Meet Nicole Kang, the CoFounder of Elementari.
Elementari is a digital platform for creating animated stories. While adults can use it, it has been primarily designed for kids, teachers, and schools as a fun way to engage students in reading, writing, language learning, mathematics, coding and game design. Thanks to partnerships with artists, they have over 10,000 illustrations and sounds for the community to use in jump-starting their stories. Stories published automatically credit and promote the artists whose art and music they have used. Everyone can use the platform for free, but to access the full catalogue of images and sounds, set up classes, and assignments, you need to pay for a site membership.
While Nicole comes from a entrepreneurial family, this is her first business and quite different from her family’s business endeavours. Nicole is both an educator and a tech nerd, having studied science at MIT and spent time working in the Educational Arcade. I had the opportunity to interview Nicole last year and was impressed by her passion, determination, hard work, and ability to adapt. You can watch that interview below.
This summer we used Elementari in one of our kid’s summer camps, and I was impressed by Nicole’s responsiveness to my queries and desires. While she may not have always understood initially why I wanted something to operate in a different way, she actually made the changes to platform in a timely manner.
Nicole’s CoFounder in Elementari, and I believe the Chief Engineer, is David Li. In addition, two artists – Len Smith and Richard Walsh – helped build the initial repository of images on the platform, and have since been joined by other artists. Finally, Nicole has also been wisely building an Ambassador Program with teachers that have been creating on the platform with their students.
Love this! I’ve also shared Elementari with some teachers and my friend who is a professional animator. Great interview too. I really like how much detail you got into about the structure of the venture. I wonder (maybe I missed it) – do you know how long Elementari has been running for now?
Glad you have been having fun with it too, Jessica. I’d love to see Nicole and her partner successful in this venture. I believe Elementari was established in 2016.
I just watched this, I love how they have set up the platform! It is a very intuitive and user friendly system. Thanks for sharing.
You are most welcome, Ryan. Glad to hear that you have had a good first experience with the platform. I’ll pass that on to Nicole the next time I speak to her.
Erica, this amazing. I love it!!! What a great interview, so creative and engaging. And…Nicole’s a fellow Korean girl 🙂
Have you heard how the pandemic is affecting Elementari? As difficult as it is for us all, Covid has positioned her platform to get into more classrooms so hopefully more traction?
I have Nicole to thank for how engaging the interview was. She is so full of energy, animated, and passionate. It is always a delight to chat with her, and everytime I do, I wish I’d set up the call as a formal interview that was being recorded as the conversation always evolves in a really interesting way.
In terms of the pandemic, Elementari was one of the earlier companies to offer free access to teachers, which you would have hoped would translate to schools buying licenses for, but with stressed budgets I don’t think they are doing that yet. Nicole has been doing some intelligent new value-added marketing, by hosting live chats with educators on YouTube and hosting two virtual Kid’s Club meetings a week on YouTube, so fingers crossed that all of there hard work and creativity will pay off soon.
This Elementari platform for K-12 students is excellent. I think this Korean-American Nikole Kang is enthusiastic and into children’s education. I’m interested in this student-centered story platform and its strategies for projects.