Tyto Online

Lindsey Tropf, M.Ed., is the Founder & CEO of Immersed Games. Before founding Immersed Games, she was a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida in School Psychology, with a specialization in Program Evaluation and a Minor in Research & Evaluation Methodology, and expertise in data-based decision making. This meant giving workshops and supporting educators in how to track and make sense of data to drive learning improvements.

With Immersed Games, she founded the company and led the design and development of their product, Tyto Online, and leads product decisions to maximize impact and growth the game-based learning curriculum.  She's recruited resources, acquiring over $2 million in funding through private investors and public grants, and participating in the Intel Education Accelerator and AT&T Aspire Accelerator. She has also served as Principal Investigator on grants through the National Science Foundation and Dept. of Education.

Only 22% of graduating high school seniors are proficient in science. This has broad impacts, as there will be a projected 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs this year and reduces the scientific literacy of our citizens that leads to better personal life and health decisions.

Tyto Online helps teachers deliver hands-on science learning where students actively solve authentic problems  ー using a video game as the platform. Students do activities like collecting evidence to determine if a species is invasive, or solving a food shortage with genetics.

Students build their science and engineering skills, and scientific literacy, as they play.

Tyto Online engages diverse students by targeted the common interest drop-off age of middle school with key strategies: stereotype-busting characters, showing the social impact of STEM, and exploring culturally relevant problems. This increased STEM engagement has potential to lead to improved scientific literacy and STEM jobs for more diverse students.

Only 22% of graduating high school seniors are proficient in science. This has broad impacts, as there will be 2.4 million unfilled STEM jobs this year, reduces students’ reach for higher-paying STEM jobs, and reduces the scientific literacy of our citizens that leads to better personal life and health decisions.

Girls and underrepresented minorities also have less access to opportunities: While 60% of college attendees are women, only 35% of STEM graduates are women, and underrepresented minorities make up 30% of the U.S. population but only 12.5% of engineering degrees.

This gap is due to many reasons, but some of the primary factors are:

• Stereotypes and stereotype threat;
• Misconceptions about STEM careers (boring, don’t make an impact, not relevant).

These are determined by social context, but also access to information and education. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to have advanced STEM classes available in their high schools.

We’ve tied our problem-solving into the timely need of schools that are adopting a new set of science standards that requires new teaching approaches, as an entry point.

Further, educators are particularly passionate right now about changing their practices in light of the racial justice movement’s awareness building across the country.

Immersed Games’ product, Tyto Online, allows teachers to deliver hands-on, inquiry-led science experiences with students — using a video game.

Students create a custom character, and then solve problems and engage with science phenomenon within the context of the game. For example, students do a quest where they are asked to determine if something is an invasive species by collecting data and forming an argument to convince the scientists to transplant it out.

The game activities have students play with models and learn deeply within progressive storylines as students build skills — exactly the type of learning the new science standard paradigm shift asks for.

Additionally, Tyto Online supports underrepresented groups by:

1. fighting stereotypes, showing how STEM careers are creative and collaborative, and having diverse role models;
2. focusing on “doing” science and letting students experience what that’s like (and see they are capable);
3. showing the social relevance and impact of STEM careers;
4. helping develop a sense of belonging in an online, cooperative community;
5. is created as a platform with a set of authoring tools so that we can work with partners to vastly expand content, age group, reach, and local contexts ー increasing potential reach, scale, and impact.

Right now, we’re going through schools as they have broad reach across all demographics of students, and we have identified an entry point with the new science standards where there’s a particular need. Our initial students have been primary in NY and WA.

For all stakeholders: from district leaders, teachers, and students themselves, we take their voice seriously and use it to guide the development of our product and supports.

When we first started the project, we spent three months with a group of middle schoolers for two hours every week. Now, we’re engaged in regular usability testing, asking for feedback, sending surveys, etc. that guide how we change the product to fit their needs.

We’ve also done initial efficacy testing to understand initial impact: showing a 12% improvement in science & engineering skills after one experience. Students were actually on-task on all but 3% of conversation during the pilot. Student feedback is that the game makes learning about the topic more engaging, and in one class, we saw that 1/3 of students actually went home to play more!

This summer, we’re currently arranging a community partnership to get feedback from BIPOC students on our upcoming racial justice partnership.

Our project supports girls and underrepresented minorities as they develop their STEM capabilities. We’ve targeted middle school as the common drop-off age for STEM interest. Therefore, we’re supporting students who are traditionally left behind to increase scientific literacy and STEM career interest.

We also overlap with impact for the other goals:

• Using relevant, authentic problems that can build awareness and motivate students into action for difficult problems (such as featuring coral bleaching with climate change);
• Exposing students to diverse perspectives and potentially people as we open up more public servers in the future. We’re also working on anti-racist science content.

I first had the idea while playing World of Warcraft as an undergraduate student, in 2008.  I was playing and realized how much I learned just through experience, and became fascinated with educational games.

The next year, I entered a doctoral program in education, and kept realizing more what a powerful learning tool that games could be as they linked to most facets of ideal learning approaches. Games  have learning communities that share information, iterate on practices, and improve together over time.

So in 2013, I began researching education games for my dissertation, but was disappointed. Educational games were largely either shallow learning experiences, or short, individual, one-off experiences. No one was really delivering on the full potential of what learning games could be.

So I decided that I wanted to build from this mental model of how powerful they could be that I had accidentally developed trough my PhD program.  I began learning about startups and game development, began talking to people, and recruiting people who wanted to participate. I ended up with a group of 20+ volunteers in 2014 who wanted to help, and recruited co-founders and first employees from that early group.

I was a curious and engaged child. I even remember getting upset with my peers once in school since I was fascinated with what we were learning, and they didn’t seem to care.

Now as an educator, I realize that the learning experiences of most students, especially those from underrepresented backgrounds, leads to disenfranchisement. That they don’t feel empowered, don’t feel the learning is relevant ー in the ways that I did.

Games are a medium that is uniquely empowering, instead. Students regularly participate in self-reflection, improvement, and problem solving in a natural way in gameplay. The engagement is important, but even more important is that empowerment.

My goal with our project, Tyto Online, is to harness that power, so that students who have been traditionally disenfranchised can experience empowered learning. We use the game to set up authentic problems from relevant examples. For example, they can help save a sick seal in the game by discovering microplastics and evaluating solutions.

My passion is that this can can serve as a model of impact for students. That they actually get to experience DOING science, to feel empowered, and to be inspired about what they are capable of in the world.

I’ve read that creative new inventions are often from the confluence of life experiences that position someone to see a problem and its potential solutions in new ways, and potentially in ways that seem obvious to them, but others didn’t have these same perspectives.

That’s definitely where I seem to fall as a founder creating something unique to our field.

My first experience was as a gamer, playing online games like World of Warcraft where I was one of the leaders of experiences where you organized forty people to come together to tackle cooperative problems (called “raids”).  We problem solved and iterated as we figured out new content, which gave me a unique perspective of the power of social learning in games.

Then, I went into a School Psychology PhD program, which provided me with key skills:

• Understanding education needs easily, with thousands of hours in schools and supporting teachers;
• Having a strong pedagogical understanding and the ability to provide excellent professional development, with science teachers and curriculum administrators often asking how I know so much about doing next generation science instruction while I deliver their training;
• Research capabilities, since I was all-but-dissertation in my PhD program and have sufficient knowledge to design and manage our studies ー which has helped us with successful grant applications.

I also ran a small business during college as a photographer, learning business basics I could apply to this project. I've also demonstrated my competency by raising private investment and over $1m in grants.

A couple years ago, I was speaking with an investor who was excited to lead a large round for us, something we were planning for months. But the deal fell through, largely due to internal issues in the firm.

I scrambled for other funding resources, but had difficulty and our runway was ticking down. We stayed transparent with our team, letting them know when we had three, two, then just one month of runway left.

A few months prior, I gave an office tour to a serial entrepreneur and his son, showing him gaming careers. He told me that he didn’t angel invest, but to reach out if I got in a bad spot, as he loved what we were doing and didn’t want us to fail.

I reached out to him, and we agreed on a loan deal that got us money in the bank with two weeks left ー and we didn’t miss payroll. This helped me understand the value in building broad relationships.

Importantly, we didn’t lose a single team member, as they trusted me to find a solution.

Also, we make the last payment on that loan THIS MONTH and it’s fully repaid!

Leadership, to me, has been mischaracterized. It’s not about giving inspiring speeches in front of an audience, but about consensus building and supporting people towards their goals ー while inspiring them to align those with yours.

Our company has often been low on cash resources for the goals we needed to meet. Therefore, we’ve been making far below market value (often ~3x under). Because of that, so far every member of our team, including myself, has made the exact same salary. I lived on a $24,000 salary for years, just like the rest of my team.

This shared sacrifice meant that my team members truly understood, and believed, that we were just paying what we could to ensure we hit our next milestones without running out of money to achieve them.

Despite low pay (now improved some), in the past two years, we’ve only had one team member leave. When we relocated the company to Buffalo in 2018, no one left. In the previous example of not losing team members when almost running out of money, one of our team later told us that’s when he realized we were honest, and he could trust us to do the right thing.

Our product has students directly engage with science phenomena by doing hands-on experiences like exploring a coral reef that is experiencing bleaching and running experiments to understand what is causing it.

We've used a video game to set up the environment for hands-on learning that would otherwise not be possible to do within a classroom. We provide innovative science learning by:

• Engaging in science and engineering practices across every activity within the game;
• Directly figuring out science from phenomena within the game;
• Learning across storylines, building learning up through these experiences;
• Multiplayer cooperative experiences (coming soon).

Other educational products also have not taken these approaches, often relying on dialogue or videos for their teaching, rather than letting students legitimately build knowledge themselves as we do.

Additionally, we developed our product as an expandable platform, with a content authoring tool we plan to make available to partners in the future to add their own content (the first public authoring tools will be available to teachers in ~1 year).

Most products in our domain focus on small amounts of content they create, but we are unique with our potential for exponentially more reach and customization to local, relevant contexts that can be accomplished through the content authoring tools.

Our long-term, audacious goal is therefore to embrace content creators and partners so that our platform will become a single video game where you can learn absolutely anything.

Our main defined theory of change was created with a focus on in-school contexts; we do have additional research supporting our strategies for underrepresented goals, but this is the broad theory of change for the product to main outcomes.

[Proximal] Improved Three-Dimensional Science Learning. There is a strong background of empirical support for games as learning tools. In one meta-analysis, students using digital games consistently showed improved learning outcomes, and those games with a defined learning theory basis did even better. Another series of studies commissioned by the Gates Foundation showed that students’ academic achievement could have been improved an average of 23% if they had learned with simulations.

The Sequences and Sandbox components’ designs pull from the research base on best practices for game-based learning pedagogy and science instruction to support strong outcomes of increased science learning and assessment performance. These include, but are not limited to:

• Games which employ endogenous mechanics where the learning is tied directly to gameplay mechanics improve learning better than games which employ exogenous approaches (such as overlaying questions with unrelated gameplay).
• Students must have direct experience with the phenomena they are learning about, including raising questions and drawing new conclusions through experiences;
• Students must understand and care about the question or problem they are working on.

[Proximal] Improved Attitudes & Interest in Science. Multiple meta-analyses on
game-based learning have found positive effects for affective learning outcomes, such as self-efficacy, attitude towards subject learning, continuing motivation and persistent level.

[Distal] Improved Science Achievement & Scientific Literacy. The implementation of the best practices are expected to result in these long-term outcomes. Studies show the benefits of problem and inquiry based learning include situating learning in context, long-term retention, and improved scientific literacy. These skills are critical for later development of students into STEM careers.

[Distal] Increased STEM Career Interest. Expanding on the research for improved attitudes and interest in science, research also explicitly supports the role of game-based learning in increasing career interest, with one study showing a 5% increase in science careers after just a 3-week implementation of the game intervention.

Our focus is on students, who are the main benefactors of our outcomes. However, this is accomplished through partners: teachers, parents, and community.

During the previous school year, we sold 4,000 student licenses across 8 organizations. Unfortunately, technical limitations (to be discussed under barriers) combined with the difficult environment of COVID19 hampered implementation, so we only ended up serving about 1,500 students.

For this coming school year, we aim to reach 25,000 students, and are excited as our technical limitations are being reduced. We have our renewal customers, we offered grants to four diverse showcase sites and 10 additional teachers who have agreed to serve as case studies, and we are in the process of selling to new customers. We’re additionally in discussions with a corporate partner and a foundation about increasing reach in out-of-school contexts within the next year.

In these early stages, it’s hard to predict five years out ー but we could reasonably be serving 5 million or more students by then. This is due to four additional sales cycles with schools, and through partner growth. Within the next 2 years, we plan on beginning to develop content with partners, at first hand-selected such as nonprofits and corporations wanting social impact. These partners will increase both our reach and broaden our domains of impact.

Long-term, we plan on opening up Tyto Online as a platform for anyone to begin adding their own content to, using our authoring tools, further increasing breadth of impact as a freemium platform.

Reach is impact for us, given the core of our product is around increasing students’ STEM skills and interest. However, in the next year we’ll begin better measuring more aspects of our impact with our showcase sites and other school partners. We’ll focus on development of science/engineering skills, STEM career interest, and stereotypes and perspectives on STEM.

Our main goals over the next year:

• Increase our implementation reach to 25,000 students;
• Support teachers for effective implementations;
• Measure pre/post with showcase site grant winners;
• Improve accessibility features;
• Summer pilot with out-of-school partner (AT&T Sponsor), including feedback from kids on our new anti-racism science content plans;
• Collect richer in-product data, including measuring students’ rate of opting to play at home for additional enrichment, and running some experiments to increase this and identify main factors for the choice.

Within the next five years:

• Expand our content to cover additional grades, and with a rich set of features for both in-school (standards-driven) and out-of-school (interest-driven) content, with more explicit career content;
• Initial teacher customization tools to edit the content for local contexts and share to relevant communities;
• Work with 10+ content partners, such as non-profits and corporate sponsors, to build additional content (available on a freemium version of the product),
• Expand to mobile devices as a supported platform so we can have more thorough reach for underrepresented/underserved students;
• Have significantly increased reach, 5 million+ students with those partners;
• Demonstrated efficacy with randomized trials of evidence for a higher tier of support for our impact.

Our largest risks for failure are in the short-term as we work to reach a break-even threshold of adoption with our product, and increase its ease-of-use and feasibility for faster and simpler adoption into schools.

I previously mentioned that tech limitations have been a significant barrier for us. Our product has experienced device compatibility issues and difficulties installing. During COVID19 school closures, we experienced a 25x increase in teacher sign ups as we made our product free for teachers. However, many were not able to get their students into the game due to these issues.

Therefore, the #1 request from our users has been: play Tyto Online in the web browser (with no installation).

We have been working on this, and plan to have it ready before the end of 2020. This will remove a SIGNIFICANT barrier for us, and power teachers to sign up and use the product within minutes. However, we recognize there will still be compatibility limitations, we won’t yet support any mobile devices, and we need consistent internet access for students.

Additional near-term barriers include:

• Limited financial resources and cash runway;
• Growing sales in an uncertain market due to COVID19;
• Making the product easier to learn for teachers; while kids tend to be comfortable with games, adults can struggle.

Barriers for our 5-year goals include:

• Flexibility and scalability of our content authoring tools and technology;
• Acquiring additional funding;
• Bringing on partners interested in building content into our platform (vs. their own stand-alone products).

One-Year

First, of course, is completing our transition to making the web browser gameplay available. We’ve applied for supplemental support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to help us afford these efforts, including making the flow of sign up into usage easier with this new approach.

• Limited financial resources: currently receiving regular investor introductions from our network. While we are not fundraising yet, we are having introduction calls in order to keep these relationships maintained before we are ready to fundraise after our sales cycle is complete (i.e. starting in Q4 2020).
• Growing sales: using NSF supplemental funds to support sales/marketing, having hired a firm with a full time sales rep.
• Making the product easier to learn: Conducting additional usability testing and improvements based on feedback to date; building a community of learning launching soon!

Five-Year

• Flexibility and scalability: We plan to start with hand-picked partners that we build content alongside in the next 1-2 years to learn from the experience and improve our platform, before opening it up further. We’ll also need to recruit significant additional design and technical talent in upcoming years.
• Acquiring additional funding: Continuing to establish relationships with private investors and foundations, but also looking to bring in revenue/sponsorship-based funding through corporate sponsors who would be interested in supporting content and our social impact.
• Partners onto our platform: Establishing a student base alongside our powerful authoring tool and collecting significant impact research will help convince partners to join vs. wanting to risk their own developments.

We’ve mainly been supported by organizations for funding so far, such as a previous grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (Dept. of Education), and our ongoing grant with the National Science Foundation.

We’ve been supported with educational accelerators from Intel, AT&T, and the non-profit LearnLaunch, and are in the portfolio of 43North, a New York State initiative which provided funding and continues to support us with human resources like support recruiting talent.

We’re currently in discussion with a corporate sponsor about sponsoring a summer camp with a community partner in Rochester, and with a Foundation about helping us further increase reach in out-of-school contexts. We therefore plan to have additional community partners within the next few months.

Within education, the line between partner and customer can also be a blurry one ー as we have partnered with amazing organizations such as Educational Service District 101 in Washington state that have supported our work in developing our climate change content and professional development with their feedback.

We generate revenue by selling Tyto Online to districts and schools at $10/student/year for access to the product ー which includes all content, and the teacher dashboard and materials. They can add professional development for an additional fee, although this year with COVID we have added online training and a community that we’ll be adding for free to all educator purchases. Schools tend to purchase in order to help provide an engaging way to address the new science standards, but right now are also in need of remote and socially distanced learning opportunities.

We also have the product available for consumers at $5/kid/month. This is mainly being used for general enrichment and by homeschoolers currently.

In New York State, we were just awarded an award with the Board of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) so that districts who purchase our product through them can receive support and a refund of up to 88% of the cost of our product through the state (higher for low SES districts). We’re excited about this in order to make us affordable in at-risk communities, and despite COVID19 budget cuts.

We’re also currently talking with our first corporate partner about sponsoring a summer camp with at-risk students from a Boys & Girls Club, and talking with a foundation to help support our reach to additional students with a focus on out-of-school contexts.

For 2020, grants are expected to cover about 50% of our costs. The primary source of these is the National Science Foundation, where we’re on a Phase II SBIR grant, with additional supplements.

We are also selling our product for early revenues ー we had nearly $100,000 in product revenues in 2019, and are working on the sales cycle to increase that in 2020 (we added our first sales rep three weeks ago).

Next year, grants will cover significantly less of our costs (~25%), and by 2022 we plan on not depending on them anymore. In the same time period, we’ll increase our revenues until we could be at break-even starting in 2021.

We do plan on raising an additional round of equity financing from private investors, planned to close in Q1 2021. This will support growing our sales/marketing and implementation support teams, and grow our content ー which will enable us to have larger deal sizes with existing and future customers (improving unit economics).

Funding History

Equity Investors

• (7/2015) $425,000 ー Angel Investors ー Equity
• (8/2016) $100,000 ー Intel Capital ー Convertible Note
• (Q1 2017) $200,000 ー Debt (Resolved) + Warrant
• (9/2017-2018) $185,000 ー Second Story Capital + Angel Investors ー Convertible Note
• (2019) $500,000 ー 43North ー Warrant
• (mid-2020) $145,000 ー AT&T + LearnLaunch ー Convertible Note + Warrant

Grants

• (1/2018) $225,000 ー National Science Foundation ー Phase 1 SBIR Grant for R&D
• (5/2018) $200,000 ー Department of Education ー Phase 1 SBIR Grant for R&D
• (4/2019) $750,000 ー National Science Foundation ー Phase 1 SBIR Grant for R&D. This is paid as work is completed, over a minimum of two years; however, this can be extended based on amount of effort on this vs. additional proejcts. There are also additional supplementeal funds available, such as:
  • $150,000 ー Commercial Partnership Support
  • $50,000 ー Commercialization (pending award)
  • $500,000 ー Phase IIB award, once the organization has brought in $1m in outside revenue or funding, can apply for this full funding ー at ~$700,000 so far.

Revenue
In the last 12 months.

We're just beginning to ramp up revenue, with last sales cycle as founder-only sales. Now we're working on a more significant sales cycle with additional sales/marketing support.

• Consumer Product Sales: ~$10,000
• K-12 School/District Product Sales: ~$68,000

We plan to begin a fundraising round after we’ve begun the 2020-2021 school year, focusing right now on sales and getting ready for implementation in the midst of new needs due to COVID19. This means we’ll begin fundraising in Q4 2020 with a plan to close the round in Q1 2021.

This will likely be a mix of equity from private investors and grants from additional National Science Foundation supplements, and potentially additional support from foundations or other impact organizations.

The amount will be at least $500,000, but we are waiting to specifically define it until we’ve finished this sales cycle and have updated projections and expectations with our learning and improvement of assumptions in our financial model from the process.

$930,000.  This assumes adding two team members in September.

We’re currently at an inflection point.  With resolving our technical hurdle and getting Tyto Online into the web browser, we’ll make our product significantly more accessible and easy for teachers to implement with students, so we already expected large growth at this point.

COVID19 has expanded this inflection point to be potentially much larger this year. Schools need more digital resources for hybrid/remote learning, and even potentially if in-school, since social distancing rules mean they cannot share materials to do labs together.

We want to rise to the challenge, and have the resources and infrastructure in place to meet this need.

The Elevate Prize seems uniquely suited to support us in overcoming multiple barriers:

• Funding to support finical limitations and make sure we have the funding for an Implementation Manager and supporting additional development needs as we deploy in the web for the first time and will need to continue to improve compatibility and ease of accessibility;
• Advising and coaching around measuring/improving impact, improving the product, and growing sales;
• Marketing, media, and exposure to help with sales and partnerships; as we move into more out-of-school contexts with freemium adoption, we’ll need broad awareness to be generated in coming years;
• Introductions to potential partners, as a key component of our growth plan for content and acquisition of users from their networks.

Funding and revenue model ー we are currently working to validate our sales model, and partnerships with others who sell to the same decision-makers in schools would help scale our reach faster. Additionally, we’ll need to fundraise from investors soon or acquire more grant support.

• Board members or advisors ー they can advise on the above, and additional strategy needed as we make important decisions over the next few years.
• Marketing, media, and exposure ー awareness will help with sales/marketing, fundraising, recruiting talent, and helping establish partnerships.
• Other ー we need content partners that want to work directly with us to add content to our platform, providing funding or collaborating for grants to acquire it.

For curricular go-to-market partners, we need people who also sell their products into schools to curriculum/science teachers. This could be any number of core curricular or supplemental providers, such as Discovery Education, Carolina Biological, Amplify, STEMScopes, HMH, Pearson, etc. Ideally, this would take a direct model of an integration with their curriculum and their sales team could offer us as an add-on and take a commission.

When we are ready to start bringing on content partners, we’ll be looking for organizations with content or a message to support. For example, an ideal content partner would be an organization like the Jane Goodall Institute. We would work with them to feature storylines and challenges based on their work; Jane Goodall and her team could serve as STEM role models in the game, and potentially even join for live events where they talk with students across the world. They would share their new content when it launches to Tyto Online, helping to expand adoption of the platform.

Additional partners for this model would include museums with good reach like the Exploratorium in San Francisco or the Smithsonian. Another model could be like banks who want to support financial literacy content, or a STEM employer who wants to support STEM career content.