For Le Yi Khor, efficiency has its place — but never at the cost of a child’s wonder

Ask Le Yi Khor what rule she’s breaking, and her answer begins with a quiet rebellion against efficiency. “The moment you push for efficiency too early — before a child has had the chance to explore a topic freely — you do it at the direct cost of their natural curiosity,” she says.

“Efficiency has its place, but that place is much later, during the mastery phase, not at the very beginning of the journey.”

In her telling, curiosity is not a luxury. It is survival. The founder of Ottodot, a learning platform built through games, argues that in an economy defined by rapid shifts, the only absolute job security is the ability to keep learning. “If my company vanished tomorrow, the gap would still remain,” she explains.

“We would be preparing a generation to be left behind. The pace of change today means the only real job security is the ability to learn constantly. If you don’t have that internal drive, you become obsolete.”

That drive, she insists, is seeded in childhood. The spark of curiosity — a willingness to ask “why?” and “what if?” — is fragile, easily extinguished by systems that reward correct answers over exploration. Khor sees her work as an act of protection: shielding that spark from premature standardisation, and letting it grow into confidence.

Ottodot’s games are designed to challenge as much as entertain. The fun, she says, is “the Trojan horse for real academic growth.”

Consider Fraction Action, one of the platform’s games. Students slice pizzas to understand fractions, but what matters is not the topping or the score. It is the moment when a child realises they can master abstraction.

“People miss that the fun comes from overcoming a challenge, and challenge is the very essence of learning,” Khor explains. Once the confidence clicks, a motivational flywheel begins: openness to more learning, better performance, and a readiness to try again.

Sparks over salaries

The philosophy cost her dearly at first. Fresh out of university, Khor turned down a tech salary to start Ottodot. For two years, she and her co-founders paid themselves $600 a month — “including CPF,” she notes, with a wry edge.

The sacrifice still nags at her, though less as regret than as an alternate history she sometimes wonders about. “Even now, I still wonder how life would have turned out differently had I started working first before taking the leap with Ottodot.”

What steadies her is not investor metrics or funding rounds but watching students transform. “I always go back to the students,” she says. Every lesson is recorded, and she finds herself replaying them, not to analyse product design but to witness small sparks. The quiet child answering for the first time.

The collective gasp when a class realises a level has been cracked. These moments keep her tethered to the mission, especially when the weight of growth targets threatens to hollow her out.

These sparks are not solitary. One of her favourite stories comes from an obstacle-course game through the human digestive system, where a boy got stuck identifying organs. Instead of waiting for the teacher, his classmates jumped in, guiding him through.

Play

The breakthrough was collective — the stuck student progressed, but the class, too, discovered their instinct to lift one another up. “That’s the kind of supportive community we’re trying to build,” she says. Education, at its best, becomes collaborative, joyful, and contagious.

Confidence, not clicks

The future of education, she believes, will hinge not on whether we restrict screen time but on how we use it. “You simply cannot remove screen time from a child’s life,” she says. “In fact, the more you try to remove it, the more addicted they’ll likely become when they eventually get hold of it. Instead of fighting it, we should be teaching them how to use technology to learn and create.”

That insistence — that children are already digital natives and that their curiosity must be guarded, not trimmed for efficiency — places Khor at odds with how education has long been measured. But she is unapologetic.

“Everyone is born curious,” she says. “The true role of education isn’t to create it, but to act as a guardian — to protect that innate curiosity from being extinguished as children grow up.”

It is a reminder that, for all the talk of technology, the work remains human at its core. What Ottodot sells is not merely games, but confidence, and with it, the possibility of a generation that sees learning not as a burden but as a lifelong instinct.

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