Role
Building Business Plan,
Marketing and Pitch Deck
Team
Debanjana Saha
Shervin Nakhjavani
Duration
8 weeks
Instructor
Minnie Bredouw, Amy Kweskin
Context
The current educational model in the United States relies heavily on standardized tests, papers, and exams to demonstrate students’ ability to learn new concepts. However, these methods often focus on rote learning and fall short. Teachers have no way of knowing whether their students have grasped and internalized new concepts or whether they simply memorized the answers. Scope provides this assurance.
A gradual rise in academic pressure has created an environment in which achievement is valued over learning. While digital tools such as Google Classroom and Canvas help teachers manage their grading and let students submit their work, they don’t help students learn. Year after year, many high schoolers question the real-world value of what they are taught in school.
This brings us to our opportunity statement:
“How might we enable classroom learning to be applied in the real world?”
Scope is a tool that encourages students to learn everywhere. We see it as the future of education, helping to create the next generation of lifelong learners who have understood how to learn, rather than what to learn. Teachers monitor their students’ growth and evaluate them on the real-world connections they make to what they learn in school. This accounts for a specific percentage of their grade.
Who it serves
This project was born out of a design research class, focused on uncovering and responding to the wicked problems faced by high school teachers in the Bay Area. Through a series of in-depth interviews, surveys, and qualitative research, we learned that a teacher’s problems were inseparable from their students’ performance. Scope will be adopted by schools at an administration level, advocated for by teachers in their classrooms, while students are ultimately the primary beneficiaries and users of the platform itself.
As a product, our primary way to measure outcome will be the increase of a student’s in-class participation and eventually, grades that reflect an understanding of a subject.
The Prototype
The Pitch
As part of CCA’s Sparks business pitch competition, we presented our product to a jury of experts and an audience of over 100 people, via zoom (due to the pandemic) and secured second prize in the competition. The presentation was eight minutes long, with a Q&A round of another seven minutes, and we received some very potent feedback and actionable critique. Albeit idealistic, our business model canvas was grounded in cost structure spreadsheets, planned upto five years in the future, and a revenue model that would perfect complement the existing learning management systems in place in most middle and high schools in America.
Shivani Singh 