Imagine K12

http://www.ycombinator.com/imaginek12.html

by pg • 15 years ago

230 81 15 years ago

btipling2• 15 years ago

Something built around the model that Khan Academy presents would be really interesting. Videos and learn at your own time. Home work help, helping parents and students find tutors, helping with test preparation. The long summer months are also a problem for a household where both parents are working. There is a lot of opportunity to help students here. Will be exciting to see what comes of it.

Good luck!

chrismanfrank2• 15 years ago

My company is tackling the tutoring component. We think with free content like the KhanAcademy, the only thing missing is personalized help when you get stuck. We're launching a summer program where K-12 students can work with tutors from Stanford via Skype. The tutor will be like a coach, though, most of the instruction will be from Khan Academy videos. What do you think? We're at IgnitionTutoring.com

ern• 15 years ago

Have you had to work around Khan Academy's CC noncommercial license?

mahdireilly6• 15 years ago

A huge problem that the Khan Academy fails to address is the digital divide. Often the children who attend schools who are the most at risk do not have access to computers/internet at home and community centers are often hard to reach both due to their distance and the danger in their traveling there.

I, a CS masters student, and my wife, a PhD EE, who attend University of Texas at Austin run an after school program for middle school kids to teach robotics and programming using lego mindstorms.

The school is one of the poorest in the city, but also has an integrated math/science magnet program within it. Our students are a mix of both the local children and the magnet kids who are bussed in.

At the beginning of class we place logic problems on the board and we were surprised to find that often the kids not in the magnet program solved them correctly often on par with those who were supposed to be the best and brightest in the city.

However when it came to programming and using the computers, the non-magnet students lagged behind the others at a pace of almost half the speed. Though they both were able to mechanically develop and debug their robot equally well.

I meet with the parents throughout the program and the correlation I noticed most prominently with those that suffered with programming was if the kid had easy access to a computer outside of school.

pclark• 15 years ago

This reminds me of jedc and his MBA research about startup accelerators and how, and more importantly, when to clone.

His #1 point was:

> You need to be unique, where unique is not just a seed accelerator in a different city

Imagine K12 is unique in their knowledge and connections. What a fascinating proposition.

http://blog.jedchristiansen.com/2011/02/23/looking-back-1-5-...

jedc• 15 years ago

Thanks, Peter. This is exactly the kind of program that I was talking about. I hope their connections to schools are able to turn startups in this market into businesses with real impact quickly.

BenSS3• 15 years ago

This is fantastic, and aligns with a project my wife and I have been discussing. It's frustrating that one or both of us would have to hit the Bay Area to do it (on the wrong coast), but certainly going to consider it.

u489983• 15 years ago

Two things which should be basic human rights and absolutely free, are: communication and education. But people wish to earn $$ off of them. And then they wonder why the world is in such a messed up state.

Kudos to Khan Academy and Bill Gates for patronizing and liberating the education.

btipling2• 15 years ago

I guess you expect publishers to print and give away textbooks for free too?

frak_your_couch3• 15 years ago

Well, I'd love and welcome a good high-quality open source textbook movement that happens to also be high quality. It's the quality issue that's the major problem at the moment, I'd say. I've LOVE to see, for instance, Math textbooks written like they wrote "Real World Haskell" in wiki format with a single (or a small,finite set of) editor(s) ensuring that content and quality is up-to-snuff. I think that there really should be minimal educational infrastructure provided for free or very low cost.

u489983• 15 years ago

I expect basic education to stay within the realm of government and free. Public giving up education to private/corporate sector is a recipe for disaster.

How technology can help government improve the quality, and how technology can keep the education free for the masses, is another thing.

u489983• 15 years ago

I should also add. Technology is driven by people so it matters how they use it to the advantage of all and not just some. When technology helps people, we generally mean to say that people are helping people. I am not being altruistic here but there are things which should be free and available to all equally and education is one of that.

mahdireilly6• 15 years ago

Honestly, that is not a ridiculous idea. If we remove the standardized testing, the community developed textbook would explode.

In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.

Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.

Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.

Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.

rewind• 15 years ago

Right... because Bill Gates didn't make billions from the education market.

You go build a company around giving things to the education market for free and I'll build a company around selling things to the education market, and we'll see whose company is better off in five years and whose customers are better off in five years.

mahdireilly6• 15 years ago

Bill Gates did make quite a bit in the education market. Find one school that does not use MS Office.

Also, Apple was, and still is, notorious for donating or offering heavily discounted products to teachers and schools. Why? They would get familiar with and used to using their products and purchase them in the future. It also gives them great publicity.

Many other companies do this as well. My campus computer store sells software at 90% discounts for the same reason. Sometimes giving things away is where the smart money is at.

maxharris6• 15 years ago

You can't have an absolute right to something that requires someone else to provide a service for you (remember that rights are inalienable, so you have them no matter how much money you have.) Such an obligation would essentially make the provider a slave to some extent (this effect can be very small for a given person, but the principle is the same: if you have to do something you don't need or want to do otherwise, and you're not even getting paid to do it, what does that make you?)

Rights only make sense when they're defined as legal prohibitions on action. Rights come from our nature as human beings; without the protection that they provide, we wouldn't be able to do all the things that we need to do to flourish (a concept that includes more than just biological survival).

gte910h• 15 years ago

>You can't have an absolute right to something that requires someone else to provide a service for you

Like a lawyer? Pretty sure I have a right to one of them when charged with a crime.

I understand to go with the clean logic of Ayn Rand's definitely of rights and everything, but that doesn't mean it fits all situations of the word right.

Positive rights have some traction and serve a useful purpose too, even though they do in fact require some taxation/other forms of forced payments to provide them.

huherto• 15 years ago

Quality education must accessible to everybody. It might, but it doesn't have to be free. What we currently have in many parts of the world is free education of poor quality. That needs to be fixed.

prestia• 15 years ago

This is a really exciting announcement! Education is probably the most important factor in maintaining long-term competitiveness and the American system is in desperate need of improvement. That said, the hurdles in this area are overwhelming. To name a few:

-Layer upon layer of bureaucracy (states, counties, districts, individual school administrators)

-Teachers that are reluctant to adopt new technology

-Students that are difficult to motivate

I have a ton of respect for anyone even trying to take on this challenge.

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

I'll add another one: academia who teach education seem to have an almost visceral reaction to any suggestion of for-profit educational product development. There's this almost dogmatic principal that anything related to education should be done not-for-profit. I speak from experience... I have an idea for an educational game (software) and I haven't had any luck getting the time of day.

ianb2• 15 years ago

OTOH, there are a lot of for-profit educational ventures, and they all seem really skeevy to me -- places like Kaplan or Phoenix University, for instance, or frankly a lot of educational software.

Perhaps a pro-market explanation is that the bureaucracy itself undermines the market, creating a market that is not truly driven by stated goals (education) but other factors. I'm not sure I believe that, but it's possible. The difficulty of procurement might in part mean that heavy up-front marketing costs dominate, and once you've made a sale it's both fairly large and neither increases nor decreases based on the quality of the product -- poor products tend to be maintained based on the commitment of the administration even when in practice they don't end up being useful.

It would be interesting if teachers were allocated money to purchase products themselves. While it seems somewhat chaotic, and challenging with student turnover (which is generally very high in the US in particular), it seems like the only way to actually have a market driven by real experience and taste rather than politics or theory.

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

> -Layer upon layer of bureaucracy (states, counties, districts, individual school administrators)

damage. route around it

> -Teachers that are reluctant to adopt new technology

damage. route around it

> -Students that are difficult to motivate

damage. route around it

i am serious

mkramlich2• 15 years ago

harsh. i thought i was giving wise advice.

krakensden3• 15 years ago

You forgot one: there is no money to go around. Many schools would be happy just to have enough money to provide paper for xeroxing tests.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

For what it's worth, there is also a new SF incubator for physical products called Magic Beans. I haven't seen them get any press yet, but it seems like they have some quality companies.

shii• 15 years ago

It seems Imagine K12 will/has solved the classic chicken-and-egg problem with education startups. I've been asking on how to get traction at schools online in different communities for years when I was working on a side project in this area. It's virtually impossible to sell to school districts, and unless pioneering teachers who are savvy enough to use something like Google Apps for their classrooms and see your product in the Marketplace or look for solutions on their own time while somehow fitting it in their already tight classroom curriculum and time budget, you have no way to gain traction from authority figures in the school system.

Enterprising students are basically they only way I've found that educational startups/sites can get active users to join on.

BenSS3• 15 years ago

"It's virtually impossible to sell to school districts"

This is exactly the problem I've been wrestling with. The best idea so far has been to appeal to private&charter schools first, and then attempt the big system. Public education is very much like a large company (risk-adverse, and process-oriented).

patio112• 15 years ago

School districts have the sales cycles of Fortune 500 megacorps, the technical savvy of convents, and the budgets of hair salons.

mahdireilly6• 15 years ago

This incubator states that they are going to target charter schools as test beds. I assume that means they are already creating contacts for interested schools. One of my fears is that since some charter schools have agendas that vary greatly from publicly funded schools, E.G. religious charter schools

mahdireilly6• 15 years ago

Another quick comment to solving the "selling to public schools" is community involvement. PTA groups often can play a powerful role in determining the agenda of the schools. Too often they stop at bake sales for carnivals, but in some cases they can be very effective in lobbying for change.

tealtan• 15 years ago

Makes me wonder if the same could happen with the health care / medical field.

mraybman• 15 years ago

The economy of scale here will be huge - if the founders of Imagine K12 build vertical expertise in promoting education startups (i.e. connections with schools, VCs who invest in education) it will be a lot easier for startups to do customer development and build/implement cool ideas. Our education system will benefit big-time.

gcheong2• 15 years ago

I'd really like to see a "request for startups" type post from this group.

PakG1• 15 years ago

I think better it come from the schools than from the group, no? The schools are the ones feeling the pain you're trying to solve, and it's a targeted segment where you don't have to searching for a customer. Your customer's right there, so the knowledge is right there.

Of course, there's the caveat that the customer isn't always sure of what they really need. But in this case, I'm sure they could think of some good ideas. :)

gcheong2• 15 years ago

I would hope that the requests/ideas would be informed by the people they are building relationships with at the school level. So perhaps more along the lines of "here are some things we are hearing again and again" rather than "these are ideas we think are good" but I wouldn't want to exclude either kind.

jtheory4• 15 years ago

That's the point of the group, though, really -- they have close relationships with a good set of schools, and can be involved enough to see actual pain points that are amenable to technological solutions, talk through ideas with teachers, find the teachers who give reliable/insightful feedback, find administrators who can give insights into what expenses would be easy to get sign-off for & what wouldn't, etc..

Soliciting ideas from the target market directly isn't as useful -- you get a lot of ideas of what people think would be neat, but often the ideas are seriously flawed (ideas for flashier solutions that in practice are less efficient/practical/flexible than the old method... ideas for things that would be better but would not fit easily into any budget... etc.).

I've gotten lots of ideas from teachers directly for my (education-targeting) site, but most of them aren't actually very valuable - things that are either obvious (and already on my to-do list) or far too specific to their particular needs, or ideas that seem good at 3000 feet up, but explode when you look into actual implementation details.

philfreo• 15 years ago

I'm excited about this program. Hopefully it will bring a lot more smart entrepreneurs and developers into the edu-tech space. It's definitely an industry that's in need of good talent, innovation, and creative problem solving.

Quizlet.com (Alan Louie, one of this program's founders, is an advisor) is looking for a few great people to join the small team in SF. If you have an interest in edu-tech (or just working on a web product that's helping millions of students study already), please get in touch. Email phil@[thedomain] or http://quizlet.com/jobs/

shortlived• 15 years ago

This is nice and all but the real issue lies with getting all families involved in their child's education. All of the technology in the world will not solve this problem.

chrismanfrank2• 15 years ago

Maybe that is an opportunity in itself.

ilovecomputers• 15 years ago

I have a naive notion of business, but does your startup idea necessarily have to be a for-profit venture?

scottshapiro• 15 years ago

This is fantastic.

But we also need a breakthrough in K-12 tech adoption.

n=1: my girlfriend is a math teacher at a better district in California. The only technology they provide her is a desktop with Windows 98.

So she uses her own mac to admin a tumblog filled with photos of assignments and answers to problems she uploads from her iphone. She uploads PDF's to google docs and 'shares with everyone'. She links to Khan academy videos since the school bans youtube and none of the district computers support flash.

Then her students use their home computers (if they have them) to consume this content. They're excited about it (most never heard of Khan before this) and it seems to be effective.

Back in the late 90's IBM installed a token-ring network at my high school. It was obsolete before they finished the project and the computers we had could barely get IE3 to load a web page.

So I hope this incubator does a lot not just to foster edu focused startups but to also get the right people in education to push for decent technology at schools.

oscilloscope• 15 years ago

Many friendly Linux User Group members volunteer to install and administer Ubuntu at public schools in the Bay Area. Ubuntu's a decent experience even with 256MB of ram, so schools can even reuse those 8-12 year old computers.

Free software's great for all kinds of technical, practical and cultural reasons. It's existed my whole life, but I didn't really feel its presence until using Debian in a research lab 4 years ago.

We don't all need to be RMS, but it's a worthy thing to think about for anyone who makes a living off free software.

thefreshteapot• 15 years ago

"If we fund you, the goal will be to build a compelling prototype or demo to raise money from appropriate investors"

- Perhaps i'm a bitter competitor* yet shouldn't this read.

"If we fund you, the goal will be to build a compelling prototype or demo to raise the standard of education for all, inspiring a thirst for learning"

I'm skeptical to private groups with funds who want to invest in a lucrative market which is not purely based on "capitalistic ideals". To use a famous quote in context "Education is for life, not just for Christmas".

* One day! for those who know me and my snail like pace at getting to a version 1.

maxharris6• 15 years ago

The major problem I have with any of the computer learning stuff out there is that I still need to reach for paper and pencil each time I actually try to solve a problem.

I wish there was an iPad app that taught college-level introductory physics (with a place to draw with one of those 3rd-party stylus things).

MrTurner• 15 years ago

SHORT COMMENT: Hey hackernews, I'm a teacher/hustler looking for a technical co-founder. Let's build something together. Apply for this program. And worst case scenario, we don't get in but we have a kick@ss product we can sell to school systems.

EXPANDED COMMENT:I'm a long time reader of hackernews and I have never left a comment. But this was the push over the edge.

I am a math teacher in an urban school. Before that I ran a (very non-tech) business, and before that I was a business analyst (read documentation nerd) for the mobile technology division in a very large bank.

I have been telling everyone that will listen that we can save public education and make a bunch of money through innovation. All of our technology, frankly, sucks when compared to similar wares that are sold directly to consumers.

I am bursting with ideas and some I have already tested. But I can no longer work in a vacuum.

So like dating ads of yesterday here is my pitch-

Me: Undaunted math teacher in an urban school with 2 years of experience. Using data driven instruction my students achieved the highest passing rate in my school system. While I can't hack (YET!) I can sell water to a whale and snow to an Eskimo. More importantly I can take complex systems and teach them to almost anyone. I have rewritten documentation for our 3 most popular programs in my systems and I hold monthly workshops for other teachers where I teach them how to use the technology in their classroom. Plus I understand teachers and I have experience in market research. And did I mention, I am a fearless hustler?

You: A) Want to change the face of education. B) Build stuff.

So let's do like voltron. Team up. Build something amazing. And if ImagineK12 doesn't want us, lets keep moving forward and kick down our own doors.

Mr. Turner

P.S. You can reach me at BRODERICK dot TURNER at GMAIL dot COM

P.P.S. Last year my school system's revenue was 662 Million Dollars. The money is there.

P.P.P.S. A list of companies whose lunch we could eat with a good enough product and A WHOLE LOT OF HUSTLE=

CARNEGIE LEARNING

PROMETHEAN

INFINITE CAMPUS

QWIZDOM

jtheory4• 15 years ago

Of course, it's "Mr Turner" -- what self-respecting teacher goes by their first name or a silly nickname? ;)

Seriously, I love these kinds of pitches, though I personally am so over-extended I can't do much beyond offer hit & run advice.

I don't know what other technical contacts you're making, but my biggest suggestion is not to wait. There's a huge amount of work you can do without being "the technical one" yourself, and the great thing about this work is that it gradually leads you into a better understanding of the technical side yourself -- which you'll need to do at some point, if you want to be centrally involved in a tech business. You don't have to write code, necessarily, but you have to learn a lot about the tech side.

All that really means is "details" -- take the best of your ideas, and start breaking it down all the way into separate pages, separate bits of data ("so we're letting teachers enter assignments here... that needs a name, description, due date -- er, wait, some teachers will have sets of assignments to do in sequence with no specific due date -- and what about extra credit assignments?" etc.); how to enter data, organize it, show it to the users who need to see it (and how to organize them). And so on. What do you do when the user "does it wrong"? Will you handle different time zones, languages, etc.? This is where the important work is; you have to add in solutions to problems, then remove most of your ideas and strip it down to what's most essential & useful & easy to build.

This process is much more difficult than the original brainstorming, but also more rewarding -- your project becomes so much closer to "real".

asuth• 15 years ago

Alan Louie (one of the founders of Imagine K12) has been advising us on Quizlet.com for awhile. What they're doing is terrific. I think it'll produce some great companies.

(see http://quizlet.com/about/team/)

julianb• 15 years ago

This reminds me of SchoolTool - http://schooltool.org/

It's a project conceived by Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu project founder.

ericdobbs• 15 years ago

Computing should be enabling us to start teaching physics and calculus and linear algebra (among other advanced subjects) in elmentary school. When I suggest such things to educators they look at me like I'm insane. But the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed.

In 1967 Seymore Papert was introducing elementary aged kids to LOGO. The turtle graphics in logo are differential geometry -- very advanced mathematics made completely accessible to young children. Papert's work in LOGO inspired Alan Kay and his colleagues to invent most of what we recognize in a modern computer: mice, GUIs, object-oriented programming. Kay's recent work to make computing accessable to children includes fifth-graders recreating Galileo's experiments and then building computer models of gravity to compare with their experimental data, then going on to apply their gravitational models to a simple computer game. That's physics -- newtonian mechanics to be specific -- made accessible to grade schoolers.

Here's his TED talk from 2007. Skip ahead to 9 minutes 30 seconds and watch the next 9 minutes of juicy educational ideas: http://www.ted.com/talks/alan_kay_shares_a_powerful_idea_abo...

Think about it. Fourty four years after Papert gave elementary kids a tool to understand and experiment with differential geometry, we still don't see even LOGO among educational standards, or any programming tools. The culture of education has not recognized what a huge leap turtle graphics are for teaching mathematics. In the late 1970s Apple II computers poured into many schools and LOGO became widely available in education. But those thirty plus years ago a bunch of adults saw some pretty pictures, shrugged, and ignored it as child's play instead of recognizing it for the little revolution it really could be.

Moreover, Alan Kay and company have been actively pursuing educational technology for four decades and still no traction for computing in education. Four decades by the people who brought you OOP.

Education is a big mountain to move. I'd very much love to be proved wrong, though.

detokaal• 15 years ago

There is a basic problem with many of these ideas. Current research in education is showing that technology alone is not enough enhance student learning. In other words, putting a computer, device, method or software in a classroom adds nothing to test scores or student outcomes. (As a time saver, I'll let you Google up the citations). We have learned this far too late in education, having spent billions and billions in this area with virtually no return in concrete results. The trend is to use these things as fancy drawing and typing and adding gizmos that simply replace pens and paper: a waste of potential.

It is also true that teachers don't want to mess with more of this stuff. We are already beat over the head on a regular bases with the latest and greatest methodologies, books, ideas, etc. on a regular basis. Ask any experienced teacher about their faculty development meetings and they will just laugh and tell you about the last 30 years of innovations that were supposed to have changed education.

Here is what someone needs to do in my opinion. Ideas should include LONG TERM training (2-3 years) that is mandatory in their sales package, back it up with solid research, and provide a payment model similar to a lease or student pay-to-play (where you aren't hoping their newest principal or school board also likes the idea the previous group did). In other words, PROVE it works, teach teachers how to use it, and give schools a realistic way to pay for it over a period of years. If not, you're just another one of the 40-50 "latest and greatest" idea I've seen come and go over the decades.

Good luck.

codeodor2• 15 years ago

I don't know how most states are doing on education budgets, but the districts around me in Texas aren't doing so hot. From what I can tell, we're cutting budgets by 1/6. (I saw spending of 54 billion in 2008-09 with cuts of 9 billion this year in separate reports)

How does that play into this?

Imagine K12

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