We are creating a fun and unique insect-themed early years literacy book with augmented reality, encouraging real positive solutions to save insects. The book combines facts, phonics with an easy-to-use smartphone/tablet app to make insects accessible everyday creatures. The augmented reality gives the illusion of eye-popping 3D insects coming out of the book and into the real world. The app overlays interactive information about insects, conservation and more as you point the camera of your smartphone or tablet towards the images of the book. Children can explore the book through all their senses. It can be read simply as you would a normal book. Alongside listening, children can trace the textured letters and follow the arrows to learn the shapes and forms of letters. Our book is a UK first, most phonics schemes focus on narrative stories our book taps into children's innate curiosity about the world around them. This book takes a fresh approach by concentrating on real positive actions to help solve real-world problems. Offering up simple and practical ideas on how children (and their carers) can become positively engaged in preventing further insect population decline in their local area and communities. Many SEN children struggle with identifying with families depicted in children's books when learning to read. Our interactive factual insect's book will engage them and help to raise their literacy levels. We anticipate it will also be a valuable tool to support adult learners who may have missed out on education as a child. Our product offers a new way to learn to read. It offers the opportunity for those working in ed-tech to work closely with creatives, conservation scientists, and educators. We are working at the crossroads of the creative industries, ed tech and publishing. We launched Buttercup Learning in 2020, as we went into lockdown we crowdfunded successfully for money to kickstart work on our Insects' alphabet book. We have been working with Zubr VR to create the book and in-house we have created a series of nature posters with augmented reality. Our bees, birds and marine life animals posters focus on British animals and act as portals to our mini e-learning sites on plastic pollution, biodiversity and habitat loss. Touch the button revealed by the AR app to be taken to the e-learning site. Our posters are great for classrooms and homeschooling families and are available to buy on our ecommerce site. The Insect's book has been developed as a mini-demo book and this has been tested out in classrooms in North Somerset by teachers and pupils aged 4-6 and their parents. It has had favorable reviews from teachers, parents and the young children who have used it. We intend to bring the completed book to market by the end of 2021. In 2020 we received support from SET Squared Enterprising Women's pre-incubation programme and this month we joined the Loop programme to develop and grow the business further. We are developing a suite of creative educational products, we would like to create a range of sustainable top trumps cards with augmented reality, a nature board game with AR and continue to develop our phonics scheme with other nature titles. We are currently developing partnerships to support our educational aims, working with Carbon offset companies, educational trusts and conservation charities. Our future ambition is to split the company into two - products aimed at those who care for young children and a commercials branch. The commercials branch will support companies to hit targets for net-zero by offering a cost-effective training platform with our posters with augmented reality connecting company employees to cobranded e-learning on sustainability and carbon literacy. There is huge potential in both B2C and B2B. More parents in the UK are homeschooling and the tech needed to engage with AR is cost-effective. Our e-learning portal will be accessible, engaging and self-testing freeing up time for busy parents and teachers. SMEs and MMEs will need to meet new targets set to reach net zero. Currently, there is no official training programme for them to support their staff and our solution is simple, effective, fun, interactive and signals to their customers they are taking their part seriously. CIC CreaTech One to Watch would support our plans to gain more press coverage, as a startup, it would give us gravitas. We are looking for support to reach a global audience and the support on offer would be invaluable to pitch our ambitious plans.
