An "Almost Fun" Approach to Learning

Lisa Wang is the Executive Director of Almost Fun. She founded Almost Fun based on her experiences teaching at high-poverty schools in New York and seeing the difference accessible, relatable, and culturally-relevant content could make on a student's education. Previously, Lisa also worked as a product manager on the Education team at Google, building products, like Google Classroom, which are used by 50 million teachers and students. She earned her B.A. from Harvard College in Computer Science and Math.

Our mission is to close the educational gaps that exist for BIPOC students in the U.S. by delivering on the research-proven methodology of providing culturally-responsive and relevant learning resources. We are proposing a large-scale, online library of highly interactive learning modules that celebrate BIPOC culture and teach by leveraging familiar and relatable experiences for students. We know that education is a reliable path out of systemic poverty, and we know that many of our BIPOC students are struggling in school today. By giving them reasons to engage and be excited about their education, by showing them their lives and educations are inextricably linked rather than completely disconnected, and by providing resources that help them draw on their own lived experiences and prior knowledge in service of learning, we elevate underserved communities of students and help them reach their full potential. 

There are 57 million students in the U.S, 29 million of whom are BIPOC. Only 22% of black or brown 8th grade students show proficiency in Math, compared to 56% of white 8th graders. Only 19% of black or brown 8th grade students show proficiency in English Language Arts, compared to 48% of white 8th graders. These gaps persist, with black or brown students scoring 200 points lower than white students on the SAT, and only 26% of black or brown adults earning a college degree, compared to 47% of white adults.  Many factors contribute to these gaps, but a core issue is lack of engagement. And it’s no surprise, given our educational standards and curricula are shaped around traditional literary canon and the prior knowledge and experiences of more privileged students and demographics. With curricula like this, we repeatedly tell BIPOC students and low-income students that the education system does not value their experiences, cultures, or them, and their lives and education are disconnected. By providing educational content that resonates with students, we help them engage with their learning. And as research has shown, engagement is a critical factor in improving learning outcomes.

We are building scalable, culturally relevant, and relatable educational resources for low-income students and BIPOC students. Our content library currently covers SAT prep and middle school math fundamentals. All our content is free and accessible via an interactive mobile app and website.

Our SAT questions are based on content students enjoy and relate to - movie scripts, young adult novels, pop culture, and real situations - to engage students in their learning, help them build skills in a way that feels relevant, and ease them into the test. Students learn parallel sentence structure and grammar through dialogue from Black Panther, how charts effectively support an author’s thesis through an article arguing Fenty is more inclusive than other makeup brands, and how to set up linear equations through a word problem about buying snacks to deal with a break-up. Our math content is similarly interactive, culturally-relevant, and engaging. Students learn functions through a vending machine that has a mapping of inputs and outputs, slopes through an interactive rollercoaster, and absolute value through a comparison of healers and attackers in video games. 

We’re currently expanding our math content and plan to start building our English Language Arts and social studies content soon.

Our end users are low-income middle and high school students in the U.S., most of whom are BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) students. During the semester, we visit schools using our content at least once a week to collect feedback, measure engagement, and better understand why certain concepts are hard to understand. We also hire college interns who come from low-income communities of color to help us develop our content. 

Watch a student of color engage with our content, and you’ll see the difference our content makes immediately. Previously disengaged students are actively discussing, pointing to textual evidence, making connections, and thinking critically. Even students who tend to skip class want to come to class, and they tell us they wish all of the school’s content could be like ours, because learning is easier using content they understand. And at the end of the day, learning outcomes improve. One of the reasons we developed SAT content is to have a clear, objective measurement of improvement. Through our pilots, we found a strong, statistically significant positive correlation between time spent using our content and score change before and after studying with us.

It is not acceptable that given the rapidly changing demographics of our student population, state-level standards, Common Core, and college readiness exams do not account for the diversity of students they should serve. The education gap of students of color continues to grow as leaders and large curriculum providers focus on the needs of far more privileged students. By providing learning tools specifically designed for underserved, BIPOC students, we help them engage with their learning and elevate their learning outcomes. And by elevating the learning outcomes of these students, we elevate future higher education and career opportunities for them.

I had been teaching SAT prep at a low-income school for a couple of months, and the other instructors and I were seeing that students had trouble engaging in class and diagnostic scores were not increasing. I initially thought we just needed to find an easy way for students to study a little everyday to reinforce the skills they learned. I asked my (most honest) student whether he had time to do one question a day on the subway. He laughed and said, “Of course, but who wants to do these questions? They suck.” Later that day, we were working on a linear equation word problem that asked students to calculate the cost of renting a luxury golf cart, and I realized he was right: these questions sucked. I started writing my own content for my students based on movies, music, and situations that were relatable and accessible. Using this content, I saw students go from falling asleep on their desks to actively engaging in discussion. While discussing the ratio of Kendrick Lamar songs with the word “Compton” in them, one of my students paused and said, “Hey, this is almost fun,” giving our future organization its name.

Growing up, I learned about my parents' own experiences growing up in rural China. My dad is brilliant, but he lacked the educational resources he needed to empower his learning. He figured out he was talented in Math, because he knew when his textbooks were wrong, even when his teachers didn't. My aunts and uncles struggled to understand Math at all, since it seemed so unrelated to and disconnected from their daily lives on the farm. As I began volunteering as an instructor at low-income schools, I found that my students were similarly brilliant, with an equally similar lack of resources. And the resources they did have were similarly unrelatable, unengaging, and often alienating. I left my job at Google to do this work, because it is painful for me to know that my dad wasn’t able to accomplish all that he wanted or could because of a lack of resources, and I am devoted to ensuring students today are not unnecessarily bound by circumstance.

I bring experience developing products and leading teams as a former Google product manager. My past experience includes starting and launching new products on Maps and Google Classroom. On the Education team, I worked closely with teachers and students as we built products used by 50 million people. I also bring my experience teaching and developing content for low-income, BIPOC students as a former instructor through programs like Minds Matter and Citizen Schools. I have spent years developing, prototyping, and testing new, interactive ways of explaining concepts, particularly in math, to students who have struggled with concept mastery, and I bring a combination of engineering, product, and content development skills to my work. Almost Fun is the first organization I've founded, and I've raised funding and support from AT&T's Aspire program, the Fast Forward accelerator, Gina's Collective, and Google.org over the course of 1 year.

I’ve also brought together a talented leadership team. Our Chief Academic Officer, Grace Kossia, is a former Harvard Teaching Fellow who taught physics at low-income schools in New York and Texas. Our CTO, Greg Zecchini, is a former Google engineer on the education team and is experienced in building education tools at immense scale.

Moreover, I am committed to this work for the long haul. It has been the greatest joy of my life to see and hear the impact our work has on BIPOC students, and I am committed to ensuring every student feels included in and connected to their education.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we focused on distribution of our product through school and non-profit partners. But, with the school closures due to the pandemic, we saw a deprioritization of our partnerships, as everyone scrambled to figure out their own strategy during this time. We saw our growth slow, and we worried that the education gaps we were working so hard to decrease would actually begin increasing due to the pandemic.

But, we also realized that students were searching for resources in the same way and at a higher frequency: online and through their mobile devices. We focused on optimizing our content for the search queries they were making and the concepts they struggled with, in particular the many tail-end queries like “How do I add mixed fractions?” or “Is absolute value always positive?” We began to see more and more students discover us, with our relatable and reliable content resonating with them, especially as they struggled to find time with their teachers. We also found that while we sometimes need to convince education leaders that culturally-relevant content is important, we never have to convince a student - they’re just excited to see a resource that speaks to them.

Unlike most of our team, one of our volunteers comes from a privileged background: he went from a private school to an Ivy League to working at a top tech company, before coming to us. During a school visit, he watched counselors hand-hold students through SAT prep and the college application process. Never a shy person, he later asked, “Just to be devil’s advocate, in school, I was expected to figure out the college application process. I didn’t get any help from my counselors. Does it make sense to put in so many additional resources to help these students?” Although it was an uncomfortable question, I knew he wasn’t asking maliciously. Guided by his own experiences, he genuinely didn’t understand. 

I shared my own challenges growing up with parents who didn’t have experience applying to college in the U.S., and the experiences of our students who questioned whether college was in their futures at all. I then gently asked him whether he ever doubted he would go to college. He reflected, then replied, “No, I never had a single doubt.” We grew closer as a team that night as we worked to see problems from each other’s perspectives.

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Our approach is innovative in two main ways. First, by focusing on the needs of BIPOC students, we can customize our content in a way that larger organizations cannot, given their broader focus. We focus on using content that is relevant and relatable to empower learning. Think of it this way: the two parts of almost every piece of learning content are a core skill (i.e. connecting sentence fragments) and context (i.e. an article about deep-sea fishing). If a student is unfamiliar with both, there is nothing they can grab onto as a starting point, and they become frustrated and disengage quickly. Today, most educational content looks like this. But, if we make the context more familiar, we draw students in rather than alienate them, allowing them to focus on the core skill. Once they build up and master that skill, they are then able to apply it more widely to new contexts.

Although there are many different education content products, few are culturally-responsive, and of those, none are comprehensive.

Second, every piece of content we provide is highly interactive. While platforms for early learning focus on interaction, most products for middle and high school students provide content in a block of text or video, which allow students to disengage. We require students to engage with us, much like they would with a teacher or tutor. Whether it's a question explanation or a math module, students must confirm understanding throughout the experience by interacting with our platform.

Media has been incredibly powerful in sharing stories of overlooked groups, empowering cultures, and helping minorities feel seen. Educational content can do the same, yet does not. When we use content, particularly culturally relevant content, that excites students and draws on their experiences, they feel supported and confident in their learning. Implicitly, we are showing them that their experiences, their cultures, and the issues they face are important and connected to their education, rather than disparate. And through this learning environment, they are far more equipped to build skills that can then be more widely applied. 

Research continually shows the benefits of culturally responsive education on self-confidence, self-image, and learning outcomes. Our own pilots also reflect this. We ran pilots with our SAT content with 150 students of color. We found that 60% of students who had given up on studying actively studied with Almost Fun, self-reported confidence increased as students practiced, and 80% of students stated they would recommend Almost Fun to a friend. After just 2 months of using Almost Fun, students took the SAT again, and we found a statistically significant positive correlation between studying on Almost Fun and SAT score change, with students practicing fewer than 15 questions seeing less than a 10 point increase and students practicing more than 40 questions seeing over a 60 point increase.

We need to ensure that the 29 million BIPOC students in America feel empowered in their pursuit of an education. By doing so, we improve learning outcomes and close the learning gaps in Math and ELA, which increases the number of BIPOC students who attend and graduate from a 4-year college, and, as a result, increases the wealth of the BIPOC community. We also want to catalyze a shift in the educational content and standards institutions provide. By providing content that teaches and assesses the same critical thinking and core reading, writing, and math skills through a lens that is more inclusive, we can not only empower students, but also push institutions to invest in more culturally responsive curricula, leading to further progress in closing learning gaps.

We currently support 1000 monthly active students and about 500 weekly active students. By the end of this year, we plan to be supporting 5,000 weekly active students (about 10% week over week growth), and in a year, we plan to sustain that growth to reach upwards of 50,000 weekly active students. In 5 years, we hope to be supporting 10 million students on a regular basis. 

We use weekly active students/users to measure reach of our product on a continual basis, but our larger goal is to improve learning outcomes for each student who uses our product. For our SAT product, our goal is for every student who uses our resource to reach a score of at least 1000, making them realistic candidates for most 4 year colleges. For our ELA and Math content, our goal is to help students reach proficiency as dictated by their grade level and state standards. We're currently working with WestEd to figure out the best way of measuring these outcomes outside of formal pilots and partnerships.

In the next year our goals are focused in 3 areas. 1) Grow our content library and our reach through expansion of our Math and English Language Arts (ELA) learning modules into more and more subject areas and concepts, ensuring students are able to build understanding effectively. 2) Build understanding of cultural relevance in the education ecosystem by creating curriculum creation guides and starting a curriculum evaluation program. We plan to help schools and other organizations evaluate their curriculum according to cultural responsiveness and social justice standards, provide feedback on areas of improvement, and help measure success. 3) Maintain open accountability to our mission by continuing to evaluate our own content based on standards released by NYU, educating ourselves as a team on best practices in advancing racial equity in education, and expanding our internship program to bring more BIPOC students into the curriculum development process.

Within the next 5 years, we essentially want to be a Khan Academy designed for and dedicated to low-income, BIPOC students. Our goal is to have a library of highly-interactive, digital content that spans K-12 math, ELA, science, and history concepts - all infused with diverse stories and pop-culture, celebrating the experiences of BIPOC students and the cultures they come from. Through this content, we hope to show measurable progress in closing the racial gaps in ELA and Math proficiency and increasing the number of BIPOC students who are accepted into a 4-year college. 

When a student finds our content and product, they stay on our platform and continue to come back, because our content works for them. We just need to make sure students can find us.

The two biggest barriers to this are financial and cultural. In order to build out the content library necessary to fully support students, we need the funding to support a larger content and engineering team. This is not only for doing the work, but also because the only way for our content to represent the diversity of cultures we want to support is if our team does as well. We also need the current momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement to continue. We need education leaders to remain committed to ensuring anti-racist learning environments, and we need society's leaders to hold them accountable.  

We could list competitive market factors, but in all honesty, it would be a joy to see large curriculum creators commit to a culturally-responsive curriculum, but we know it's not likely. The missions of these companies are focused on serving all students or all users, which doesn't leave room to support a specific group of students. Our mission is to fill that gap, and be the education tool designed for and by BIPOC communities. 

Our team currently comprises a full-time team of 3 (myself, CTO, and Chief Academic Officer), an intern team of 2-3 (depending on the time of year), and a volunteer team of 5-10 (also depending on time of year and need). Everything created and built on our website and mobile app has been done by our small, but scrappy team. But, as mentioned, we need much more support to scale our library to cover K-12 math, ELA, science and history. We are actively fundraising in order to grow our team next year, with the goal of focusing on growing our content development and engineering teams. 

We are also working on mass outreach to educators and school leaders to encourage them to commit to anti-racist curriculum development this fall. We are actively running professional development sessions, leveraging our early social media presence, and reaching out to prominent BIPOC educators to build this movement. We are also working on developing partnerships with larger organizations that are also committed to supporting BIPOC students to form a coalition for anti-racist education.

We currently partner with the College Advising Corps, College Spring, and the Harvard Teaching Fellows in supporting students, conducting professional development with teachers and counselors, and piloting.

We are also partnering with WestEd in conducting research on the efficacy and best practices of a culturally-relevant and responsive curriculum. We are hoping to jointly apply for IES funding and create guides and curriculum planning resources for teachers and schools based on our research on best practices.

Our key beneficiaries are low-income, BIPOC students, and all of our content is and always will be free for them. We provide learning resources that are accessible through a mobile-optimized website and mobile app. We also provide professional development to other non-profit organizations that place teachers or counselors in our target communities. Our content is also free for them to distribute and train with.

We've measured impact primarily for our SAT prep product, because of the clear, objective metric of score change. We ran pilots with our SAT content with 150 students of color at high schools in CA and NYC. We found that 60% of students who had given up on studying through products like Khan Academy actively studied with Almost Fun, self-reported confidence increased as students practiced, and 80% of students stated they would recommend Almost Fun to a friend. After 2 months of using Almost Fun, students took the SAT again, and we found a statistically significant positive correlation between studying on Almost Fun and SAT score change, with students who practiced fewer than 15 questions seeing less than a 10 point increase and students who practiced more than 40 questions seeing over a 60 point increase. Qualitatively, students shared that they wished all their classes used content like ours, and they felt they learned more easily with our content. They want and need our content, because most of the content they learn with today feels unbearably boring and disconnected from their lives.

Currently, we are 100% funded through philanthropy, but we hope to be 100% self-sustaining through earned revenue within 5 years. We are currently exploring 3 potential revenue streams. 

1) Content partnerships: Much of our content infuses pop-culture into the learning experience, whether it's using Black Panther dialogue to teach grammar or Jane the Virgin monologues to explain how supporting evidence is used. We want to partner with content companies to create sponsored learning content, i.e. we could partner with disney+ to promote their new Marvel TV shows through questions based on their scripts or learning modules featuring new characters. We also want to create sponsored modules that connect skills with real-world careers that students would be excited about, i.e. marketing at Nike or makeup designing at Glossier. 

2) Curriculum evaluations for organizations: As more and more institutions reflect on ways they can ensure anti-racist behavior and ideals, we believe there is an opportunity to help schools and curriculum providers navigate this process. As we take the cultural health of our curriculum very seriously, we do constant evaluations based on guidelines for cultural relevance and social justice. We believe there may be an opportunity to conduct evaluations and provide feedback for other organizations as a paid, consulting service.

3) Student progress analytics for schools & districts: Lastly, given the prominence of this feature as a revenue stream in so many other learning products, there is likely an opportunity for us to monetize analytics in learning progress and areas for improvement. 

We are primarily funded by philanthropy currently, and all of our funding sources are grants. We received $25,000 from Fast Forward in July of 2019, $25,000 from Google.org in September of 2019, $30,000 in individual donations in September of 2019, $125,000 from AT&T in June of 2020, and $25,000 from Gina's Collective in June of 2020. We also have committed funding of $250,000 to be spread out and received over the next two years.

We plan to raise an additional $500,000 from philanthropy by July 2021. 

Our 2020 estimated expenses total $180,000.

The two biggest barriers we mentioned were in funding to support the growth or our content library and maintaining momentum in the BLM and anti-racist movements. 

For funding, as mentioned in our revenue section, we currently rely on philanthropy (the monetary prize will be impactful here), but we plan to be self-sustaining within 5 years. In order to do this, we're developing three potential revenue streams. The highest priority path is focused on creating sponsored content with content creation partners. The Elevate Prize's support in connecting with industry leaders and influencers will be hugely impactful in forming the necessary content partnerships. The mentorship provided will also be impactful as we evaluate different revenue opportunities.

Building and elevating the momentum around anti-racist educational environments can similarly be accelerated by finding the support of industry and societal leaders. We need non-BIPOC district and school leaders (the majority) to understand the importance of culturally-responsive and anti-racist educational resources. Furthermore, we hope to support and partner with educators as we create content, and the tailored media campaign to build public support for this effort will aid us in growing this grassroots movement.

I also ascribe to an eco-centric vs. an ego-centric model for social enterprises; I believe that together we are much stronger than apart. I've learned so much from other social impact founders in different spaces, like open data in air quality and criminal justice, and I'm eager to share and learn from the social entrepreneurs and heroes in the Elevate Prize's community.

In the above question, we discuss our goals for partnership in revenue and growth & momentum. 

In addition, our current board comprises trusted advisors and friends, and we are starting to plan for evolving our board to comprise leaders in our space. We are hoping to connect with prominent BIPOC educators who have been active in developing anti-racist content and pushing the community forward, as well as district leaders who strongly believe in the power of culturally-relevant curricula as potential board members. 

And in media, marketing, and exposure, our number one goal is to reach more students and ensure they can find us when they need us. Currently, we are partnering with schools and other non-profits as well as investing heavily in SEO. But, we're still in the early stages, and partners and support will be helpful as we work to reach all the students we hope to support.

For growth and distribution, we hope to partner with more organizations that train teachers and counselors, including TFA, and districts with primarily BIPOC students. We would love to run professional development sessions, pilots, and support development of anti-racist curriculum for these organizations.

Education leaders we hope to connect with include José Vilson, Michael Sorrell (president of Paul Quinn College), and Dr. Kim Parker.

For content partnerships, we would like to work with content creators dedicated to diverse stories and characters, such as Marvel, NBC, and publishers (this is one of the publisher lists we sourced from). We would also like to work with consumer companies that are influential in the lives of BIPOC students, such as Nike, Fenty, and Roc Nation. These are partners that we can partner with to create sponsored, custom content that resonates with our students and helps them build their brand in a new way.