Through Tabula Digita, Founder and CEO NT Etuk is rewiring how young people learn. What’s more, he is moving mountains for young people unsure of their intelligence and greatness by 
building their academic knowledge and personal confidence while rewarding their spirit of competition.
Tabula Digita is the company behind the DimensionU Learning System – a universe of educational video games where students practice core K-12 subjects, at school and at home, including math, language arts, and science. This May, they will host the U Games National Scholarship Tournament where students will compete for $60,000 in scholarship funds.
Resident Planning Geek: Your company uses technology in a unique way to engage kids and adults in the education process. When did you develop the awareness that video games were the way to do this?
NT Etuk: When I graduated from college I really wanted to give back to a world that had given me so much. As a result, I started volunteering with the Big Brothers Big Sisters program with a young man whose mother wanted me to teach him algebra. Regrettably, this was a young man who was having trouble with some of the basic arithmetic skills that should have been mastered far earlier. The school system had failed him, and if he didn’t turn around his understanding of the subject and master the material, he was going suffer for it.
My answer at the time was to place him on a hardcore intervention diet of basic arithmetic and pre-algebra requisites – countless hours of drill and practice exercises. It was difficult. It was no fun. It was all we did, and it was working. I could see slow, steady progress being made. But after about two months, in a slightly traumatic moment for me, he asked his mother to ask me to stop – as if I was doing medieval torture or something! When I approached him to ask why, he said, “I really like you, but we never have any fun.”
That was when I realized that I had committed the cardinal sin in teaching: like many of his teachers before him, I had taken the fun out of learning.
It was at that moment that I realized perhaps our biggest problem in education was not class size, or teacher proficiency, or teacher tenure, or even facilities; it was that we had ignored the fundamental fact that the most important person to get committed, engaged, and involved in the education process was the one who we were actually trying to get to absorb the knowledge, the student. That’s when I decided to bring kids’ voices into the educational conversation because if we could create a learning solution where millions of kids were engaged in education, having fun, and still learning, that’s when the education world would be forever changed, for the better.
Resident Planning Geek: You’re an entrepreneur. Did you quit your job and undertake Tabula Digita as a start up or did you develop your company as a part time project?
NT Etuk: When I graduated from business school in 2002 I went to work for Citigroup. For me the company was developed as a part-time project initially. I did ask my co-founder to work on the company full-time and used the money from my Citigroup paycheck to pay him.
Resident Planning Geek: Did you have any personal challenges that you had to overcome as you developed Tabula Digita into the success it is today?
NT Etuk: At the very beginning we were entering an industry that had seen the rise and fall of what used to be called “edutainment.” This included a lot of the early games such as Oregon Trail, Mathblaster, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? That market had imploded spectacularly in the late 1990s, so when we first came out with our concept people were quite skeptical. They didn’t know if educational games could be “game” enough for kids, but “educational” enough for teachers or parents. As a result, and especially in the midst of the Internet meltdown, professional funding was hard to come by. This meant that we spent a lot of time taking in $10,000, $20,000 checks to make ends meet. Much of this was secured from my friends and family. Each check was a personal burden to me. I had a tremendous amount of pride, so the idea of asking others to help me with an idea that I had in an industry in which I had no working experience was extremely difficult for me. Every day that I woke up in that time period was a day in which I swallowed my pride, and rebuilt a different view of myself. It was incredibly difficult, but ultimately successful – we ended up raising $1.2 million from friends and family over a two-year time period.
Resident Planning Geek: What advice or encouragement did you receive that kept you on course?
NT Etuk: Patience. I am an extremely impatient person, but I was fortunate enough to have people around me who could see the tremendous structural barriers that existed in the industry I was trying to affect, and kept telling me – it is going to be slower in your industry, but ultimately it will come.
Resident Planning Geek: When did you realize that DimensionU had a global reach?
NT Etuk: When I was up late at night and noticed that we had students playing our DimensionM math games in Japan. What an amazing feeling to see our dream playing out on the other side of the planet. Kids having fun, competing, learning, collaborating – it is the new universal language of learning.
Resident Planning Geek: Aside from video games, how have you fostered fun and competition along with learning among all your students?
NT Etuk: The video games are the cornerstone of fun and competition. For several years we have hosted Multiplayer Educational Videogame Tournaments in New York City, Garland and Austin, Texas and Broward County, Florida. Last year, Dallas Independent School District used our DimensionU for Math game for its 35th Math Olympiad, the first time in the event’s history that paper and pencils were replaced with immersive video games.
In May of this year, we will host the U Games National Scholarship Tournament for students in grades three-eight. Students from around the country can participate in the virtual competition by downloading a free tournament version of the DimensionU Learning System for math by going to www.dimensionu.com/UGames.
The competition, co-sponsored by Intel and in partnership with Dell, began in November 2010 and consists of 12 rounds of play, each lasting two weeks. We have thousand of students who are actively competing against their peers across the country and working hard to win a spot in the finals.
People often ask me why we emphasize tournaments and the answer is simple. Just watch the students when they are playing. They are having a fantastic time. Look at their test scores after they have played. They are improving their test scores, sometimes by double digits. The tournaments work because they’ve been proven to engage everyone from kids to adults. They incorporate the best of everything that we want to stimulate in the education process – collaboration, competition, effort, training, reward for achievement, and pride of success, without the sometimes debilitating and confidence-draining challenges of failure. They’re not for everybody, but look at how many people they’ve motivated to succeed, or to celebrate and cheer on success. March Madness, The World Cup, The Olympics, Quiz Kids, The National Spelling Bee – tournaments engage all of us on a very deep level.
This is the true and necessary part of the education revolution; the creation of a time and a place where kids light up at the thought of a math, science or literacy problem. Where kids can’t wait to show themselves, and the world, what they’ve learned.
Resident Planning Geek: Tabula Digital offers the grade 6-8 winner of its upcoming U Games National Scholarship Tournament a $50,000 scholarship plus $1,000 to spend. That’s extremely generous. Why so much?
NT Etuk: We are committed to helping students now and in the future. The cost of higher education is astronomical. We hope that with these winnings we will help to make the dream of a college education more tangible.
Resident Planning Geek: What other competitions like the U Games scholarship for students is your company envisioning for 2011?
NT Etuk: Right now, that’s all we have planned. But in the years to come, our tournament will cover other subject areas including literacy, science and even history.
Resident Planning Geek: What advice would you have for a student who wants to solve real world problems like you. Where should they start?
NT Etuk: Start with your passion and find a way to feed that passion with constant feedback. The hard-core focus on education is something that has moved my family, on both sides (my mother is from the Bahamas, my father from Nigeria) from pre-colonial challenges to post-colonial success in a variety of intellectual and business arenas. It is one of my passions to give students everywhere the internal motivation to go out and grasp their education and change their lives. I want them to be so excited about education that their income level, their personal surroundings, or their country’s national commitment to education doesn’t matter. They want to learn and they are motivated to do it. When I see the faces of the kids as they use our games … when I see the e-mails that come in from teachers and students about what our products have done for their lives and their perspective on education – that closes my feedback loop. Real world problems are hard to tackle, and the only way you overcome them are to place your passion against their inertia and feed your soul with the small successes you see along the way.
© 2012 Resident Planning Geek
