Turkey’s PISA scores are below the OECD average.

Turkey has the lowest preschool enrollment rate among OECD countries.

Just within the last year, with the pandemic, the number of preschool students decreased by 25% which means they were not getting sufficient educational support throughout a crucial time for their brain development.

Preschool children's vocabulary significantly affects their future creativity, literacy skills, math ability and social skills. (Source 1: Hart & Risley “30 Million Word Differences” Study, 1992)

Children who grow up in an enriched learning environment in pre-school are more advantageous in terms of mental development than their peers.

In summary, all preschool children need to be provided with the necessary support and opportunities to support their vocabulary and mental development equally and we made it our aim to help achieve that.

We needed to find a way to improve preschool children's vocabulary and allow them to spend quality time with their parents at the same time.

First we created a series of animated videos with a "bee" character; Vizviz. Before creating Vizviz, we did qualitative research on our character. We determined our character's name, voice, appearance and personality by taking the opinions of parents and children. (Source included on the board) We showed Vizviz in everyday situations, interacting with her peers, parents, environment, and learn (and teach) new things along the way. Content is categorized according to basic themes like "vehicles", "professions" or "self-help" etc.

But this was, on its own, a passive interaction and we thought we shouldn't stop there. So we also offered them one creative activity that goes along with each video content, related to the theme in question, to ensure the engagement ends with parent/teacher involvement.

Our target audience was Preschool children aged 3-6 and their parents & teachers.

We prepared the 1500kelime.com platform under the consultancy of Prof. Selçuk Sirin and with the support of experts in their fields.

We aimed to make the time that preschool children spend with their mobile devices more productive and to direct the content they consume to more useful offline activities that will enable them to spend quality time with their parents.

We have created the platform with a gamification infrastructure based on scoring points, in a way that allows parents to follow their children's development and maintain their motivation for learning. In addition, we made sure that the offline activities offered are shared on the platform as user-generated content and that children are aware of what their peers are doing.

In April 2021, we launched the platform with an online press conference and an extensive PR/communication plan. In addition, on April 23rd (National Children's Day in Turkey), we organized a Children's Festival with the voluntary participation of celebrities, influencers, opinion leaders, and education professionals on Instagram with 5.5 hours of uninterrupted live broadcasting. As soon as the project came to life, social media support came from various NGOs and celebrities which helped the platform to reach a much wider audience who shared our project voluntarily.

There were 308K sessions, nearly 3mio page views, 187K unique visitors, and 39,923 (current numbers) memberships within the first few weeks.

Thanks to the integrated communication covering PR, digital media and live broadcast launch political and media profiles with a high influence noticed the project and with the public endorsement by these profiles, more than 54 million reach was achieved, 2.5 times the target.

The average interaction time in the mobile application is 52 minutes, nearly twice the target.

According to the research conducted before and after the project on the same group of teachers and parents, the following was observed: (Source: *Akademetre, 1500Kelime.com Project Effectiveness Evaluation on Parents and Teachers, Quantitative Research, 2021)

After experiencing the platform, parents who found the project helpful raised from 64% to 82%.

73.8% of the parents considered 1500Kelime.com among the methods for children to learn new words, surpassing TV, the internet, and YouTube.

According to the parents’ and teachers’ statements, the children’s vocabulary developed by 13,9%.

99% percent of the teachers who experienced the platform recommends 1500Kelime.com for the mental development of preschool children.