Yooyaland is a Palestinian startup that aims to fill the need for creative educational resources for 3-9 year old children in the Arab world; providing resources that blend technology with an enlightening learning process, and utilize Internet as a medium to deliver across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and the rest of the world.
Its exclusive, original content is carefully created to stimulate the children and challenge their intellect; provide teachers with entertaining, educational material; and transform the home educational cycle by giving parents an ever growing library of resources ranging from Yooyaland’s interactive portal to worksheets, toys and other products.
Yooyaland delivers a rich variety of age-appropriate activities to each user, providing parents with the possibility to change the level of difficulty to each activity, according to their child’s pace.
It also focuses on the educational skills that are most important to the child’s development, including basic language skills, number recognition and mathematical thinking, critical thinking, spatial reasoning and logic.
The animations are based on flash technology and demonstrate effective use of e-learning methods such as dividing the content into few learning steps, examining the knowledge gained in each step, and interacting with the child to keep him/her playing online.
To get access to all the lessons and contents of Yooyaland, subscribers have to charge their accounts using one of the supported payment methods: Visa, CashU, OneCard and Yooya Prepaid Cards.
Alia Abu Shmeiss submitted the Yooyaland project to PICTI (Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator) back in 2005, where it was then incubated for a period of 18 months, through which it went from idea to reality with support and consulting from PICTI.
PICTI then linked Yooyaland with Hadara, a member of Paltel Group, which launched it to the private sector, making Yooyaland the first case of a merger and acquisition from the incubator in Palestine culminating in transfer of equity shares in exchange of US$450,000 and an additional US$1Million of investment in the company.
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Palestinian entrepreneur Hassan Hamdan, Co-Founder of Optimal Technology Solutions and recent graduate of Modern Science and Art University, has been awarded the “Lessons from the Edge Award” in the 2010 Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA) Competition.
