Monkey Junior has become the first Vietnamese start-up company to be in the final round of the US Department of State’s Global Innovation through Science and Technology (GIST) Tech-I competition held in Silicon Valley.

GIST Tech-I is a global initiative from the US government. This year’s event was held under the chairmanship of President Barack Obama along with top US officials to pick out outstanding science and technology companies with strong community values. GIST Tech-I 2016 received more than 1,000 applications from over 100 countries and territories.

Monkey Junior is among the top 15 startups in the GIST Tech-I Finalists of the startup stage and also the sole Vietnamese representative selected to compete in the finals in Silicon Valley.

The selection is not only a win for Monkey Junior, but also for Vietnam’s technology sector as a whole as this is the first time a Vietnamese startup has had the honour of presenting  its programme in a world-level science and technology competition.

Officially launched six months ago, Monkey Junior is among the most popular children’s language improvement programmes on the Apple App Store and Google Play, constantly in the top 100 downloaded educational programmes in a range of countries including the US, Canada and Vietnam with a total of over half a million downloads and thousands of positive feedback from users worldwide.

The software was born from the heart and mind of a father concerned about his child’s development – author and father Dao Xuan Hoang, who graduated in IT under an Australian government scholarship in 2008.

The programme is designed as a system of effective and comprehensive lessons with a total of over 1,000 lessons per language, applying learning methods proven by the world's leading experts in the field of early childhood education.

Each day the child can go through one or more lessons, at 5-7 minutes each. The parents do not need to plan and prepare learning content. All lesson content has been prepared and distributed by experts under the programme.

According to Hoang, Monkey Junior targets global users so the languages taught in the programme are the most common ones around the world.

Currently, the British and American English versions of the program have been completed and Monkey Junior is expected to launch the Vietnamese, French, Spanish and Chinese versions this May.

Source: Nhan dan