What are some interesting startups in the education space?

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Tashi Namgyal

I wanted to provide information about an interesting ed tech startup that I came across from someone answering my own question.

Is there any brain training for kids or a Lumosity for kids app out there?

Jane Smith, brought my attention to Page on kadho.com , Kadho Inc. | CrunchBase
A very interesting start up founded by Two PhD scientist, what they seem to be doing is translating the last 50 years of neuroscience into games and ebooks for children. They are developing a series of educational games for children below the age of 7 to preserve the innate abilities that every child is born with. Their curriculum includes customizable games enrich specific areas of the developing brain such as working memory, conceptual reasoning, impulse control and their flagship and clinically validated platform for enhancing language learning abilities. Their first apps seem to be multiple language immersion for babies and toddlers in a unique way.

Their first App, Mochu Pop seems to be created by an international team of renowned gamers, scientists and educators, teaches a child not just their own language but also the tools to learn any language throughout their lifetime! It features pleasing music in the background as the child plays the interactive game. The happy penguin, dressed in a striped scarf, taps his feet and smiles with his eyes as the game progresses. Animated characters Moon and Sun pop up as the differently shaped balloons float by. App options include a volume control, a blue light filter to protect young eyes and a parental dashboard to monitor your little one’s performance.
iPad version

Mochu Pop - Language Immersion for Babies and Toddlers

Android version

Android Apps on Google Play

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W...

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Jess Huang

Here's one noteworthy peer-to-peer education model in Paris newly opened in November 2013 to students around the world, tuition FREE!École 42The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech.

This French Tech School Has No Teachers, No Books, No tuition — And It Could Change Everything


Above: Nicolas Sadirac, the director of the ambitious, free, French tech school Ecole 42. Image Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Nicolas Sadirac, a French entrepreneur and educator, is the school’s director. Before École 42 he ran Epitech, a well-regarded, private, for-profit school that trained software engineers.

PARIS — École 42 might be one of the most ambitious experiments in engineering education.

It has no teachers. No books. No MOOCs. No dorms, gyms, labs, or student centers. No tuition.

And yet it plans to turn out highly qualified, motivated software engineers, each of whom has gone through an intensive two- to three-year program designed to teach them everything they need to know to become outstanding programmers.

The school, housed in a former government building used to educate teachers (ironically enough), was started by Xavier Niel. The founder and majority owner of French ISP Free, Niel is a billionaire many times over. He’s not well known in the U.S., but here he is revered as one of the country’s great entrepreneurial successes in tech. He is also irrepressibly upbeat, smiling and laughing almost nonstop for the hour that he led a tour through École 42 earlier this week. (Who wouldn’t be, with that much wealth? Yet I have met much more dour billionaires before.) Niel started École 42 with a 70 million euro donation. He has no plans for it to make money, ever.

“I know one business, and that’s how to make software,” Niel said. “I made a lot of money and I want to give something back to my country,” he explained.
To make the school self-sustaining, he figures that future alumni will give back to their school, just as alumni of other schools do. If a few of them become very rich, as Niel has, perhaps they, too, will give millions to keep it going.

The basic idea of École 42 is to throw all the students — 800 to 1,000 per year — into a single building in the heart of Paris, give them Macs with big Cinema displays, and throw increasingly difficult programming challenges at them. The students are given little direction about how to solve the problems, so they have to turn to each other — and to the Internet — to figure out the solutions.

The challenges are surprisingly difficult. One student I talked with was coding a ray tracer and building an emulation of the 3-D dungeon in Castle Wolfenstein within his first few months at the school. Six months earlier, he had barely touched a computer and knew nothing of programming. He hadn’t even finished high school.

In fact, 40% of École 42′s students haven’t finished high school. Others have graduated from Stanford or MIT or other prestigious institutions. But École 42 doesn’t care about their background — all it cares about is whether they can complete the projects and move on. The only requirement is that they be between the ages of 18 and 30.

“We don’t ask anything about what they’ve done before,” Niel said.
Yet École 42 is harder to get into than Harvard: Last year, 70,000 people attempted the online qualification test. 20,000 completed the test, and of those, 4,000 were invited to spend four weeks in Paris doing an intensive project that had them working upwards of 100 hours a week on various coding challenges. In the end, 890 students were selected for the school’s inaugural class, which began in November, 2013. (The average age is 22, and 11 percent of the first class is female.)

890 students out of 70,000 applicants means an acceptance rate a little north of 1%, or if you only count those who completed the test, 4.5%. By contrast, Harvard accepts about 6% of its applicants. And, even with financial aid, it charges a whole lot more than ZERO for its classes.

The upshot: If it works, the school’s course of education will produce coders who are incredibly self-motivated, well-rounded in all aspects of software engineering, and willing to work hard. (The four-week tryout alone, with its 100-hour weeks, blows away the French government’s official 35-hour-work week.)

All of École 42′s projects are meant to be collaborative, so the students work in teams of two to five people. At first glance, the École’s classrooms look a little bit like a factory floor or a coding sweatshop, with row after row of Aeron-style chairs facing row after row of big monitors. But a closer look reveals that the layout is designed to facilitate small-group collaboration, with the monitors staggered so that students can easily talk to one another, on the diagonals between the monitors or side by side with the people next to them. Students can come and go as they please; the school is open 24 hours a day and has a well-appointed cafeteria in the basement (with a wine cellar that can hold 5,000 bottles, just in case the school needs to host any parties).

Students share all of their code on Github (naturally). They communicate with one another, and receive challenges and tests, via the school’s intranet. Everything else they figure out on their own, whether it means learning trigonometry, figuring out the syntax for C code, or picking up techniques to index a database.

Tests are essentially pass-fail: Your team either completes the project or it doesn’t. One administrator compared it to making a car: In other schools, getting a test 90% right means an A; but if you make a car with just three out of four wheels, it is a failure. At École 42, you don’t get points for making it part way there — you have to make a car with all four wheels.

The no-teachers approach makes sense, as nearly anything you need to know about programming can now be found, for free, on the Internet. Motivated people can easily teach themselves any language they need to know in a few months of intensive work. But motivation is what’s hard to come by, and to sustain — ask anyone who has tried out Codecademy but not stuck with it. That has prompted the creation of “learn to code” bootcamps and schools around the world. École 42 takes a similar inspiration but allows the students to generate their own enthusiasm via collaborative (and somewhat competitive) teamwork.

Sadirac and Niel say that some prestigious universities have already expressed interest in the school’s approach. The two are considering syndicating the model to create similar schools in other countries.

But even if they never expand beyond Paris, École 42 could become a significant force in software education. France already has a reputation for creating great engineers (in software as well as in many other fields).
If École 42 adds another thousand highly-motivated, entrepreneurial software engineers to the mix every year, it could very quickly accelerate this country’s competitiveness in tech.

And the model will force schools like Harvard to make an extra effort to justify their high tuitions. If you can get training like this for free, and you want to be a software engineer, why go to Harvard?

(news link:) This French tech school has no teachers, no books, no tuition -- and it could change everything

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Jon Bischke

Most of the low-hanging fruit is already gone but I'll add a few here that are worthy of inclusion:

8DWorld (http://www.8dworld.com/en/home.html) - Virtual world focused on learning English as a foreign language. May be the first company to have figured out how to make significant revenue from virtual currency in the education space.

Chancellor University (http://www.chancelloru.edu) - This isn't a pure start-up but is the latest in a line of non-profit to for-profit conversions of online universities (several of which have gone public). Revenues are growing like a weed.

Chromatik Music (http://www.chromatikmusic.com) - Very early stage but could end up being the "Rosetta Stone for learning music" which is a pretty big market.

CourseHero (http://www.coursehero.com) - "Scribd for students". On fire and they have a wicked smart founder. Compete has them at 300K monthly uniques heading into the summer.

Smart.fm (http://smart.fm) - Very cool educational platform which was formerly IKnow.co.jp. Company is based in Tokyo and raised money outside of VCs so they aren't known as well.

Udemy (http://www.udemy.com) - The live collaboration space is hot (with Elluminate recently being purchased by Blackboard) and Udemy has one of the best products I've seen.

Zoodles (http://www.zoodles.com) - Probably not the first company that would come to mind when you think "education startup" but doing some very, very cool work in making education online more accessible for the under 8 set.

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Jess Lin

Udacity and Coursera were both recently launched by Stanford professors, following the success of Stanford's free online classes. Both startups provide online university-level courses.

Udacity is co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, who taught the online AI course. It will offer CS 101: Building a Search Engine and CS 373: Programming a Robotic Car this spring. http://www.udacity.com/

Coursera is co-founded by Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who taught the online Machine Learning and Database courses, respectively. It has a number of courses this spring. http://www.cs101-class.org/hub.php


There's an article about both of them here: http://www.i-programmer.info/new...

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Mike Lee

The edtech startup accelerator Imagine K12 has had 7 cohorts so far.
Summer 2011 cohort:
  • BloomBoard - Professional development marketplace. Previously known as Formative Learning.
  • BrainNook - Social learning games.
  • Claco - Github for teachers.
  • ClassDojo - Realtime behavior management tools.
  • Educreations - iPad-based video lesson creator.
  • Eduvant - Data analytics and intelligence tools for schools.
  • ElevenLearning - Community-powered textbooks. No longer operating.
  • Goalbook - Individualized education plan management system.
  • remind101 - Private text messaging platform for teachers and students.
  • Tutorcloud - Online marketplace to find and collaborate with tutors. No longer operating.
Winter 2012 cohort:
  • BrainGenie - Online STEM exercises with gamification. Acquired by CK-12.
  • edshelf - Edtech discovery engine.
  • Hapara - Google Apps-based teacher dashboard.
  • instaGrok - Search engine for learners.
  • LearningJar - Informal online learning management.
  • LearnSprout - API for school systems.
  • Socrative - Realtime assessments and exercises.
  • TapToLearn - Educational games on iOS. First startup to go through YC and IK12 simultaneously.
  • TeachBoost - Teacher evaluations and assessments.
Summer 2012 cohort:
  • Chalk - Digitizes paperwork for efficiency.
  • CodeHS - Teaches high school students how to program.
  • DigitWhiz - Game-based learning for foundational math skills.
  • Blendspace - Multimedia online lesson plan creator. Previously known as EdCanvas.
  • Tryumph - Collaborative study groups through existing social networks.
  • NoRedInk - Adaptive learning lessons for grammar and writing skills.
  • Raise - Allows HS students to earn micro-scholarships for college.
  • Securly - Cloud-based web content filter.
  • SmarterCookie - Video-based coaching for teachers.
  • StudyRoom - 3D online study group.
  • Tioki - LinkedIn for teachers.
Winter 2013 cohort:
  • Kaizena - Voice feedback from teachers to students.
  • Accredible - Portfolios of knowledge for learners.
  • MommaZoo - Private Facebook for classrooms and parents.
  • Padlet - Easy-to-make online "walls" for any kind of content. Second startup to go through YC and IK12 simultaneously.
  • Plickers - Realtime assessments using simple printouts instead of devices.
  • Literably - Automatically scores oral reading assessments.
  • Showbie - Platform to enable paperless classrooms.
  • GigaBryte - Teaches programming through wearable electronics.
  • VideoNot.es - Note-taking for videos.
Fall 2013 cohort:
  • Cellabus - Mobile device management platform.
  • Class Central - Comprehensive MOOC aggregator.
  • ClassroomIQ - Open response grading platform.
  • Classwork - Realtime tablet-based whiteboards for students.
  • DealsList - Gradebook for soft skills.
  • Edoome - Edmodo for Latin America.
  • EDpuzzle - Turn online videos into interactive lessons.
  • Front Row - Differentiated, adaptive, and gamified math practice.
  • geddit - Realtime confidence tracker for students.
  • Kaymbu - Classroom documentation system for teachers and parents.
  • Kodable - Early programming skills for K-2 students.
  • Panorama Education - Data analytics and feedback surveys.
  • SchoolMint - School admissions management platform.
Fall 2014 cohort:
  • AdmitSee - Repository of higher ed applications and advice.
  • BrightLoop Learning - Real-time student observation tracking.
  • Chesscademy - Adaptive learning tool for improving chess play.
  • Educents - Marketplace for parents and educators.
  • Edusight - Gradebook with built-in student learning portfolios.
  • Eduvee - High school exam practice with machine learning.
  • Formative - Real-time formative assessment & classroom response system.
  • Leada - Data science & analytics online courses with instructor support.
  • MathChat - Collaboration platform through drawing, typing, and messaging.
  • Mission 100% - Video library of observation clips from real K-12 classrooms.
  • Mosa Mack Science - Short animated inquiry-based science mysteries.
  • Peekapak - K-3 curricula and storybooks aligned to the Common Core.
  • Picolab - Meeting and collaboration platform for teams.
  • ReadWorks - Research-based reading comprehension instructional materials.
  • TeachMe - Educational math games and apps.
  • Tickle - Programming lessons for Arduino, drones, robots, connected toys, and smart home devices.
  • Trinket - Programming lessons delivered via a browser.
Fall 2015 cohort:
  • allcancode - Teaches K-12 students how to code through building games.
  • answer.ky - Automatic grading of handwritten answers via scanning.
  • Codevolve - Teaches anyone how to code using an AI-powered platform.
  • DeZyre - Learn job skills by taking interactive online sessions.
  • KickUp - Analytics to help professional development teams support teachers.
  • Rumie - Free digital education to underprivileged children around the world through low-cost tablets and volunteer educators.
  • Sense - Evaluates open-ended assignments using AI to provide personalized feedback.
  • Sesame - Multimedia student portfolios that teachers can evaluate using rubrics, checklists, or rating scales.
  • Sown To Grow - Students set their own learning goals, scores, and evaluations.
  • Swing Education - Marketplace for schools to find substitute teachers.
Source: All Imagine K12 Startups
Disclosure: I am the cofounder of a startup from the 2nd cohort, edshelf.
Fellow IK12ers: Feel free to edit the description I've written here, in case I misrepresented you.


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