Kajeet swaps mobile phones for learning

SmartyCard’s online games service is providing the ultimate incentive for kids to learn: free stuff. If they answer enough questions correctly, solve enough puzzles or problem sets, they can earn a copy of popular teen vampire novel Twilight, a DVD of High School Musical, and even—if they play long enough—a gadget like an MP3 player. But according to polls conducted with SmartyCard’s sizable tween audience, the most desired prize is a mobile phone. Starting this week SmartyCard has started offering just such a prize in partnership with Kajeet, the child-focused MVNO.

“Kids don’t have access to PayPal, they don’t have credit cards—at least I hope they don’t,” said Aaron Burcell, vice president of marketing for SmartyCard. “They have limited means of getting things they want. This provides them with a safe means of earning and getting a phone on their own.”

Parents will first have to opt in for the specific prize, so they won’t suddenly be surprised by their child running around with a handset. But if they do, a child playing SmartyCard can earn a Samsung m300 with 5 minutes of prepaid talk time relatively easily. SmartyCard’s prize system works via points earned through answering questions and solving puzzles on social studies, math, English and other standard grade school subjects. The difficulty of the questions is based on the child’s grade level, and the points themselves are purchased by the parents as a means of rewarding their children scholastic efforts.

To get the m300 costs only 3700 points, though. Burcell said that a child typically earns 700 points an hour if they’re studious, meaning a solid week of effort could result in the big prize.  For parents, loading the system with 5,000 points costs only $10, so Kajeet is heavily subsidizing the cost of the phone to make it easier for their primary customers, tweens, to get them. Kajeet retails the same phone on its Website for $70. But once the phones are in their children’s hands, parents are on the hook for purchasing future minutes.

While this may sound like a controversial proposition, Burcell said SmartyCard did extensive polling of parents and found they were mainly in support of the program. Kajeet’s service doesn’t work like a typical prepaid consumer service, in which a customer has an allotment of minutes he or she is free to burn through. Kajeet allows parents to set strict parameters on how their children use their phones, limiting the numbers they can call or receive calls from, budgeting the minutes a child can use per day, and even set specific times of the day child can use the device. The m300 even has GPS, which parents can activate to track their children’s location. Burcell said parents are realizing the value of getting their children cellphones for safety and convenience reasons, and they appreciate the parental controls Kajeet gives them. By making the phone a reward for scholastic work, so much the better, Burcell said.

Ideally, Kajeet and SmartyCard want to extend the rewards program to minutes themselves, so not only the prize of the phone itself but its usage are tied to their performance on the SmartyCard platform, Burcell said. Kajeet and SmartyCard are all working on creating interfaces between their billing and provisioning systems that could allow kids to exchange points for minutes, but Burcell said there was an urgency in launching the program this summer. As parents make their decisions about summer programs for their children, they will also be making phone purchase decisions, Burcell said.

Kajeet and SmartyCard didn’t want to miss that window, he concluded. If the Kajeet phone proves popular, though, linking service directly to the rewards program will definitely become a priority, Burcell said.

“It is something that we can do,” Burcell said. “The development work necessary to integrate our systems is much more than that required to ship a phone, but if we start to move enough of them, we’ll do that work.”