An educational program that sends kids on adventures to places like the Arctic and Amazon inspiring them to love & protect our planet!
Junior Explorers is an interactive game that inspires the adventurer in every child! We send kids on virtual “eco-missions” to learn about wildlife and ecosystems around the planet.
We have hit our initial funding goal, but we have so many more stories to tell. Share this with your herd and we will build an exclusive Mission Elephants for our Kickstarter backers.Let’s save elephants, TOGETHER!
In every mission, kids solve mysteries in nature that involve the eco-challenges facing the habitat and the animals that live there. Kids hone problem-solving skills, gain valuable STEM knowledge, and learn what they can do to help protect the planet!
Thousands of kids have experienced Junior Explorers and love it! Parents and teachers have given us their stamp of approval and want to use our product to teach Environmental Science in their homes and classrooms.
With your support, we will be able to develop the technology and curriculum teachers need to use our program to teach Environmental Science to their students. By backing our project you will enable us to build more eco-missions and send kids on more adventures that will educate and motivate them to become the conscious consumers of tomorrow.
Here is a brief overview of our program:
Expose Your Child to the Planet: We would all LOVE to take our kids on an African safari or a diving expedition to the Great Barrier Reef… one can dream, right? Junior Explorers is the next best thing! Send your child on exciting, far-away, adventures from your own home.
An Affordable Adventure: A vacation or even an average outing to the zoo with your family is expensive these days. With Junior Explorers, you can cultivate your child’s interest in animals and the planet for only $19 per adventure.
Games That Matter: Junior Explorers helps you instill values of conscious consumerism and planet-friendly living in your kids from an early age. Building a foundation of knowledge, awareness, and empathy is crucial to the children of today becoming the innovators and thought leaders of tomorrow!
Making Philanthropy Fun: As a certified B-Corp, giving back is one of our core values. Your child donates the points they earn while playing to a real life conservation project! Those points translate to a $1 donation that Junior Explorers makes on their behalf to these projects.
Inspire Your Child to Pursue STEM: Science is important! And so is diverse representation in STEM fields. Our Missions feature environmental, scientific, and conservation professionals of diverse backgrounds to show your child there are people like them, all over the world, doing incredible things, and one day, they could too!
Make Your Child’s Screen Time Count: What makes Junior Explorers unique is that our program is both tactile and digital. We combine engaging, educational offline materials with an immersive, online experience. Not only does this make Junior Explorers adaptable to a variety of learners, our unique combination approach means your child won’t be glued to a screen all day.
Every Adventure Begins With an Explorer Kit: Each month your child embarks on a virtual adventure to a different ecosystem to solve a mystery that teaches them about that habitat and the wildlife that lives there. The mission starts with an Explorer Kit, shipped to your door, to get your young explorer ready for their adventure!
Kits are carefully curated for each adventure and include fun collectibles like stickers, wristbands, figurines, and animal cards, along with a book of activities, games, and fun facts about the ecosystem and species that live there. Think Carmen Sandiego for nature and wildlife! Learn more here.
The Adventure Continues Online: The fun and learning continue online! Explorer Kits include a secret code that unlocks an interactive digital world. Your child will login to Junior Explorer Mission Center and join Kia and Kyle on an exciting, game-based adventure to complete their mission.
As kids solve mysteries, they learn about science, conservation, and ways to help protect different ecosystems. Check out the online experience here!
We love rewards… especially ones designed to bring out the WILD side in your kids and entire family! Check out our Kickstarter ANIMAL-TASTIC Kickstarter exclusives:
Choose from one of four explorer packs — the more you buy, the more you save with our specially discounted KICKSTARTER ONLY PRICING! Kids will love exploring, learning about exciting wildlife, and solving mysteries in places like the Arctic, Great Barrier Reef, Virunga, Serengeti and many more! Parents, trust us when we say, you too will learn more than you ever imagined!
Every adventure includes an interactive online experience:
Choose your spirit animal and wear and express your wild side! These awesome t-shirts come in both kids and adult sizes and include fun facts about your animal. Perfect for everyone in your pride, pack, herd, colony…we could go on and on. :-)
We love sharks and who doesn’t love Shark Week? This Kickstarter Exclusive reward takes your child on a deep sea adventure with our Mission Gulf Coast kit. This adventure is extra special. We have partnered up with OCEARCH (check out their Kickstarter Campaign here) to give kids the opportunity to track REAL sharks in REAL time! How cool is that? Shipped in time for Shark Week.
If you want to protect the planet and support kids in classrooms learning about what is happening and how they can make a difference… this is the reward for you! Help us get teachers the curriculum and tools they need to teach Environmental Science. You can give a Classroom License to your child’s school, a school in your neighborhood, a community center, a library, or we can select a class in need for you! (we work with many who cannot afford it and would appreciate your help!).
A Classroom Licence comes with:
Every kid loves a theme party! Make your child’s next birthday party a WILD adventure with this exclusive Junior Explorers Theme Party Kickstarter reward. Your child can choose any one of our adventures as their party theme and our team of designers and product experts will create a wild party for your child + 10 friends!
Every party pack includes these awesome things for every child:
From scouring the Arctic to locate a polar bear mom separated from her cubs to saving a silverback gorilla while exploring the Virunga Mountains in Africa, each adventure is a new mystery, in a new ecosystem full of captivating wildlife to learn about and discover!
Here is a brief description of three of our Missions:
Learn about all our current Missions here: Mission Biomes / Mission Arctic / Mission Serengeti /Mission Amazon / Mission Great Barrier Reef / Mission Everglades / Mission Virunga / Mission Yellowstone
We are a certified B-Corp, which means we are a company that uses business as a force for good. Giving back is one of our core values.
At the end of every eco-mission, kids get to donate the points the earned playing to a frontline conservation project of their choice and we match those points with a $1 donation. Our hope is that we will become one of the largest contributors to nonprofits focusing on conservation work on behalf of kids across the world.
Our Process: We developed our current program over the course of two years across a global team of 20 people in 4 time zones. Now that we’ve streamlined our development process, we’re hoping to build our education platform in less time and have it ready by October. Here’s how we did it:
Our Timeline: With almost two years of hands-on experience, we are confident we will be able to meet our delivery schedule and build top quality products for both backers and teachers. We have factored in buffers to account for any surprises and have the pieces and people in place to get started as soon as this campaign ends.
It took over two years of research and product development with a global team of educators, parents, psychologists, product designers, and science experts to create Junior Explorers. We looked at how kids today play and learn, what excites them, and designed something tailored to those needs.
We have combined all things kids love: Storytelling, adventure, animals, gaming, and sharing. Our goal is for kids to have fun so they learn without even realizing it!
We have built a successful product with a vibrant community. In the past 15 months, we have shipped over 10,000 adventure kits across 3 different countries, reaching thousands of kids. Users from all over the world have contributed to our community, sending us pictures and sharing their stories.
Parents love Junior Explorers because of its positive social message and its ability to explain a complex subject. Our approach encourages social activity, sharing and quality time among families, siblings and friends.
Teachers love Junior Explorers because it’s accessible to all sorts of learners and easily adaptable to a classroom setting. Teachers who have used our program have given us glowing reviews and are asking for more.
In just the past 2 weeks, we have had over 7000 teachers sign up asking for our program and curriculum. The demand for a great educational product that finally addresses a difficult — and timely — subject area is very real. Teachers want Junior Explorers!
Check out our Facebook page to read their comments and see how excited teachers are about what we are doing.
From the Concrete Jungle to the Real Jungle
All the messages we receive about the environment are negative and laced with doom and gloom. We knew if we wanted to truly inspire kids we had to do something different. So we created something that was fun, interactive, and experiential with a positive message! We both left corporate jobs, invested our own capital, and have been working for two years to follow our passion.
Anurag: “I grew up in India, where we have amazing biodiversity, but not the will to protect our natural resources. I have been fortunate to have explored the world and experience the natural wonders of our planet. I wanted others, especially our kids to experience the beauty of our planet and inspire them to build their own connection and passion for nature and wildlife.”
Sarah: “Every year as a child I was fortunate enough to travel to a National Park. Some of my favorite memories are of seeing wildlife at Yellowstone and being blown away by the beauty of the Grand Tetons in Idaho. Because of these trips, I developed a deep understanding of how important it is to protect our natural habitats and I want kids of today to have that same connection and understanding that I was lucky to enough to develop.”
We have all heard the phrase “it takes a village to raise a child.” Imagine how many people it takes to inspire millions of kids! We would not be able to do what we do without the help of these amazing mentors, advisors, and investors who share our passion, embrace our vision, and want to do their part for the planet! We hope you will join this list, too.
As Junior Explorers has been gaining momentum, the following partners have joined forces with us on our campaign:
Watch a trailer of “On The Wing”
We put a lot of time and thought into our Kickstarter campaign to make sure that all of our backers have an amazing experience in supporting our product. We did not want to launch our campaign until when we were 100% ready. Part of this was figuring out how to get your rewards to you within the promised delivery times — without sacrificing quality — while being cost-efficient. However, in any global production/delivery process, there can be hiccups along the way that may need to be sorted out. Don’t worry, we are the team up for any challenge, and will work relentlessly (night and day, actually!) to assure all of you feel the highest level of care and consideration.
In the last two years we have shipped over 10,000 Explorer Kits in America, 3000 in Brazil and 1000 in Singapore. 14,000 kits over three continents has helped us streamline production, identify and negotiate terms with vendors, and establish processes that are efficient and scalable. We have great relationships with our partners and we know we can count on them. Our global team is ready and has been preparing for the past 6 months for delivering on this Kickstarter campaign!
Our estimates for delivery are conservative, but we generally expect your rewards will arrive early. In the event of unexpected issues, we will keep you posted on progress (we are over communicators). We’ll make sure you’re in the know about any unforeseen problems that arise and do our best to get your rewards out to you as quickly as possible!
Our goal is for every backer to have a great “Junior Explorers” experience — we believe our product and those that back it deserves nothing less.
For backers who are waiting on our curriculum and teacher resources, we are licensing a new technology platform that requires both development and testing. Our content and technology teams are on standby and we are confident that our educator product will be ready by the beginning of the school year (Fall 2016).