BeBot by BEcoME.

We inspire all students to learn the adaptive skills they'll need for a lifetime of self directed learning and course adjustments. Our natural language AI develops an evolving picture of the child through chat interactions and helps them explore, design and navigate their unique future in an increasingly dynamic world.

Current career education in schools is too little, too late. A scramble for a one off answer, late in high school based on static or outdated information delivered by under resourced career teachers.  

This chasm between what we prepare people for and the reality they'll face is about to open up due to the enormous acceleration in labour market disruption.  

It’s those with the least financial and human capital who will be most at risk unless we create a scaleable tool that transforms the design and delivery of career education to make it accessible to all, highly personalised and dynamic.

Our design and delivery of careers education from primary school is critical for:

- Acquiring the exploratory and adaptive skills for a lifetime of learning (Hartung, 2015).

- Avoiding premature narrowing of career aspirations based on gender and social stereotypes which perpetuate social inequality. (Gottfredson, 2002)

- Imagining a positive future horizon and acquiring the skills to navigate to that before the decline in hope and engagement evident post Grade 5 (Gallup, 2016).  This increases short term academic engagement, decreases delinquency and improves long term academic, vocational and social outcomes (Hooley & Dodd, 2015). 

Although we want to engage in research partnerships to assess and continuously improve the impact on long term outcomes, we can evaluate our immediate outcomes based on the following leading indicators:

• 1m students to have BeBot as their personal guide by 2023.
• This will be distributed to them by 8,000 schools who also use the insights dashboard as a key data point for student learning conversations.
• BeBot delivers positive shifts in our key metrics of engagement, exploration and adaptability.

Student account configuration # and active users. - 1m students to have BeBot as their personal guide by 2023.

8,000 schools sign ups, dashboard set ups and user engagement. - 8,000 schools using the insights dashboard as a key data point for student learning conversations.

Individual baseline and shift metrics built into BeBot and reported at an anonymised level. - BeBot delivers positive shifts in our key metrics of engagement, exploration and adaptibility.

Providing natural language guided and ad hoc multimedia exploration of modern careers on a recurring basis as the student matures. Integrated with a 'serious game' that simulates a job market providing for iteration and deep learning on tasks such as budgeting time and money for job skills development, employment goal setting, and adaptability to changing market conditions.

The system is designed to solicit opinions from students and use that evolving profile to curate jobs that they may find interesting to explore and provide personalised guidance. Repeated interactions over time are designed to be interesting, relevant, and useful - helping to establish critical goal setting and adaptability skills by keeping career and training topics at 'top of mind.’

It will be accessed initially via an internet based web app.

We are completing a 6 month Accelerator Program with EduGrowth Australia which included initial investment. We're also raising currently raising a PreSeed round to sustain us through to August 2018.  

To supplement this investment and as part of our go to market strategy we're also selling and delivering school workshops which introduce students and schools to our digital product. This activity will decrease as our software sales scale and we shift further towards scaleable marketing strategies including strategic partnerships.

The major factor limiting our ability to succeed would be lack of funding to support and accelerate us towards becoming self sustaining.

Gaining access to pilot schools can also be time consuming and slow.  Partnership in this area would accelerate our success.

https://www.become.ai/

https://www.facebook.com/edugrowthaus

BEcoME was founded to close the gap between research evidence and practice in how we prepare children for 21st Century careers using technology and innovation.  We know both sides and have a long held connection to solving this problem but we also understand that success is only possible when you build a strong team around a vision.   Through Solve, we're hoping to work with like minds who have complimentary skills, augment our own skillsets and by doing so, get a better solution, to more young people, faster.

EduGrowth, the first EdTech Full Time Accelerator Programme in Australia.

Navitas, our main investor.

Professor Jim Bright, Professor of Career Development at ACU.

As far as we know nobody is developing a similar solution.