For Evacuated Israeli Kids, Innovative Studies Keep Minds Sharp

At a high-tech office in the quiet town of Yeruham, in southeastern Israel, dozens of kids who have been evacuated from their homes near the Gaza border are keeping up with their studies, albeit in a less conventional way.  

From learning how to code through video games to building cartoon-like Rube Goldberg machines, the young people unable to attend their own schools are now studying stimulating courses of their choice on and offline. 

Tens of thousands of Israelis have been evacuated from their homes in southern Israel close to the Gaza border and in the north near the frontier with Lebanon. Most of that number, which includes around 30,000 children, are from the south.

The residents of communities close to the Gaza border were internally displaced following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists who stormed into Israel, killing 1,400 people and abducting hundreds more.

The courses that dozens of them are now studying – and more – are being offered for free by the Sprint platform, which lets children learn a new unique topic of their choice every week, for 90 minutes a day.

The platform was created by MindCET, an innovation center that develops and supports edtech startups from Israel and from around the world. The organization normally raises funds for edtech startups, and every year offers an eight-month accelerator program for them. 

MIndCET CEO Avi Warshavsky developed the platform after he realized that it was simply unrealistic to expect children who had been displaced or evacuated from their homes to be able to learn in a conventional classroom.

“The level of anxiety, the level of uncertainty is just too high,” he tells NoCamels. 

Around 80 children from different ages and religious backgrounds are now piloting the MindCET program at the organization’s headquarters in Yeruham, where they have also been relocated with their families.

The Sprint platform can be used in two different ways. 

The first lets the children aged 9 to 15 use software created by edtech startups such as Plethora, which teaches computational thinking through gaming, and Zbenko, which teaches financial literacy. 

This part of the platform is open to all edtech startups that want to contribute, Israeli or not. In fact, says Warshavsky, a Lithuanian edtech startup with no connection at all to Israel even contacted the organization asking to contribute their product to the platform. 

“The fact that international startups from countries such as Lithuania are aware of the situation in Israel and are supporting us has huge value,” he says.  

The second way offers more structured courses or “journeys” – each of which has been created by the MindCET team. One course, for instance, teaches how to build a Rube Goldberg machine – something that is intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an overly complicated way, but is also known to teach creative problem solving. 

“The topics are chosen according to the kids’ curiosity,” says Warshavsky. “They’re not traditional curriculum topics like math or history.”

Other 90-minute journeys include teaching the children how to take high-quality photographs with their smartphones and how to create art using artificial intelligence. There are even yoga classes on offer.

Each journey combines videos and online resources with some guidance from a volunteer who is an expert in each particular field.

Every lesson chosen by the children is also accompanied by a group activity, in which they share the things they learned with one another. 

The next version of this platform, explains Warshavsky, will include AI that both helps the children understand what they want to learn, and build the journey for them itself. 

“We try to treat the kids in the same way we would like to be treated,” he says. “They appreciate this approach, I think.”

To create the platform, MindCET recruited startups it has previously worked with both in Israel and abroad to provide the curriculum and products for free. It has also partnered with Microsoft to help build the next incarnation of the platform, and collaborated with the CET innovative learning organization, of which MindCET is a subsidiary. 

“We believe that this can really help children during emergency situations such as these,” says Warshavsky. 

The Israeli Pediatric Association says that nearly 90 percent of children that have needed treatment from their healthcare provider since the start of the war have reported symptoms of anxiety. 

Yet despite the negative effect that the war is having on Israel’s children, both in terms of education and their mental state, Warshavsky is optimistic that they have the ability to move past such challenges. 

“There’s something about the way they grow and develop that results in this amazing ability to overcome,” he says, “even if they lose out on a couple of years of traditional learning.”

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