Our Story

The journey to a quality STEM program for early years

Today’s young children will work in jobs not yet imagined, and we’re passionate about delivering innovative programs that spark their engagement and interest in STEM at an early age.

Our team is a unique blend of STEM-education specialists, learning scientists, developmental psychologists, data scientists and digital creators. We develop high-quality STEM programs that are research-based and proven to work. We are based in Canberra, Australia.

Here’s our Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) Program journey.

2016 – our unique approach to STEM receives government funding

In 2016, we won the Australian Government open tender process and were awarded $5.6 million to create the Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) Program – a quality STEM program designed specifically for children aged 4 and 5.

2018 – we create the ELSA Program and a pilot starts

In 2018, we undertook the very first Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) Pilot project.

The Pilot featured a suite of play-based digital apps for children, as well as an Educator app and a Families app, and more than 100 classroom activities that children could engage in—ensuring a healthy balance between digital play and physical play.

Tasked with focussing on engagement, the ELSA Pilot engaged 100 preschool services across Australia, with a total of 400 educators and more than 3,800 children taking part.

During 2018, children’s engagement with the digital apps exceeded expectations, with more than 43,000 sessions and 10,000 hours logged, and a staggering 88,000 items of content created by children.

2019 – a new pilot starts to focus on learning progressions

The success of the 2018 Pilot led to an extension of the project and another ELSA Pilot in 2019—this time with a focus on children’s learning progressions.

The 2019 Pilot engaged 111 preschool services, 200 educators and more than 4,300 children.

The children’s apps were updated so they could monitor and capture children’s Bounded Learning Progressions (BLPs) in detailed and sophisticated ways, without the need for formal assessment, while the children simply played the digital activities.

This data was then transmitted to the Educator app in the form of clear ‘I Can’ achievements—providing insights about each child’s progress.

Data from 2019 revealed continuous learning attainment by children throughout the year—irrespective of individual differences.

2020 – the project expands again for further research

In 2020, the project was extended again in order to undertake a focussed research project to determine the efficacy of the learning and engagement within the program, as well as the impact the program has on children’s STEM development.

The 2020 Research Project involved a randomised control trial (RCT) with approximately 140 early learning centres and 1200 children across Australia.

Data from the project revealed significant and substantial performance gains in both STEM learning and numeracy for those children who participated in the intervention.

This included a relative growth in STEM learning of approximately 12% (BAU) compared to 38% (ELSA Program); and a relative increase in numeracy of approximately 28% (BAU) and 56% (ELSA Program) during the RCT.

2021 and beyond … our world-class program becomes available to all

After three highly successful years running ELSA in a pilot and research phase, we were able to make the program commercially available to all preschools, kindergartens, early learning centres and foundation-year classes across the country.

ELSA is now administered by SPLAT-maths, a company established at the University of Canberra by the original ELSA team.