FEC Monday Series: Education and Entrepreneurship: A “Game”- Changing Endeavor

FEC Monday Series: Finding Activities for Students’ Unique Interests

On September 21, Harmony Plus continued the Monday Series talk show. For our fourteenth episode, we interviewed Clarence Tan. With over 9 years of experience in game design as well as development experience, Clarence is the co-founder and CEO of Boddle Learning. Clarence does engaging interactive experiences for schools, government institutions, and large corporations and is also a frequent speaker on gamification at educational conferences.

What is Boddle Learning?

Boddle Learning is a platform that takes assignments and learning activities that children go through and turn it all into a game, managing to get students’ attention while also helping them learn concepts. Boddle Learning uses Machine Learning to assess students’ knowledge and skill level, which helps provide the right games and exercises for them to play.

How did Clarence come up with the idea? Turns out, Clarence’s friend’s friend had pitched this idea during a gathering. Clarence initially wasn’t a fan of this concept, but once they started interviewing and talking to various children, he realized there might be something big in the making here. With good platform development and teamwork, they could really make this work.

COVID-19’s impact

When asked how COVID-19 impacted their business, Clarence talked about how “We started focusing more on a target base of parents, while before we focused mainly on schools. Due to this online learning, there actually has been great growth in terms of users because more parents and teachers are trying to engage the students in a different format to keep them passionate and excited about education. Let’s use this to support schools during these times.”

Career trajectory

Having 9+ years of game developing experience at such a young age is no easy feat, it requires a lot of hard work and career planning. Clarence didn’t expect he would be here today as an entrepreneur but rather as an investment banker just like his father and he pursued Business management and Finance as his majors. However, he always loved playing video games, and in his junior year in college, he and his friends decided to make something out of what they loved and that made him venture into the world of a game development job on the side. Soon, he loved his side job so much that he quit his investment banking job to fully pursue game development and started working full-time at a game development company, and moved to Columbia. All was not as smooth as one might think.

Learning from failures

“Failures are really a part of life, you learn from them and move on. In my experiences, I’ve failed numerous amounts of time as well, I failed 72 competitions before even winning one, and went through multiple rejections in my life. I went to China to get funds to build online games but it failed really hard. Experiences like these help you learn and get better so you can work towards your successes. If you don’t fail, you just don’t get better.”

When starting a company, one of the biggest things you look for before launching your products, you have to ask yourself, is there a big enough marketplace for this to succeed? What is the use of this product to the people? Will people even use this product? If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’ then it’s just not worth the time and money. You can never force someone to use anything. It’ll be a huge waste. Clarence goes more in-depth about this with his former company called Coda Quest, which had a goal to build the best educational roleplay gaming platform.

“Graphics, characters, multiplayer, and everything was perfect for the game. But when we launched it, out of over 83 school districts that signed up with us and our game, only one private school had the technology to properly install and run our game. This was a huge downfall for us”

To successfully run his current company Boddle Learning, Clarence and his team went into great research to find the market value, the audience interest and tested it out with multiple prototypes. They managed to find the perfect niche where their product identifies each student’s difficulties in learning. This is a perfect example of learning from your mistakes and turning it into future success.

“My passion for games really enhanced my love for EdTech and the ability to create multiple education games really helped other students who were so interested in it kind of fueled my fire.”

Clarence thought back on his whole process and he strongly believes that one has to be open to trying new things. Never give up, and always keep trying no matter what comes your way, no matter what failure comes your route. His advice would be to not let failures define you since they help you get better.

If you want to learn more about Clarence’s experiences, please click here to watch the full episode.