Maike Niemeier, the founder of Portcrash, believes that for effective learning children need to form an emotional and physical bond with real-life elements; teaching only digitally would be to abstract. This is why Portcrash is combining digital and analog content and aiming at bridging the gap between traditional childhood education and digital media. Through storytelling and gamification centered around the feisty intergalactic pirate girl Cap’n Portcrash and her crew, children can explore art, physics, chemistry, coding, math, and music in their spare time.
Maike is the creative mind behind Cap’n Portcrash and her crazy crew of pirates. She’s the one who creates the stories, thinks up the extraordinarily long words and wields the paintbrushes and pens. With twenty years of experience in elementary music pedagogy and instrumental teaching, together with her studies of Art and Music Pedagogy at Bielefeld University, she has a firm foundation for offering you a cool learning system.
Maike founded her own school of Art and Music ten years ago while she was still a student, and teaches children, teens and adults. She and her colleagues have run projects in preschools and schools at all levels, with everything from small groups to entire schools of up to 400 children. She has also been teaching music at a secondary school, the Städtisches Gymnasium in Petershagen, for two years. Her father was an elementary school principal, so she’s well versed in formal education systems and knows what’s important to teachers.
Portcrash is her second company, and she runs it parallel to her music school. It uses books which feature QR-coded links to browse games, experiments, and additional materials to educate children in a playful, humorous way while being based on pedagogic principles. Design, haptics, and audio are tailored to provide children with the conditions they need to improve their focus and to strengthen effective learning.
The EdTech startup was founded late 2017 with the aim to make education fun for students, teachers, and parents alike. Alongside the educational games, the Portcrash engineering team also created a licensing system for educators: ‘Rock the Boat with Cap’n Portcrash’.
Apps – all themed around Cap’n Portcrash and her piratey pals – take children age four and up on a crazy, adventurous journey into distant galaxies and steer them towards the learning objectives. According to the website “The apps are based on our scientifically-underpinned learning system; that ensures an optimal learning environment.”
Source & Image: Portcrash UG & Co. KG
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