True education starts at home, and Jesse Williams is on a mission to ensure that learning is fun for everyone involved.
As previously reported by AfroTech, Williams partnered with VISIBILITY to launch Homeschooled, a trivia app that offers excitement for learning like never before.
“We’re about constantly building things for us, by our own hand, that serves a purpose to the collective, but that we can also be enjoying ourselves,” Williams said to summarize the mission he and VISIBILITY have for Homeschooled.
“So much of my work, and much of our work, is very serious in nature and tone, as it should be. So we built a media company that can continue to be in service in that same direction, but with a more playful bend,” he continued.
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The Importance Of Self-Learning
The Homeschooled app emphasizes that learning begins at home and is designed with a college campus theme. This allows users to simulate the experience of selecting courses, attending classes, and engaging in friendly competition with peers or other app users.
Although the platform is heavy on the learning experience through trivia exercises, Williams notes that the offerings were intentionally constructed around categories that teach important lessons and provide a pleasant time for users.
“There are different ways to retain information, and we thought it’d be fun to create something that you can play on the train, you could play in a waiting room, that you could play it just in your crib, you could play wherever,” Williams said. “That is not a total waste of time. To put it frankly, gaming now is so incredible and the graphics are so ill and the storylines are so ill, but at a certain point, I had to step away from playing my Xbox and PlayStation for certain things. I could easily spend seven hours on this game because it’s so dope, but when I turned it off, what have I gained?”
Education Is Liberating
This is not Williams’ first rodeo in the education space. He’s been dedicated to supporting schools and students in need through previous partnerships as well as during his time as an educator himself.
That’s right, in an interview with PureWow, he revealed that before his acting career took off, he taught high school students and also once served as a long-term substitute for kindergarteners and seventh graders.
Today, his love for teaching others continues.
“Education is liberal. Education is an ability to self-determine,” Williams told AfroTech in regard to why he continues to put this at the forefront of anything he does. “It is an ability to know yourself better and push at the edges of what you think your possible potential is.”
He continued: “I don’t take full credit for that outlook. That was something that was ingrained in me from my parents and bouncing around from really disenfranchised school systems into better-off ones and learning at a very young age that we don’t always get what we deserve. In terms of opportunity, you get what the government is provided for you. You get what your community is provided. You get what your family is, and the circumstances they find themselves in. So education is the great equalizer, it can allow you to sit up straight and to have a sense of not just what you want to do, but what you can do and feel the freedom to experiment and expand and play in certain areas.”
For the “Only Murders In The Building” actor, the purpose of Homeschooled is much greater than him.
“I imagine Homeschooled as one of many, almost like a finger on a hand to a larger canvas of ways in which we can continue to grow, learn and teach with each other,” Williams said.
Click here for more on how to download the Homeschooled trivia app and check out the full interview below.
