i-Umka interactive platform

An application estimating capabilities and personal traits of children aged 5 to 9 through interactive testing. The platform is a tool for developing practice-oriented recommendations for charting individual development trajectories and fully evolving each child’s talents. The data on child development is accumulated and systematized under a parent/teacher personal account displaying information on achievements, the child’s capabilities change dynamic, and providing recommendations on charting the child’s individual education and upbringing trajectory; it also offers access to certificates.

i-UMKA platform is a modern way to assess children’s capabilities and personal traits through interactive testing.

The project has been implemented as a website adaptable for mobile devices (phones/tablets).

The platform is a tool to develop practice-oriented recommendations to chart a personal development trajectory, in order to fully evolve a child’s talents.

The target audience is children aged 5 to 9, their parents and teachers.

Thanks to the platform, children get an opportunity to learn and develop their skills while playing, while parents and teachers can asses their children’s capabilities and get recommendations on their personal development trajectories, including offline.

How does it work?

A parent or a teacher signs up for the i-UMKA platform (creates a personal account) in order to later add their child or a group to the platform.The data on child development is accumulated and systematized under the parent/teacher personal account displaying information on achievements, the child’s capabilities change dynamic, and providing recommendations on charting the child’s individual education and upbringing trajectory; it also offers access to certificates.

What are the assignments like?

The assignments at the platform has the form best suited for the children of that age group (5-9), mainly the form of games that help develop artistic and aesthetic tastes of the child.

Methodology and content creation

The assignment offered at the platform have been developed by professional pre-school educators and psychologists. We’re partners with Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D.Ushinsky, and signed a partner agreement with International Teaching Academy of Pre-School Education (ITAPE). The game mechanics for the developed and tested kids’ assignments were created in-house: our designers, game designers more or less transposed the method onto an interactive game while preserving its principles and the main purpose.

Platform mechanics

Children use our platform to assess their cognitive capabilities, like (attention focus, observation skills, visual perception, emotional perception and empathy, eye-mindedness, abstract thinking, time perception, visual modelling) by doing interactive tests and tasks.

We also have tests for detecting how ready for school a child is and how familiar the year 1 school subjects are to them.

When doing tests or assignments, a child answer questions or solves problems in a gameplay form, and the system evaluates the results. Based on that result, the child is issued a personal certificate of passing a specific test, indicating the score received and the maximum possible score. A certificate in the .pdf format can be printed out and used in a portfolio.

A parent or a teacher gets the child’s results sent to their personal account on the website, with recommendations on how to develop a specific capability and a clear demonstration of the underdeveloped capability.

How do we implement the practice?

The practice implementation means joining an already existing platform. You don’t have to download or install any special software, or purchase a license to be able to implement the program.

The platform is implemented in 3 steps:

Go to i-umka.ru website;

Sign up (for parents or teachers);

Add a child or a group of children.

Now a child will be able to do assignments and get recommendations.

If you experience any problems using the website, there’s a helpful chat bot.

Project history

The platform was created in 2018 as a regional project for the children of the Yaroslavl Region. In 2019, after over 1,000 kids and over 20 education institutions joined the platform, we made the decision to modernize our platform (website) and launch a nation-wide project. The result was a new (technically modernized) IT platform, partnership relations with methodology research center on the Federal level that support the project with their method expertise (Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University named after K.D.Ushinsky, and a partner agreement with International Teaching Academy of Pre-School Education (ITAPE)), as well as with game designers and animators.