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Request for Education Startups

178 points by hobaak 9y ago

tonydiv 9y ago
I would love feedback on my project BlockSchool from anyone who is interested in ed-tech! BlockSchool is an online coding school for kids ages 6 to 13. We hire teachers from top colleges and companies like Stanford and Facebook, and connect them with students who don't have easy access to high-quality instruction. Our classes are conducted via video chat in a fun 3D block-based world where everything can be controlled by writing Puzzle code (our visual programming language), JavaScript, and Python. It's collaborative, social, and kids love the creative freedom we give them. We are focused on 1:1 and 1:2 instruction now which isn't 'scalable' but later on, we plan on offering a help service for kids only when they get stuck or need a new concept explained. This will lower the cost for students substantially. We hope to follow in the footsteps of VIPkid on this front. We are based in Seoul/SF, so we have a number of students in China, Japan, and Korea already, but a majority of our customers are in the US. If anyone is interested in offering feedback, here is our website: https://block.school https://block.school We'll be applying to YC too! Hopefully our project is relevant to what they're looking for. We're also growing quite fast :)
- hobaak 9y ago
  I am running a startup that is a market place, http://greensprout.co http://greensprout.co for afterschool programs and summer camp providers (limited to Bay area). Naturally I am interested in this space. As a Korean, it is great to see startups working from Korea. The coding school is getting popular. So, it is a good place to start. But, there are many varieties. This seems to me like a tutoring service for computer programming. As you said it is video chat, is there youtube video to introduce the service? That will be helpful. I have one kid, who is at your target. But I am not sure if I need tutoring like for block programming. I am more interested in real programming. Also, it is not clear what you will achieve at the end. But, keep doing the good work since you have traction and I guess that people like the teaching quality, which you need to keep it consistent.
  - tonydiv 9y ago
    How old is your child? Has he/she done programming before? We strongly believe any beginner should start with visual programming first. Happy to share all the reasons with you if you're interested. Here's a short clip of a class (it's also on our website): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y
- tarr11 9y ago
  I run an after school coding program for kids in the bay area. Happy to talk if you would like. Info is in my profile.
- crpatino 9y ago
  I know you (and many people in HN) do not want to think about this, but have you considered the legal liability of exposing a bunch of underage children to a group of adults under minimal/non-existent oversight? Adults taken from a demography that's famous for their low social skills and awareness, not to mention empathy. It does not have to be just sexual predators (which is probably the worst case scenario, although still on the table), but anything that could offend the parents, or any activist with an axe to grind, really. I teach a high school programming class these days, and I had to change my class plan which included the "99 bottles of beer" classic example because it is against school policy to encourage alcohol consumption in any form. You may argue whether this was justified or not, but this is the state of affairs already set in place, and you are an outsider of this industry. Even if you are right, the energy and resources devoted to fight off this conflict can derail your startup if not properly planned for and prevented.
- bskinny129 9y ago
  Hey Tony - I've been planning on reaching out to you. I've run Breakout Mentors (https://breakoutmentors.com/ https://breakoutmentors.com/) for almost 7 years now (mostly Bay Area, some online) so one of the longest for the hot kid coding space. Plus started the CoderDojo Silicon Valley chapter (http://www.coderdojosv.org/ http://www.coderdojosv.org/) and ran the tech side of things for a few years. Hit me up at brian@breakoutmentors.com
baby_wipe 9y ago
TeachBay (for grade schools) - Parents bid in an auction for seats in a teacher's classroom at the beginning of the school year, instead of having the principal assign students to teachers. This will reward the good teachers, punish the bad ones, and give everyone an incentive to do better.
- alex_g 9y ago
  This sounds terrible. Poor students get slapped down even more than they are now.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    Yes we'd have to accept some would benefit more than others. But the idea is education as whole would improve and everyone benefits.
- germinalphrase 9y ago
  Assuming parents even have adequate information to make good choices, this seems like a surefire way to create wildly unbalanced classes. Giving difficult students to a bad teacher doesn't "punish" the bad teacher - it just creates a dysfunctional learning environment for the students who need it most. I would seriously question the ethical resolve of my kid's school if they used such a system.
  - baby_wipe 9y ago
    Adequate information - Do you think principals have adequate information? If so, why couldn't they just provide it to the parents then? Besides, there are many tools such as feedback reviews + word of mouth which would help with the information asymmetry. Unbalanced classes - Classes may currently have balance within the school, but there is already a massive inbalance between schools. And why do we assume that all classrooms should have an equal distribution of IQ? Colleges do the opposite - they purposely exclude lower IQs. Difficult students going to bad teachers - Maybe this is how it would turn out. I'm not sure. (But even if it did, it would be even more of an incentive for teachers to perform better - just a thought). I would be hesitant to predict any specific outcome of this scheme, only that teachers would be more inclined to provide the service that parents actually want. Ethical grounds - I would question the ethical resolve of any school that isn't open to whatever system will help students best.
sjg007 9y ago
I would like something that increases parental involvement or at least oversight of their kids. 1:1s and close contact with your manager or team in problem solving is invaluable. What does that mean in the context of a classroom? Is it valuable? Teachers probably have 120 kids at some level so it may not scale.. And I think it's to early or weird to have kids participate in a stand up but an app to help parents understand what kids are working on and how they can help would be interesting. How can you improve the feedback loops. I think kids hit critical periods where they don't understand something and may not have the skills necessary to solve so providing some sort of peer pair (programming?) may help? Maybe start this in AP CS or a high school programming class or something and see if it is effective. The other idea is work/life balance for kids in school. How do you monitor that and help them? I think kids have more energy but at the same time need downtime etc.. What does that mean in the context of education etc..?
- jeffmould 9y ago
  My fiance's children just started in a new school system and they use an app called ClassDojo that is intended to increase involvement between teachers, parents, and the students. At any given time, my fiance can login, see photos of what the kids are doing in class, send/receive messages with the teacher(s), check grades/assignments. Compared to their previous school system, the level of involvement is beyond compare. Her son who is in middle school also uses an app called Remind that has all the assignments and communication between parent/teacher/student on specific assignments.
  - 2arrs2ells 9y ago
    ClassDojo and Remind are both alumni of ImagineK12/YC Education!
    - jeffmould 9y ago
      I can't speak from personal experience, but based on my fiance's feedback they are great tools!
- germinalphrase 9y ago
snomad 9y ago
May I point out - to YC and others interested in the space - their is a fairly large market for continuing education. Nurses, accountants, lawyers, and lots of other industries require practitioners keep up to date and take courses throughout their professional career. Perhaps their are not enough students to warrant a massive big name startup, but there are definitely enough students for a reasonable sized businesses.
- Swizec 9y ago
  In fact, there is a huge cottage industry of exactly this in at least the software engineering world. Several companies with enough revenue to make any seed-stage startup sneeze. Making tens of thousands of dollars for a 2 day workshop/corporatetraining is not unheard of. No millions of dollars from VCs required.
v4n4d1s 9y ago
It's not K-12, but some of you may be interested in reading this paper about the online exams service at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478 http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478
Kevin_S 9y ago
I know it doesn't fall neatly into any of those categories, but I'd love some feedback on my idea: I want to create an organization that is essentially a 6 week retreat for students before they begin college. Selecting the best applicants possible, they will go through rigorous training to become their most successful selves, covering Academics, Social life, Health, and Lifestyle topics. Elements of secrecy will help it's applicant pool, I was heavily inspired by the Bohemian Club. Long term, the alumni network itself will more than make up for the cost, in turn making the applicant pool stronger and stronger. It's an aggressive plan, and requires years of building up from the ground. But it's my dream to make it happen.
- MikeTheGreat 9y ago
  "Selecting the best applicants possible" I predict stunning success, based on this sentence alone. That said - I think that providing help for people who are already doing well is nice, but it doesn't really support the real goal of public education: educating (all of) the public. Unless you're thinking that this will be a great for-profit biz, with the most successfully students+parents most able to pay top dollar for this? In which case - yeah, you've got a solid idea. It's essentially the same as idea as going to Harvard/Yale/Cornell/etc. If you can get a good round of 'seed families' (students+already successful parents) it just might work.
  - Kevin_S 9y ago
    Sorry I didn't see your comment until now. Right, it is intended to be a for-profit business, not really interested in tackling better education for everyone. Long term I think a great case will be made for taking some % of students that couldn't afford it, just based on their accomplishments/skills to date. Rich parents send their under-14 yr olds to a summer camp (just for fun & MAYBE some sports lessons) and pay 10k+. For a program proven to boost their kids' chance of success, I think they'd be willing to pay even more than that.
ankyth27 9y ago
A professional football player starts playing at the age of 4-5, a professional dancer starts practicing right from childhood, but I see most people only get interested in code when they need a job and they start fearing. Our education system should introduce problem solving and coding right from primary classes, teachers should be trained exclusively for these, and the big G, F and others should collaborate with government/NGOs to produce better curriculum and teachers.
- Kevin_S 9y ago
  Disagree. Coding is one of hundreds of skills that can lead to a good career, and coding is absolutely not for everyone. Football/dance are extra-curriculars, I am all for coding being an option early on (high school?) but not anytime before then. If a kid shows an interest in coding, they'll find a way. And parents nowadays are more aware of it as a viable option Even if this seems worth it anyway, a teacher "trained" in coding is not a programmer I would trust to teach my kids coding, and hiring CS majors would be monumentally too expensive. At the end of the day it's not practical.
  - tonydiv 9y ago
    Why not before high school? As someone teaching kids, they grasp the concepts just fine at young ages and if the material is presented in a fun and personalized way, they tend to enjoy it more than other subjects (depending on how those are taught). Actively exposing your child to coding will greatly increase the likelihood they pursue it later on. Our pricing is as low as $22.50 per hour with a friend, which I consider pretty affordable compared to many extra curriculars!
    - TarpitCarnivore 9y ago
      There's no issue with having an introduction to computer classes and the fundamentals to some, but the original comment was more in the line of making it a mandatory class. They need exposure, but it shouldn't be forced on them. Fostering an interest is far better than demanding kids sit in a 40 minute class to learn functions. Also $22.50 may seem cheap, but it is quite expensive especially if a family has 2-3 kids that they'd like to enroll.
kodable 9y ago
Oh hey! We're one of the companies on this list :) We went through IK12 (now a part of YC, same people) and it was the single best decision we ever made for Kodable. Education companies have some pretty unique problems, and it is almost guaranteed that the partners will have seen it before, know how to handle it, or at least be able to connect you with someone that has. At this point I think that YC/IK12 companies have a presence in pretty much every school in the USA and most countries around the world, so the network of edtech startups you get access to is just incredible. Edtech startups can be really hard, but this is one of the few things you can do that will actually make it just a little bit easier. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out - Jon at Kodable dot com
pergadad 9y ago
I work on the policy side of digitalisation. Looking at the things listed in the YC call this all doesn't seem too much line the things that are really needed. Here some major issues that education (thinking here mainly about schools but this covers all sectors. And about developed counties other than the US, which has a strange, immensely commercialised education) faces : - cost (depending on the country education can be 3-8% of GDP), most of which is salary - equity - even in the best of countries kids with the right parents fare much better - changing demographics - massive increases (including migrants but also due to housing cycles etc) in some areas while in some villages a school might end with 6 students, all at different ages. - how to truly personalise learning (without kids being on devices all day or teachers having to insert massive amounts of data) - teacher training in subject matter, technical skills and pedagogies, while time and resources are limited - lack of good teachers (often due to pay...) - relevance of learning content and methods - improving assessment - lack of time for teachers (choose resources, plan lessons, learn new rules /curricula, do a lot of admin,... -measuring impact of new policy /tools /... (issues are scale, the direct cause-effect link, worry about too much /instructive tracking, etc) I think for none of these there are any good solutions out there short of throwing money at the system, which few places can /want to do. For anything to find actual uptake in education it needs to be timely, cost-effective, easy to train /use, respect very specific laws, and tested /proven in a real setting. There are huge concerns about issues such as vendor lock-in. And looking at some of the proposals listed, there are things that seem crazy /near-evil, eg the suggestion to give a system free to schools but let parents pay. This seems like a rather negative post, but I just mean to give a bit of perspective. Education is complex, deeply personal, so emotional, immensely important, shapes and determines society and our common future. There is a massive amount of both idealism and frustration on the part of the people involved (especially teachers) . Most have experienced a dozen broken tech promises and been covered in advertising leaflets of questionable commercial providers. All that ends with either the same pretty much evil players dominating this complex market (everyone in education hates Pearson but few can avoid using some of their products as they know how to play the system, including the funding models and rules ), or with an increased influx of highly commercial tech players (Google, Microsoft, Apple,) which don't understand/care for the aims of education and just see a massive market and an opportunity to train the next generation of users on their systems. Maybe you'll have some ideas... :-)
jfaucett 9y ago
I've been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that's the only part I've been working on thus far. I'm not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don't really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn't allow it to happen either. But anyway I'll put the gist of the idea up here. I'd like to see what everyone thinks. I've been working on it anyway even if it is completely futile, just because I at least want the software for this to exist and maybe somewhere, some government would allow it to happen. So here goes. Basically, number one indicator of success in school (excluding socio-economic factors) is having good teachers and very low student/teacher ratios, ideally 1-1 for most tasks (i.e traditional tutoring) and very small groups i.e. 3-5 per teacher for group work. Small groups have tons of benefits from keeping kids focused to dealing with misbehaving kids, etc. Anyway, the idea consist in doing away with the traditional concept of a teacher at the primary school level (but eventually all levels). You can do this by hiring all your teachers on an hourly basis and leveraging college students, stay at home moms/dads, or just anyone with a GED and wanting to make a few extra bucks on the side. These teachers can work even just a couple hours a week if they want. Also, you don't have to have high standards on anything other than the teachers ability to communicate, being nice and helpful,liking to work with kids, and having a GED. The calculations I've done allow you to cut your student/teacher ratios by about a factor 3-4 and additionally allow for special tutoring of kids who need it for a couple hours a week. Another key aspect of the model is that now kids are in smaller groups and can be paired with others who work roughly at their own pace, also I want to note that age no longer plays a role in determining which classes a student is in. The whole time we're doing this the teachers and students are using software that has learning algorithms designed to tailor learning materials to the particular student. That student, then has a personalized and adaptive learning pathway through the digital courses at his school. There is also no longer the idea of a particular "year of work". Students take a comprehensive exam to exit every class and a fully comprehensive end of year exam for the courses they have mastered in that years time frame. All students can move more or less freely to and from groups and take these exams whenever they want, skipping entire courses if they have already mastered the materials and can prove it by passing the exams. So its not age but ability which determines where a student is placed. You can think of a school year (or a entire primary through high school curricula) as a graph where the classes are nodes and to go from one class to the next all a student needs to do is pass a particular exam. The only real pedagogical emphasis is that we try to teach students how to teach themselves and provide them the digital materials to do so. Also my dream would be to be able to offer this to kids from the poorest neighborhoods first, because they're the ones who would benefit the most from a small group learning environment and 1-1 tutorship. Anyway, that's the idea. If anyone is interested in helping out, please ping me up (email in bio). Right now the software is slow going since its just been me and my brother working on this in our spare time. Thanks for the feedback.
grendelt 9y ago
PLEASE have someone with an education background on your team. (Preferably classroom experience.) Don't assume what teachers want and need. Don't just survey teachers. Get them on your team and have them help steer your product development.
- TarpitCarnivore 9y ago
  I worked in a school's IT department a few years ago and the way the approach to tech worked was downright frustrating. It basically culminated in teachers request XYZ and us providing it. No one, not even our director, took the time to find out what the actual needs were for teachers. All they did was throw money and technology at the teachers and said "here, use it". I get really uncomfortable when people without any experience inside of a school try to solve problems by just throwing technology at it. There is so much more to a classroom then just having a tablet or chromebook and wifi. The biggest hurdle is always going to be our curriculum set up and how incredibly inflexible it can be in schools; not to mention how many of them are downright jokes when it comes to K-12 tech education. Edit: Going to go an extra further here and say no solution for education with tech is valuable unless you can provide a way to make the administration, teachers and parents understand the value in. This means not only making it known why they should try your new startup, but also providing some top notch on-boarding and training. Far too many companies come in and make a product look like gold, but then bail when the time comes to get some continued training on something. Also understand that a lot of schools have very constrained budgets. It's simply not easy to justifying projects in the XX-XXX thousands range of a budget. So if you're doing this also be sure to figure out some steps on how to work with the school to find ways of justifying the finance, or perhaps grants from the state, to implement this. Be mindful of state curriculum guidelines as well. Every state has their own guidelines for the different subject areas of education. There are bulleted items that schools must hit to meet them so you need to consider this. You simply cannot come in and say "here's some VR headset to use for history". Work with teachers and administration to have boilerplate lesson plans to meet the criteria of the curriculum. They've been doing things for years and are already busy. The last thing they'll have time for is sitting down to re-write lesson plans to fit a piece of technology in. Some will be eager to do it, but a higher percentage will probably be resistant. These are all issues and observations I saw when I was getting my education degree and then working in schools for 5+ years. Things have changed a bunch since I left (2011) but I'm sure a lot of these headaches still remain in various ways. There is so much to what makes a classroom work and work well that isn't just in the tool. Teachers, administration and parents have to buy in 100%.
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jpereira 9y ago
These all seem to be assuming the institution-teacher-student model of education we have today. Even the "New school models" section is assuming a delivered experience, which has an institutional bent. I think biggest area of disruption in education would be in building fundamentally new architectures for educational systems, based on networks and social communities instead of funnels and institutions. The latter have a pretty huge list of undesirable properties and negative externalities, especially in how they limit diverse experiences and learning. An eye-opening read on this front for me has been Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich [0]. It's insane how much of what he wrote 40 years ago still holds true. [0] http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  The way to achieve your goals would be through lobbying your local school district, state education agency, and state legislature (if your American). A startup has limited power and no legal authority to change the public education system.
  - BadassFractal 9y ago
    In addition, the VC model isn't particularly well suited for this. How many generations will it take for parents to accept en masse a radically redesigned approach to schooling? A big part of schooling is babysitting + credentialing, you can't disrupt that over a few years with so much of society relying on those functions.
  - jpereira 9y ago
    I don't think this needs to be directly tied to public education. My concern is more that educational startups tend to assume an institutional model (i.e an institutions defines what is being learned, how it's being learned etc etc). They don't need to change public education but rather create services that embody a different educational paradigm. For example a matchmaking service for shared learning goals or interests could for sure be within the power of a startup. Something like 42[0] but without a fixed institution. Or community level organized learning environments for various subjects. Or even to go more in the vien of Papert and Turtle, a npm type system but with a strict pedagogical focus. There's a ton of systems that can be hugely powerful without depending on a classroom model or a school/institution. And there's no reason these can't be as impactful or more as systems and services targeted towards public/institutional education. [0] https://www.42.us.org/ https://www.42.us.org/
jerrac 9y ago
I work in the IT department at a community college. One of the biggest costs we face is our ERP, Ellucian's Banner. I'm not on that team, but the number of times I've been interrupted by them talking about a problem in Banner is really really high. AFAIK, the biggest reason there are no real competitors is that Ellucian does a good job packaging the law and regulation related stuff for financial aid. Apparently that's difficult enough that no open source alternative or non-open source company has been able to do better. I'd love to see someone fix that problem.
graniter 9y ago
It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instruction, student work, and assessment. Students should be able to receive instruction in multiple ways (1on1, group, watch videos), do their work with something like TAs, and be assessed at their own pace. Japan is starting to see to super-star teachers that parent pay for. Why do we always need a teacher to provide direct instruction in the classroom? Why can't we reward the best instructors, like Kahn, by having kids be instructed that way? The reason is because instruction, work, and assessment are not separated now. I wish there were more experimentation in education, but since everything is a big ball of wax paid for with property taxes, there's a lot of reluctance for anyone to experiment with their kid, and since it's all or nothing, there just are minor experiments in the classroom We need tech to find a way to scale the classroom and deliver it cheaply to students, and I think we need a separation of concerns in order for that to happen.
- jpereira 9y ago
  It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground. I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the test. This creates even more messed up incentives but this time facing students and teachers as opposed to institutional practices. I think that assessment, when decoupled, can't be done with an institution or institutions. Instead we need social networks that use a consensus process to define knowledge and who has it.
  - graniter 9y ago
    Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for education, having an assessor focus on assessments, independent and separate from instruction, might make it so that there could be easier to assess and more types of assessment, so the teacher doesn't have to always do it. And that might help compare results across teachers. College Board owns SAT, AP, and (essentially) Common Core so there's been a trend to tighter coupling. I like the idea of an AP Test that anyone can and be assessed separate from the teacher. Same for SAT. I think we need more of that model, not less.
Mz 9y ago
Something I don't see on the list: Homeschooling related startups Big companies can be a unique resource for small, independent operations. In k-12 education, some of the smallest and most independent are homeschooling families. They need to comply with state laws. They sometimes need to accommodate 2xe students. They need to prove their children actually received an education. There are no doubt other areas where they could use help. This is often done currently via free websites, free email lists, etc. There is a homeschoolers legal aid group or something. I was a member when I was homeschooling. So, there are some supports already, but it tends to be pretty sparse and a lot is local, homegrown.
- philipps 9y ago
  Homeschooling is the right entry point for disruptive change. The new home schooling community (as opposed to the traditional religion focused home schoolers) is large and growing and much more open to new ideas than the education system.
  - Mz 9y ago
    I was a secular homeschooler, so I forget that this distinction even needs to be made. Thank you for bringing it up. One subset of the homeschooling community is gifted kids who don't fit in well at school. They frequently have either a very high IQ, above what gifted programs are geared to, or are 2xE or both. Their parents are often well educated and comfortably middle class. The needs of this populatuon would likely be a good point of entry.
bluetwo 9y ago
What about corporate educational systems?
alphonsegaston 9y ago
I really hope this isn't driven by a desire to capitalize on the coming wave of school privatization under DeVos. What she and her compatriots have done to Michigan's school system is not only a tragedy for the communities they serve, but also a demonstrable failure: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-s... Tech lipstick on underperforming, segregated, for-profit schools isn't going to make them any prettier.
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ams6110 9y ago
> For instance, we believe there’s potential for a company to build a service that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for the service. I disagree. I already pay taxes, book fees, technology fees, extracurricular fees to my school district. I would not pay another cent for anything I didn't have to pay. A big problem in K-12 education today is actually over-involvement of parents. Helicoptering, or whatever you want to call it. Sure a teacher wants parent support -- but from home. They do not want to, do not have time for, and should not be dealing with 20 parent interactions a day, technology-assisted or not.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  The bigger problem is that it would make it much harder for poor parents to keep up with the richer ones because they could not afford the service.
  - jamestimmins 9y ago
    This problem has a solution (albeit an imperfect one), which is charging wealthier schools more in order to charge more poor schools less. Obviously that model has drawbacks, but it may work better with a tech product than other areas, where marginal cost is relatively small.
    - BadassFractal 9y ago
      We already have that, it's called Title I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...
BinaryIdiot 9y ago
I used to work as a developer for an online charter school many years back so this space is very familiar. I even thought about starting my own company and breaking into this space because the software I worked on wasn't very good (it was miles above what was already out there, for sure, but I thought there were many places that could be improved). The problem I ran into, which completely discouraged me at the time, was that of making money. You need a significant amount of capital to sell to a private school and a public school requires sales cycles of at least a couple of years. It just wasn't possible with me already having a family, mortgage, etc. I would love to see the whole thing get disrupted. I even think about doing something in it from time to time. Having YC behind you would certainly be a big help. One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. This is the biggest hurdle, IMO, because it's so easy to just appeal to someone's bias narrative. For example "brain games" which "train" your brain basically only train it to play those games but they're still hugely popular and sometimes marketed to the same demographics.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  > One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. Don't let the barely adequate be the enemy of the actively harmful. Most education research is of low quality and education does not incorporate known effective techniques like mastery learning or spaced repetition. Education degrees and education research deserve all the respect they get.
  - hdctambien 9y ago
    Honestly, fixing the education of educators would be the best long term solution. Alternatively, creating a complete, ready-to-go curriculum package for every course (as defined in every state) that could be handed to anyone might be a startup-able solution to that problem. Although, that might also just be a patch that leads to a local maximum of not-very-good teachers teaching from better-than-before curriculum. Where making better teachers would lead to better teaching (eventually).
jacquesm 9y ago
> For instance, we believe there’s potential for a company to build a service that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for the service. I'm sure that will play well with parents that are already straining under the load. This sort of thing is so rife with bias that it is very hard to step away from your privileged position for the 30 seconds that it takes to vet the idea that you have to wonder why this cycle repeats over and over again. Any kind of parental contribution to the school system outside of taxes will end up as a way to differentiate between the haves and the have-nots and at best will lead to children from disadvantaged environments not being able to take part in fun stuff, at worst it will disadvantage them even further. This kind of thinking seems to be present in more than one YC project, the misguided attempt at their version of 'basic income' which fails to take even the most basic precautions against doing damage rather than improving things is another.
baron816 9y ago
I don't know if this exists, but I think something like a "GitHub for textbooks" would be valuable. Let people (teachers or otherwise) collaborate together on open source textbooks and create a pretty UI for reading those books (like GitBook).
jxramos 9y ago
I wonder if the Ycombinator folks may have recently watched School Inc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI)
cosinetau 9y ago
Anyone want to take a crack at MyMathLab?
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  Speaking of maths, I'd like to see a cheaper TI-83. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/
  - cosinetau 9y ago
    Do you mean wolfram alpha?
    - cosinetau 9y ago
      Or, whatever you know. You can reinvent the wheel for all I care. https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83 https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83
deleted 9y ago
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gnicholas 9y ago
Interesting that learning science is not represented in the categories — something along the lines of: "There's lots of research on ways in which material can be presented that makes it easier for kids to learn. We would encourage companies that have relevant expertise and the ability to bring research-backed technology to market." Or is there not an interest in something like this?
shanev 9y ago
Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $Bs doing this for young founders. 4/ The more meritocratic an industry, the faster it moves away from false credentialing. I.e., the MBA and tech startups. 5/ A generation of auto-didacts, educated by the Internet & leveraged by technology, will eventually starve the industrial-education system. 6/ Until then, only the most desperate and talented students will make the leap. 7/ Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. 8/ The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. 9/ The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. 10/ Educational credentials are badges that admit one to the elite class. Expect elites to struggle mightily to justify the current system. 11/ Eventually, the tide of the Internet and rational, self-interested employers will create and accept efficient credentialing... 12/ ...and wash away our obsolete industrial-education system. [1]: https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160 https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160
- alexashka 9y ago
  The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim? This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess. Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is. Go ask engineers how many of them get to engineer anything. Go ask how many people in science get to work on interesting problems or can even get a job in the area they studied. We have the smartest people ever, with access to the most information and the best technology of all time, to make incredible things. It's just hard to get to do those things - when the economy is in this frenzy of quarterly profits. The decision-makers are 'buy for a dollar, sell for two'. Their worldview is incompatible with education, because you don't need education to make profit, you need someone to exploit to make profit. That's the world we've always lived in by the way, this is not new. The traders sometimes believe some specific technology, would make them incredible profits, so they become interested in education for a minute, and then get busy with everyday business as usual. This is why science has become toxic via the grant system - 'promise a miracle to get money for research.' I don't see a world where tradesmen relinquish their powerhold - creative people are always going to either be starving artists, with dignity, or shameless shills. Since the idea of starvation only appeals to a few, we have 'desire to learn is scarce.' It's against human nature to choose starvation you know :)
ontouchstart 9y ago
A lot of great ideas and important issues on Education startups can be found in this 5-hour long video "Technology In Education: Witnesses testified on technological advances in education." recorded on OCTOBER 12, 1995. https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education
- philipps 9y ago
  I second this. The panel includes true visionaries like Adam Kay and Seymour Papert. Seymour's comment about kids learning french in France remains one of the most compelling suggestions for the type of technology-supported learning we should be focusing on. The comments above contain many of the reasons why change is hard and slow, but education needs more of these kinds of big ideas rather than incremental improvements of the current system. I also find it useful to distinguish between the process of learning and the system of education.
pier25 9y ago
I work in an education company. As ironic as it sounds, we've found the biggest factor that is stoping change in K12 education is that teachers systematically refuse to learn anything new. It's not in the US though so YMMV.
deleted 9y ago
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MozillaUser 9y ago
Please make an alternative computer science DEGREE, YES with a DEGREE (equivalent to brick and mortar) that is affordable and suitable for working adults
adamsea 9y ago
School has played a socialization role for kids and a role in the community - teachers have often been role models, and education has often extended beyond the subjects taught, to, at its best, teaching deeper life skills. And then of course there are various troubled or at-risk populations of students where no amount of educational technology will help because they come from broken homes and underserved communities. This is not to denigrate the idea of Education Startups, but rather, to point out the broader scope of "education".
peterburkimsher 9y ago
I'm making my own learning materials for self-studying Chinese. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io VoiceTube is a similar startup company that scaled this up to help people learn English. http://www.voicetube.com http://www.voicetube.com I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. I emailed 100 Chinese teachers in universities around Taiwan, but didn't get any replies. If someone wants to do the business and marketing, I'm happy to give you everything I've done so far.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  > https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io > I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. A couple of suggestions: 1) Find someone learning Chinese who's physically near you (so you can be in the same room) but who you don't know personally, e.g. someone at a meetup. Open your site, and give them your laptop and observe what they do. (Don't ask them questions, until they get stuck and ask for help. Just observe.) 2) Try to answer these questions: - What do you have now (data and/or functionality)? - To what people could those be useful? - In which contexts? - What else would they need in order to get started using this? 3) Try out some other Chinese learning tools (ChinesePod, Popup Chinese, Decipher Chinese, Chairman's Bao, ...) and, for each one, make notes on paper about each thing that happens after you first visit the site (or open the app). That will help you understand onboarding flows. My email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss in detail. I'm in Beijing, so same time zone as Taiwan.
ChicagoDave 9y ago
If I didn't have five kids, one in college, and monthly financial minimums that preclude taking time off from regular work, I'd jump at applying for YC. I even _had_ a great ed-tech startup... 5 years ago ... Textfyre Final Presentation, 2012 http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Presentation%20September%202012%20V3.3.pdf http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese... (The slide with the team has been removed...no need to share that info) We were in talks for a couple of months with Gates Foundation, but our timing was off. They had just pivoted away from helping startups to giving millions of dollars to big education publishers like Pearson. I gave up after realizing that I'd vastly under-estimated the networking (and cash) requirements in even proving the plan. Education is a really hard business to crack and we were targeting textbooks. Fast-forward a couple of years, maybe 2014-15, and I'm listening to a gal from Pearson being interviewed on NPR. She's essentially spouting many of Textfyre's ideas (embedded testing, interactive content, variable reading levels). I laughed and cried at the same time. The funny part is, not a single person ever told me the plan was bad. They just told me the education business sucks and it would cost a lot of money. But bar-none, everyone _loved_ the plan. And this goes through to today. I chat about this plan once in awhile with someone that's peripherally interested in ed-tech and they all say, "Why aren't you still working on THAT!" I'd love to. Write me a check.

178 points by hobaak 9y ago

I would love feedback on my project BlockSchool from anyone who is interested in ed-tech! BlockSchool is an online coding school for kids ages 6 to 13. We hire teachers from top colleges and companies like Stanford and Facebook, and connect them with students who don't have easy access to high-quality instruction. Our classes are conducted via video chat in a fun 3D block-based world where everything can be controlled by writing Puzzle code (our visual programming language), JavaScript, and Python. It's collaborative, social, and kids love the creative freedom we give them. We are focused on 1:1 and 1:2 instruction now which isn't 'scalable' but later on, we plan on offering a help service for kids only when they get stuck or need a new concept explained. This will lower the cost for students substantially. We hope to follow in the footsteps of VIPkid on this front. We are based in Seoul/SF, so we have a number of students in China, Japan, and Korea already, but a majority of our customers are in the US. If anyone is interested in offering feedback, here is our website: https://block.school https://block.school We'll be applying to YC too! Hopefully our project is relevant to what they're looking for. We're also growing quite fast :)

hobaak 9y ago
I am running a startup that is a market place, http://greensprout.co http://greensprout.co for afterschool programs and summer camp providers (limited to Bay area). Naturally I am interested in this space. As a Korean, it is great to see startups working from Korea. The coding school is getting popular. So, it is a good place to start. But, there are many varieties. This seems to me like a tutoring service for computer programming. As you said it is video chat, is there youtube video to introduce the service? That will be helpful. I have one kid, who is at your target. But I am not sure if I need tutoring like for block programming. I am more interested in real programming. Also, it is not clear what you will achieve at the end. But, keep doing the good work since you have traction and I guess that people like the teaching quality, which you need to keep it consistent.
- tonydiv 9y ago
  How old is your child? Has he/she done programming before? We strongly believe any beginner should start with visual programming first. Happy to share all the reasons with you if you're interested. Here's a short clip of a class (it's also on our website): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y
tarr11 9y ago
I run an after school coding program for kids in the bay area. Happy to talk if you would like. Info is in my profile.
crpatino 9y ago
I know you (and many people in HN) do not want to think about this, but have you considered the legal liability of exposing a bunch of underage children to a group of adults under minimal/non-existent oversight? Adults taken from a demography that's famous for their low social skills and awareness, not to mention empathy. It does not have to be just sexual predators (which is probably the worst case scenario, although still on the table), but anything that could offend the parents, or any activist with an axe to grind, really. I teach a high school programming class these days, and I had to change my class plan which included the "99 bottles of beer" classic example because it is against school policy to encourage alcohol consumption in any form. You may argue whether this was justified or not, but this is the state of affairs already set in place, and you are an outsider of this industry. Even if you are right, the energy and resources devoted to fight off this conflict can derail your startup if not properly planned for and prevented.
bskinny129 9y ago
Hey Tony - I've been planning on reaching out to you. I've run Breakout Mentors (https://breakoutmentors.com/ https://breakoutmentors.com/) for almost 7 years now (mostly Bay Area, some online) so one of the longest for the hot kid coding space. Plus started the CoderDojo Silicon Valley chapter (http://www.coderdojosv.org/ http://www.coderdojosv.org/) and ran the tech side of things for a few years. Hit me up at brian@breakoutmentors.com

baby_wipe 9y ago

TeachBay (for grade schools) - Parents bid in an auction for seats in a teacher's classroom at the beginning of the school year, instead of having the principal assign students to teachers. This will reward the good teachers, punish the bad ones, and give everyone an incentive to do better.

alex_g 9y ago
This sounds terrible. Poor students get slapped down even more than they are now.
- randyrand 9y ago
  Yes we'd have to accept some would benefit more than others. But the idea is education as whole would improve and everyone benefits.
germinalphrase 9y ago
Assuming parents even have adequate information to make good choices, this seems like a surefire way to create wildly unbalanced classes. Giving difficult students to a bad teacher doesn't "punish" the bad teacher - it just creates a dysfunctional learning environment for the students who need it most. I would seriously question the ethical resolve of my kid's school if they used such a system.
- baby_wipe 9y ago
  Adequate information - Do you think principals have adequate information? If so, why couldn't they just provide it to the parents then? Besides, there are many tools such as feedback reviews + word of mouth which would help with the information asymmetry. Unbalanced classes - Classes may currently have balance within the school, but there is already a massive inbalance between schools. And why do we assume that all classrooms should have an equal distribution of IQ? Colleges do the opposite - they purposely exclude lower IQs. Difficult students going to bad teachers - Maybe this is how it would turn out. I'm not sure. (But even if it did, it would be even more of an incentive for teachers to perform better - just a thought). I would be hesitant to predict any specific outcome of this scheme, only that teachers would be more inclined to provide the service that parents actually want. Ethical grounds - I would question the ethical resolve of any school that isn't open to whatever system will help students best.

sjg007 9y ago

I would like something that increases parental involvement or at least oversight of their kids. 1:1s and close contact with your manager or team in problem solving is invaluable. What does that mean in the context of a classroom? Is it valuable? Teachers probably have 120 kids at some level so it may not scale.. And I think it's to early or weird to have kids participate in a stand up but an app to help parents understand what kids are working on and how they can help would be interesting. How can you improve the feedback loops. I think kids hit critical periods where they don't understand something and may not have the skills necessary to solve so providing some sort of peer pair (programming?) may help? Maybe start this in AP CS or a high school programming class or something and see if it is effective. The other idea is work/life balance for kids in school. How do you monitor that and help them? I think kids have more energy but at the same time need downtime etc.. What does that mean in the context of education etc..?

jeffmould 9y ago
My fiance's children just started in a new school system and they use an app called ClassDojo that is intended to increase involvement between teachers, parents, and the students. At any given time, my fiance can login, see photos of what the kids are doing in class, send/receive messages with the teacher(s), check grades/assignments. Compared to their previous school system, the level of involvement is beyond compare. Her son who is in middle school also uses an app called Remind that has all the assignments and communication between parent/teacher/student on specific assignments.
- 2arrs2ells 9y ago
  ClassDojo and Remind are both alumni of ImagineK12/YC Education!
  - jeffmould 9y ago
    I can't speak from personal experience, but based on my fiance's feedback they are great tools!
germinalphrase 9y ago

snomad 9y ago

May I point out - to YC and others interested in the space - their is a fairly large market for continuing education. Nurses, accountants, lawyers, and lots of other industries require practitioners keep up to date and take courses throughout their professional career. Perhaps their are not enough students to warrant a massive big name startup, but there are definitely enough students for a reasonable sized businesses.

Swizec 9y ago
In fact, there is a huge cottage industry of exactly this in at least the software engineering world. Several companies with enough revenue to make any seed-stage startup sneeze. Making tens of thousands of dollars for a 2 day workshop/corporatetraining is not unheard of. No millions of dollars from VCs required.

v4n4d1s 9y ago

It's not K-12, but some of you may be interested in reading this paper about the online exams service at ETH Zurich (Switzerland). http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478 http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478

Kevin_S 9y ago

I know it doesn't fall neatly into any of those categories, but I'd love some feedback on my idea: I want to create an organization that is essentially a 6 week retreat for students before they begin college. Selecting the best applicants possible, they will go through rigorous training to become their most successful selves, covering Academics, Social life, Health, and Lifestyle topics. Elements of secrecy will help it's applicant pool, I was heavily inspired by the Bohemian Club. Long term, the alumni network itself will more than make up for the cost, in turn making the applicant pool stronger and stronger. It's an aggressive plan, and requires years of building up from the ground. But it's my dream to make it happen.

MikeTheGreat 9y ago
"Selecting the best applicants possible" I predict stunning success, based on this sentence alone. That said - I think that providing help for people who are already doing well is nice, but it doesn't really support the real goal of public education: educating (all of) the public. Unless you're thinking that this will be a great for-profit biz, with the most successfully students+parents most able to pay top dollar for this? In which case - yeah, you've got a solid idea. It's essentially the same as idea as going to Harvard/Yale/Cornell/etc. If you can get a good round of 'seed families' (students+already successful parents) it just might work.
- Kevin_S 9y ago
  Sorry I didn't see your comment until now. Right, it is intended to be a for-profit business, not really interested in tackling better education for everyone. Long term I think a great case will be made for taking some % of students that couldn't afford it, just based on their accomplishments/skills to date. Rich parents send their under-14 yr olds to a summer camp (just for fun & MAYBE some sports lessons) and pay 10k+. For a program proven to boost their kids' chance of success, I think they'd be willing to pay even more than that.

ankyth27 9y ago

A professional football player starts playing at the age of 4-5, a professional dancer starts practicing right from childhood, but I see most people only get interested in code when they need a job and they start fearing. Our education system should introduce problem solving and coding right from primary classes, teachers should be trained exclusively for these, and the big G, F and others should collaborate with government/NGOs to produce better curriculum and teachers.

Kevin_S 9y ago
Disagree. Coding is one of hundreds of skills that can lead to a good career, and coding is absolutely not for everyone. Football/dance are extra-curriculars, I am all for coding being an option early on (high school?) but not anytime before then. If a kid shows an interest in coding, they'll find a way. And parents nowadays are more aware of it as a viable option Even if this seems worth it anyway, a teacher "trained" in coding is not a programmer I would trust to teach my kids coding, and hiring CS majors would be monumentally too expensive. At the end of the day it's not practical.
- tonydiv 9y ago
  Why not before high school? As someone teaching kids, they grasp the concepts just fine at young ages and if the material is presented in a fun and personalized way, they tend to enjoy it more than other subjects (depending on how those are taught). Actively exposing your child to coding will greatly increase the likelihood they pursue it later on. Our pricing is as low as $22.50 per hour with a friend, which I consider pretty affordable compared to many extra curriculars!
  - TarpitCarnivore 9y ago
    There's no issue with having an introduction to computer classes and the fundamentals to some, but the original comment was more in the line of making it a mandatory class. They need exposure, but it shouldn't be forced on them. Fostering an interest is far better than demanding kids sit in a 40 minute class to learn functions. Also $22.50 may seem cheap, but it is quite expensive especially if a family has 2-3 kids that they'd like to enroll.

kodable 9y ago

Oh hey! We're one of the companies on this list :) We went through IK12 (now a part of YC, same people) and it was the single best decision we ever made for Kodable. Education companies have some pretty unique problems, and it is almost guaranteed that the partners will have seen it before, know how to handle it, or at least be able to connect you with someone that has. At this point I think that YC/IK12 companies have a presence in pretty much every school in the USA and most countries around the world, so the network of edtech startups you get access to is just incredible. Edtech startups can be really hard, but this is one of the few things you can do that will actually make it just a little bit easier. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out - Jon at Kodable dot com

pergadad 9y ago

I work on the policy side of digitalisation. Looking at the things listed in the YC call this all doesn't seem too much line the things that are really needed. Here some major issues that education (thinking here mainly about schools but this covers all sectors. And about developed counties other than the US, which has a strange, immensely commercialised education) faces : - cost (depending on the country education can be 3-8% of GDP), most of which is salary - equity - even in the best of countries kids with the right parents fare much better - changing demographics - massive increases (including migrants but also due to housing cycles etc) in some areas while in some villages a school might end with 6 students, all at different ages. - how to truly personalise learning (without kids being on devices all day or teachers having to insert massive amounts of data) - teacher training in subject matter, technical skills and pedagogies, while time and resources are limited - lack of good teachers (often due to pay...) - relevance of learning content and methods - improving assessment - lack of time for teachers (choose resources, plan lessons, learn new rules /curricula, do a lot of admin,... -measuring impact of new policy /tools /... (issues are scale, the direct cause-effect link, worry about too much /instructive tracking, etc) I think for none of these there are any good solutions out there short of throwing money at the system, which few places can /want to do. For anything to find actual uptake in education it needs to be timely, cost-effective, easy to train /use, respect very specific laws, and tested /proven in a real setting. There are huge concerns about issues such as vendor lock-in. And looking at some of the proposals listed, there are things that seem crazy /near-evil, eg the suggestion to give a system free to schools but let parents pay. This seems like a rather negative post, but I just mean to give a bit of perspective. Education is complex, deeply personal, so emotional, immensely important, shapes and determines society and our common future. There is a massive amount of both idealism and frustration on the part of the people involved (especially teachers) . Most have experienced a dozen broken tech promises and been covered in advertising leaflets of questionable commercial providers. All that ends with either the same pretty much evil players dominating this complex market (everyone in education hates Pearson but few can avoid using some of their products as they know how to play the system, including the funding models and rules ), or with an increased influx of highly commercial tech players (Google, Microsoft, Apple,) which don't understand/care for the aims of education and just see a massive market and an opportunity to train the next generation of users on their systems. Maybe you'll have some ideas... :-)

jfaucett 9y ago

I've been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that's the only part I've been working on thus far. I'm not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don't really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn't allow it to happen either. But anyway I'll put the gist of the idea up here. I'd like to see what everyone thinks. I've been working on it anyway even if it is completely futile, just because I at least want the software for this to exist and maybe somewhere, some government would allow it to happen. So here goes. Basically, number one indicator of success in school (excluding socio-economic factors) is having good teachers and very low student/teacher ratios, ideally 1-1 for most tasks (i.e traditional tutoring) and very small groups i.e. 3-5 per teacher for group work. Small groups have tons of benefits from keeping kids focused to dealing with misbehaving kids, etc. Anyway, the idea consist in doing away with the traditional concept of a teacher at the primary school level (but eventually all levels). You can do this by hiring all your teachers on an hourly basis and leveraging college students, stay at home moms/dads, or just anyone with a GED and wanting to make a few extra bucks on the side. These teachers can work even just a couple hours a week if they want. Also, you don't have to have high standards on anything other than the teachers ability to communicate, being nice and helpful,liking to work with kids, and having a GED. The calculations I've done allow you to cut your student/teacher ratios by about a factor 3-4 and additionally allow for special tutoring of kids who need it for a couple hours a week. Another key aspect of the model is that now kids are in smaller groups and can be paired with others who work roughly at their own pace, also I want to note that age no longer plays a role in determining which classes a student is in. The whole time we're doing this the teachers and students are using software that has learning algorithms designed to tailor learning materials to the particular student. That student, then has a personalized and adaptive learning pathway through the digital courses at his school. There is also no longer the idea of a particular "year of work". Students take a comprehensive exam to exit every class and a fully comprehensive end of year exam for the courses they have mastered in that years time frame. All students can move more or less freely to and from groups and take these exams whenever they want, skipping entire courses if they have already mastered the materials and can prove it by passing the exams. So its not age but ability which determines where a student is placed. You can think of a school year (or a entire primary through high school curricula) as a graph where the classes are nodes and to go from one class to the next all a student needs to do is pass a particular exam. The only real pedagogical emphasis is that we try to teach students how to teach themselves and provide them the digital materials to do so. Also my dream would be to be able to offer this to kids from the poorest neighborhoods first, because they're the ones who would benefit the most from a small group learning environment and 1-1 tutorship. Anyway, that's the idea. If anyone is interested in helping out, please ping me up (email in bio). Right now the software is slow going since its just been me and my brother working on this in our spare time. Thanks for the feedback.

grendelt 9y ago

PLEASE have someone with an education background on your team. (Preferably classroom experience.) Don't assume what teachers want and need. Don't just survey teachers. Get them on your team and have them help steer your product development.

TarpitCarnivore 9y ago
I worked in a school's IT department a few years ago and the way the approach to tech worked was downright frustrating. It basically culminated in teachers request XYZ and us providing it. No one, not even our director, took the time to find out what the actual needs were for teachers. All they did was throw money and technology at the teachers and said "here, use it". I get really uncomfortable when people without any experience inside of a school try to solve problems by just throwing technology at it. There is so much more to a classroom then just having a tablet or chromebook and wifi. The biggest hurdle is always going to be our curriculum set up and how incredibly inflexible it can be in schools; not to mention how many of them are downright jokes when it comes to K-12 tech education. Edit: Going to go an extra further here and say no solution for education with tech is valuable unless you can provide a way to make the administration, teachers and parents understand the value in. This means not only making it known why they should try your new startup, but also providing some top notch on-boarding and training. Far too many companies come in and make a product look like gold, but then bail when the time comes to get some continued training on something. Also understand that a lot of schools have very constrained budgets. It's simply not easy to justifying projects in the XX-XXX thousands range of a budget. So if you're doing this also be sure to figure out some steps on how to work with the school to find ways of justifying the finance, or perhaps grants from the state, to implement this. Be mindful of state curriculum guidelines as well. Every state has their own guidelines for the different subject areas of education. There are bulleted items that schools must hit to meet them so you need to consider this. You simply cannot come in and say "here's some VR headset to use for history". Work with teachers and administration to have boilerplate lesson plans to meet the criteria of the curriculum. They've been doing things for years and are already busy. The last thing they'll have time for is sitting down to re-write lesson plans to fit a piece of technology in. Some will be eager to do it, but a higher percentage will probably be resistant. These are all issues and observations I saw when I was getting my education degree and then working in schools for 5+ years. Things have changed a bunch since I left (2011) but I'm sure a lot of these headaches still remain in various ways. There is so much to what makes a classroom work and work well that isn't just in the tool. Teachers, administration and parents have to buy in 100%.

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jpereira 9y ago

These all seem to be assuming the institution-teacher-student model of education we have today. Even the "New school models" section is assuming a delivered experience, which has an institutional bent. I think biggest area of disruption in education would be in building fundamentally new architectures for educational systems, based on networks and social communities instead of funnels and institutions. The latter have a pretty huge list of undesirable properties and negative externalities, especially in how they limit diverse experiences and learning. An eye-opening read on this front for me has been Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich [0]. It's insane how much of what he wrote 40 years ago still holds true. [0] http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html

Pulcinella 9y ago
The way to achieve your goals would be through lobbying your local school district, state education agency, and state legislature (if your American). A startup has limited power and no legal authority to change the public education system.
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  In addition, the VC model isn't particularly well suited for this. How many generations will it take for parents to accept en masse a radically redesigned approach to schooling? A big part of schooling is babysitting + credentialing, you can't disrupt that over a few years with so much of society relying on those functions.
- jpereira 9y ago
  I don't think this needs to be directly tied to public education. My concern is more that educational startups tend to assume an institutional model (i.e an institutions defines what is being learned, how it's being learned etc etc). They don't need to change public education but rather create services that embody a different educational paradigm. For example a matchmaking service for shared learning goals or interests could for sure be within the power of a startup. Something like 42[0] but without a fixed institution. Or community level organized learning environments for various subjects. Or even to go more in the vien of Papert and Turtle, a npm type system but with a strict pedagogical focus. There's a ton of systems that can be hugely powerful without depending on a classroom model or a school/institution. And there's no reason these can't be as impactful or more as systems and services targeted towards public/institutional education. [0] https://www.42.us.org/ https://www.42.us.org/

jerrac 9y ago

I work in the IT department at a community college. One of the biggest costs we face is our ERP, Ellucian's Banner. I'm not on that team, but the number of times I've been interrupted by them talking about a problem in Banner is really really high. AFAIK, the biggest reason there are no real competitors is that Ellucian does a good job packaging the law and regulation related stuff for financial aid. Apparently that's difficult enough that no open source alternative or non-open source company has been able to do better. I'd love to see someone fix that problem.

graniter 9y ago

It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive. I think we need to separate instruction, student work, and assessment. Students should be able to receive instruction in multiple ways (1on1, group, watch videos), do their work with something like TAs, and be assessed at their own pace. Japan is starting to see to super-star teachers that parent pay for. Why do we always need a teacher to provide direct instruction in the classroom? Why can't we reward the best instructors, like Kahn, by having kids be instructed that way? The reason is because instruction, work, and assessment are not separated now. I wish there were more experimentation in education, but since everything is a big ball of wax paid for with property taxes, there's a lot of reluctance for anyone to experiment with their kid, and since it's all or nothing, there just are minor experiments in the classroom We need tech to find a way to scale the classroom and deliver it cheaply to students, and I think we need a separation of concerns in order for that to happen.

jpereira 9y ago
It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground. I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the test. This creates even more messed up incentives but this time facing students and teachers as opposed to institutional practices. I think that assessment, when decoupled, can't be done with an institution or institutions. Instead we need social networks that use a consensus process to define knowledge and who has it.
- graniter 9y ago
  Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for education, having an assessor focus on assessments, independent and separate from instruction, might make it so that there could be easier to assess and more types of assessment, so the teacher doesn't have to always do it. And that might help compare results across teachers. College Board owns SAT, AP, and (essentially) Common Core so there's been a trend to tighter coupling. I like the idea of an AP Test that anyone can and be assessed separate from the teacher. Same for SAT. I think we need more of that model, not less.

Mz 9y ago

Something I don't see on the list: Homeschooling related startups Big companies can be a unique resource for small, independent operations. In k-12 education, some of the smallest and most independent are homeschooling families. They need to comply with state laws. They sometimes need to accommodate 2xe students. They need to prove their children actually received an education. There are no doubt other areas where they could use help. This is often done currently via free websites, free email lists, etc. There is a homeschoolers legal aid group or something. I was a member when I was homeschooling. So, there are some supports already, but it tends to be pretty sparse and a lot is local, homegrown.

philipps 9y ago
Homeschooling is the right entry point for disruptive change. The new home schooling community (as opposed to the traditional religion focused home schoolers) is large and growing and much more open to new ideas than the education system.
- Mz 9y ago
  I was a secular homeschooler, so I forget that this distinction even needs to be made. Thank you for bringing it up. One subset of the homeschooling community is gifted kids who don't fit in well at school. They frequently have either a very high IQ, above what gifted programs are geared to, or are 2xE or both. Their parents are often well educated and comfortably middle class. The needs of this populatuon would likely be a good point of entry.

bluetwo 9y ago

What about corporate educational systems?

alphonsegaston 9y ago

I really hope this isn't driven by a desire to capitalize on the coming wave of school privatization under DeVos. What she and her compatriots have done to Michigan's school system is not only a tragedy for the communities they serve, but also a demonstrable failure: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-school-experiment-232399 http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan-s... Tech lipstick on underperforming, segregated, for-profit schools isn't going to make them any prettier.

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ams6110 9y ago

> For instance, we believe there’s potential for a company to build a service that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for the service. I disagree. I already pay taxes, book fees, technology fees, extracurricular fees to my school district. I would not pay another cent for anything I didn't have to pay. A big problem in K-12 education today is actually over-involvement of parents. Helicoptering, or whatever you want to call it. Sure a teacher wants parent support -- but from home. They do not want to, do not have time for, and should not be dealing with 20 parent interactions a day, technology-assisted or not.

jacquesm 9y ago
The bigger problem is that it would make it much harder for poor parents to keep up with the richer ones because they could not afford the service.
- jamestimmins 9y ago
  This problem has a solution (albeit an imperfect one), which is charging wealthier schools more in order to charge more poor schools less. Obviously that model has drawbacks, but it may work better with a tech product than other areas, where marginal cost is relatively small.
  - BadassFractal 9y ago
    We already have that, it's called Title I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...

BinaryIdiot 9y ago

I used to work as a developer for an online charter school many years back so this space is very familiar. I even thought about starting my own company and breaking into this space because the software I worked on wasn't very good (it was miles above what was already out there, for sure, but I thought there were many places that could be improved). The problem I ran into, which completely discouraged me at the time, was that of making money. You need a significant amount of capital to sell to a private school and a public school requires sales cycles of at least a couple of years. It just wasn't possible with me already having a family, mortgage, etc. I would love to see the whole thing get disrupted. I even think about doing something in it from time to time. Having YC behind you would certainly be a big help. One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. This is the biggest hurdle, IMO, because it's so easy to just appeal to someone's bias narrative. For example "brain games" which "train" your brain basically only train it to play those games but they're still hugely popular and sometimes marketed to the same demographics.

barry-cotter 9y ago
> One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. Don't let the barely adequate be the enemy of the actively harmful. Most education research is of low quality and education does not incorporate known effective techniques like mastery learning or spaced repetition. Education degrees and education research deserve all the respect they get.
- hdctambien 9y ago
  Honestly, fixing the education of educators would be the best long term solution. Alternatively, creating a complete, ready-to-go curriculum package for every course (as defined in every state) that could be handed to anyone might be a startup-able solution to that problem. Although, that might also just be a patch that leads to a local maximum of not-very-good teachers teaching from better-than-before curriculum. Where making better teachers would lead to better teaching (eventually).

jacquesm 9y ago

> For instance, we believe there’s potential for a company to build a service that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for the service. I'm sure that will play well with parents that are already straining under the load. This sort of thing is so rife with bias that it is very hard to step away from your privileged position for the 30 seconds that it takes to vet the idea that you have to wonder why this cycle repeats over and over again. Any kind of parental contribution to the school system outside of taxes will end up as a way to differentiate between the haves and the have-nots and at best will lead to children from disadvantaged environments not being able to take part in fun stuff, at worst it will disadvantage them even further. This kind of thinking seems to be present in more than one YC project, the misguided attempt at their version of 'basic income' which fails to take even the most basic precautions against doing damage rather than improving things is another.

baron816 9y ago

I don't know if this exists, but I think something like a "GitHub for textbooks" would be valuable. Let people (teachers or otherwise) collaborate together on open source textbooks and create a pretty UI for reading those books (like GitBook).

jxramos 9y ago

I wonder if the Ycombinator folks may have recently watched School Inc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI)

cosinetau 9y ago

Anyone want to take a crack at MyMathLab?

peterburkimsher 9y ago
Speaking of maths, I'd like to see a cheaper TI-83. Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/768/ https://xkcd.com/768/
- cosinetau 9y ago
  Do you mean wolfram alpha?
  - cosinetau 9y ago
    Or, whatever you know. You can reinvent the wheel for all I care. https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83 https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83

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gnicholas 9y ago

Interesting that learning science is not represented in the categories — something along the lines of: "There's lots of research on ways in which material can be presented that makes it easier for kids to learn. We would encourage companies that have relevant expertise and the ability to bring research-backed technology to market." Or is there not an interest in something like this?

shanev 9y ago

Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]: 1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing. 2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials. 3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $Bs doing this for young founders. 4/ The more meritocratic an industry, the faster it moves away from false credentialing. I.e., the MBA and tech startups. 5/ A generation of auto-didacts, educated by the Internet & leveraged by technology, will eventually starve the industrial-education system. 6/ Until then, only the most desperate and talented students will make the leap. 7/ Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long. 8/ The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet. 9/ The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. 10/ Educational credentials are badges that admit one to the elite class. Expect elites to struggle mightily to justify the current system. 11/ Eventually, the tide of the Internet and rational, self-interested employers will create and accept efficient credentialing... 12/ ...and wash away our obsolete industrial-education system. [1]: https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160 https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160

alexashka 9y ago
The best teachers are absolutely not on the internet. How do you even make that claim? This is a typical 'technology is going to save the world' rant. No, it isn't. Technology is not a solution to short-sightedness that humans possess. Education is not in trouble - the economic model that makes it difficult to go study, learn and get to apply that knowledge and those skills to solving real problems is. Go ask engineers how many of them get to engineer anything. Go ask how many people in science get to work on interesting problems or can even get a job in the area they studied. We have the smartest people ever, with access to the most information and the best technology of all time, to make incredible things. It's just hard to get to do those things - when the economy is in this frenzy of quarterly profits. The decision-makers are 'buy for a dollar, sell for two'. Their worldview is incompatible with education, because you don't need education to make profit, you need someone to exploit to make profit. That's the world we've always lived in by the way, this is not new. The traders sometimes believe some specific technology, would make them incredible profits, so they become interested in education for a minute, and then get busy with everyday business as usual. This is why science has become toxic via the grant system - 'promise a miracle to get money for research.' I don't see a world where tradesmen relinquish their powerhold - creative people are always going to either be starving artists, with dignity, or shameless shills. Since the idea of starvation only appeals to a few, we have 'desire to learn is scarce.' It's against human nature to choose starvation you know :)

ontouchstart 9y ago

A lot of great ideas and important issues on Education startups can be found in this 5-hour long video "Technology In Education: Witnesses testified on technological advances in education." recorded on OCTOBER 12, 1995. https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education

philipps 9y ago
I second this. The panel includes true visionaries like Adam Kay and Seymour Papert. Seymour's comment about kids learning french in France remains one of the most compelling suggestions for the type of technology-supported learning we should be focusing on. The comments above contain many of the reasons why change is hard and slow, but education needs more of these kinds of big ideas rather than incremental improvements of the current system. I also find it useful to distinguish between the process of learning and the system of education.

pier25 9y ago

I work in an education company. As ironic as it sounds, we've found the biggest factor that is stoping change in K12 education is that teachers systematically refuse to learn anything new. It's not in the US though so YMMV.

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MozillaUser 9y ago

Please make an alternative computer science DEGREE, YES with a DEGREE (equivalent to brick and mortar) that is affordable and suitable for working adults

adamsea 9y ago

School has played a socialization role for kids and a role in the community - teachers have often been role models, and education has often extended beyond the subjects taught, to, at its best, teaching deeper life skills. And then of course there are various troubled or at-risk populations of students where no amount of educational technology will help because they come from broken homes and underserved communities. This is not to denigrate the idea of Education Startups, but rather, to point out the broader scope of "education".

peterburkimsher 9y ago

I'm making my own learning materials for self-studying Chinese. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io VoiceTube is a similar startup company that scaled this up to help people learn English. http://www.voicetube.com http://www.voicetube.com I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. I emailed 100 Chinese teachers in universities around Taiwan, but didn't get any replies. If someone wants to do the business and marketing, I'm happy to give you everything I've done so far.

rahimnathwani 9y ago
> https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io > I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. A couple of suggestions: 1) Find someone learning Chinese who's physically near you (so you can be in the same room) but who you don't know personally, e.g. someone at a meetup. Open your site, and give them your laptop and observe what they do. (Don't ask them questions, until they get stuck and ask for help. Just observe.) 2) Try to answer these questions: - What do you have now (data and/or functionality)? - To what people could those be useful? - In which contexts? - What else would they need in order to get started using this? 3) Try out some other Chinese learning tools (ChinesePod, Popup Chinese, Decipher Chinese, Chairman's Bao, ...) and, for each one, make notes on paper about each thing that happens after you first visit the site (or open the app). That will help you understand onboarding flows. My email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss in detail. I'm in Beijing, so same time zone as Taiwan.

ChicagoDave 9y ago

If I didn't have five kids, one in college, and monthly financial minimums that preclude taking time off from regular work, I'd jump at applying for YC. I even _had_ a great ed-tech startup... 5 years ago ... Textfyre Final Presentation, 2012 http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Presentation%20September%202012%20V3.3.pdf http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese... (The slide with the team has been removed...no need to share that info) We were in talks for a couple of months with Gates Foundation, but our timing was off. They had just pivoted away from helping startups to giving millions of dollars to big education publishers like Pearson. I gave up after realizing that I'd vastly under-estimated the networking (and cash) requirements in even proving the plan. Education is a really hard business to crack and we were targeting textbooks. Fast-forward a couple of years, maybe 2014-15, and I'm listening to a gal from Pearson being interviewed on NPR. She's essentially spouting many of Textfyre's ideas (embedded testing, interactive content, variable reading levels). I laughed and cried at the same time. The funny part is, not a single person ever told me the plan was bad. They just told me the education business sucks and it would cost a lot of money. But bar-none, everyone _loved_ the plan. And this goes through to today. I chat about this plan once in awhile with someone that's peripherally interested in ed-tech and they all say, "Why aren't you still working on THAT!" I'd love to. Write me a check.