commission.
Another major innovation is the Augmented Classroom (ARC), the one and only digital platform for K-12 that brings together 3 main pillars in the EdTech space: explore, create and collaborate in the multi-player augmented environment.
According to Darya, AR has made it possible for kids to see, hear and touch the knowledge which engages them in learning and developing skills needed for the unknown future workforce.
“Speaking to over 750 educators worldwide, I saw a simple pattern that technology can and will change the world of education. My vision is to empower educators to help kids to develop necessary skills through strategic use of technology, breaking old-fashioned pedagogical barriers, building bridges between teaching and tech focused on increased engagement of students in the classroom,” she says.
Darya strongly believes that one day, everyone, regardless teachers or parents, would realize how important it is to expose kids to education technology. If one will observe the kids of today, almost each one of them is surrounded by tech in one way or another. She wants to utilize this opportunity to teach the students and their parents on how to use it for their benefit.
She wants to teach them on the same principle like how we teach our kids to cross the street on a green signal. It is because as parents, we cannot always be there when the kids cross the street and so, we teach them how to do it. The same applies to technology- she wants to teach them how to leverage technology properly and become lifetime learners. This, according to her, must be the eventual goal of education and technology.
She puts some light on this further: “For me, there is a big difference between education and learning; education is when you try to memorize information in order to pass a test and learning, on the contrary, is when you remember something because you are motivated to or because it is emotionally appealing to you. Learning lasts longer and education can be proven by a piece of paper that we call a diploma or certificate.”
Darya also adds that change can’t be achieved by changing the education system- it can be achieved through changing ‘mind-sets’. To iterate further on this, she shares a quote from Seth Godin’s book:
“Leaders work to change things and the people who win rarely do.”
Put simply, when we change our mindset, our future will also change.
