Chinese tech giant Tencent has teamed up with US ed tech company Age of Learning to launch a new ABCmouse English-learning program in China.
Working closely with Age of Learning, Tencent has integrated the online platform’s current curriculum—comprised of 5,000 learning activities—into a new ABCmouse mobile app and website for China. The localization effort includes integration with Chinese instant messaging platform QQ and social network WeChat, which currently reach 783 million and one billion monthly active users, respectively.
Terms of the partnership will see Tencent handle product development, marketing, sales and customer support for the new ABCmouse program. Tencent also redesigned the brand’s titular animated mouse specifically for the Chinese market.
Aimed at children ages three to eight, ABCmouse teaches English as a second language through four phases—listening and understanding, speaking, phonics and reading, and writing. Speech-recognition technology has also been incorporated into the program, which is accessible at abcmouse.qq.com and from all major app stores in China.
Age of Learning’s Tencent alliance comes in the wake of a US$150-million venture investment from Iconiq Capital in 2017 that was partly made to bolster the company’s product expansion into emerging markets like China. The partnership also follows Tencent’s new collaboration with The LEGO Group, which spans digital games, a branded zone in Tencent’s online video platform, a localized version of coding property LEGO Boost and the potential co-development of social network LEGO Life.