Camp K12, an ed-tech startup building a global online school for 21st-century skills, today announced the launch of Hatch Kids, its very own Metaverse and AR/VR creation platform for young learners.
Camp K12 originally built the Hatch Kids platform for use in its own programming courses, but after witnessing strong demand from educators and students while working with early partners, it is now opening up the platform for any organization to use free of cost, along with free AR/VR curriculum modules for teachers to use in the classroom or in online workshops.
Over the past 6 months, Hatch Kids has grown organically to 1.1M+ users across 150 countries via school, government, and ed-tech partnerships, with 75% of the consumption coming from US and Canada. Other top geographies include UK, Australia, and India. Students have created 3.6M+ projects on the platform to date, in the classroom and beyond.
Speaking about Hatch’s vision, Camp K12’s Co-founder and CEO, Anshul Bhagi, said, “There are 100m+ kid coders out there today using a variety of free coding platforms to learn coding by building games and apps. These platforms are incredibly effective and set the stage for the kids coding movement starting in 2007, however the vast majority of them are restricted to 2D project creation, built for the age of smartphones and flat screens. As technologies like AR and VR go mainstream, we need to upgrade the tools that kids learn on and that educators teach on for modern-day use cases and content formats. We built Hatch as a kids coding platform for the age of the Metaverse. We want to give 100M+ young kids their first AR/VR creation experience and the self-confidence to be builders in the inevitable Mixed Reality future rather than passive consumers of it.”
Hatch Kids makes it possible for students spanning ages 6 to 18 to create 3D, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences with ease, in an age where kids are captivated by 3D games like Roblox and Minecraft and yet the mainstream kids coding platforms are still restricted to 2D project creation.
Hatch Kids supports all K-12 age groups and experience levels. Younger students and first-time coders can start using a visual, blocks-based programming environment, then graduate to programming advanced 3D applications using JavaScript. Students can instantly publish and share their creations to millions of supported devices, including iPads, smartphones, professional VR headsets, laptops & desktops via a simple QR code scan or a link share.
The government of Delhi started using the Hatch Kids platform in January 2022 to teach programming in government school classrooms, in the process of transforming its students into some of the youngest Metaverse creators anywhere in the world. The platform is also being used by 100+ schools and ed-tech companies in North America, Middle East, India, and Europe to make AR/VR creation accessible for kids. In December, Hatch Kids was featured on Code.org (a global coding platform with 70M+ kid coders) as an “Hour of Code” activity and today has grown to be the #1 most popular activity for students from Grades 6 – 8 and the #3 most popular activity overall in the Code.org partner ecosystem.
The team expects 2M+ MAUs by December 2022, powered by both direct-to-student consumption, as well as partnerships with 1500+ schools, ed-tech, and additional government bodies worldwide by year-end.