SagaPro Escolar

Communication and relationship problems impact the well-being of students and educators, making them feel unrelated. Researching the scientific literature we learned that 20% of the world population has a learning disability, 30% of Brazil's school students have suffered or seen cases of bullying, and 81% of Brazil's school students are absent from in person classes during the Pandemic. 

Our solution comprises an emotional state thermometer for students and educators, empathy exercises and pedagogical activities through gamification and storytelling. All of this across a mythological world in the palm of your hand in digital format.

Our solution can bring socio-emotional education, pedagogical activities, AI, gamification and storytelling anywhere with an internet connection. Our solution also comprises a crowdsourcing of pedagogical activities, so teachers and schools can share their knowledge within the platform across cities, states and countries. 

Schools are a place of diversity, not rarely bringing together students from all kinds of cultural backgrounds, this is the case in most large cities. On the other hand, we see poor infrastructure and less access to opportunities in some, not rarely unconnected and neglected, rural communities. We intend to close the gap between Brazil's private and public schools, urban and rural communities! We can do that with SagaPro Social, a segment of our solution that benefits a public school for free for every private school within the platform. Our crowdsourcing of pedagogical activities within the app can connect teachers and schools across cities, states and countries.
Communication and relationship problems impact the well-being of students and educators, making them feel unrelated. Researching the scientific literature we learned that 20% of the world population has a learning disability, 30% of Brazil's school students have suffered or seen cases of bullying, and 81% of Brazil's school students are absent from in person classes during the Pandemic. 
Only in Brazil we are talking about ~48 million school students! Can you imagine Latin America, Africa and the world at large?

SagaPro Escolar is a mobile and web app. It offers an emotional state thermometer for students and educators, empathy exercises and pedagogical activities through gamification, storytelling and AI. All of this across a mythological world in the palm of your hand.

Our empathy activities aim at the self-identification of emotions and offer an anonymous and reviewed by the teachers way of presenting thoughts on it through the Mural of Emotions. We have the Gratitude Mural for dealing with sadness-related emotions, the Forgiveness Mural for dealing with angriness-related emotions and the Victory Mural for sharing pedagogical conquests with your friends and community!

We use Artificial Intelligence to provide students with personal revisions of their progress and learning stage, to the teachers we inform both the emotional climate and learning climate of their classrooms, to the coordinators we do it on a school level. 

As teachers add pedagogical activities and lists of exercises to the app, these are shared and reusable by all other teachers and schools within the platform. We believe in inter-school cooperation and in the crowdsourcing of educational resources!

Gamification and storytelling are our bets on how to keep students involved and engaged in their learning. It's Epic Saga Time!

Our main stakeholders are Brazilian students in their basic education years, we are talking about ~48 million students. Since this is a very large and diverse section of the population, we are starting with middle school students in the state of São Paulo. Brazilian school system is still very disciplinar and curricular, in particular the public school system lacks proper infra-structure and is understaffed. By offering tools for a socio-emotional education through gamification, AI and crowdsourcing we hope to foster a healthier school community, to help mitigated some of the lacks and to account for some of the stress factors. In 2020 we did interviews with families, teachers, school coordinators, school directors and psychologists to better understand the difficulties and shortcomings the students face. In 2021 we gathered with several schools that we were interested in our solution and selected two of them to get close and develop our solution, a public one and a private one. Our solution doesn't require a methodological shift in the schools' way of operating, we provide another tool that can be easily included with the pedagogical material they are familiar and already work with. Talking to the educators we learned how they struggle with the students attention span, specially during the Pandemic, in remote classes. Our solution can help the school community better related to each other, since we focus on the individuals' emotional states, before addressing learning goals.

Students come from all sorts of backgrounds and homes, this can be an opportunity for both conflict and growth. Although we cannot prevent conflict, we can address it properly once the individuals' have access to a socio-emotional education and can express anonymously and securely their joys and struggles in our app.

In Brazil public and private schools are very apart, there are prejudices and stigmas surrounding them. For every private school that uses our solution we will provide it for free for a public school, not only that, but we will also foster their exchange of knowledge and cultural activities.  

Our business model was analyzed by Cietec, Latin American greatest incubator, based in the University of Sao Paulo, before we were approved for incubation.

Our prototype is in very active development, we are still developing the main software, while maintaining close contact with our partnered schools.

Our front-end is being developed in Unity, a very versatile software capable of game development, augmented reality solutions and other AI capabilities. While the back-end is mostly done in cloud services, running Node.js and MongoDB Atlas.

There are pedagogical apps and daily mood apps, but they are not focused on socio-emotional education. Our solution is innovative in how it conveys and directs mood-oriented approaches to ones own self-monitored emotional state. We offer a pipeline that passes first at socio-emotional education and follows with a pedagogical education set by the teachers. We believe both social interactions and student's autonomy is the key to empower them with the necessary tools to better develop their emotional intelligence. In a world where so many suffer from depression, anxiety and bullying we need socio-emotional solutions.

Currently: from our partnered schools, we will be soon serving around 500 students and educators.

In one year: we intend to work with quadruple as many partner schools, serving approximately 2500 users by the end of the year.

In five years: we seek to serve around 150 schools and approximately 40000 users.

Our metrics are based on measuring how many students we serve, how many from public schools and how many from private schools, how many schools we serve, how many pedagogical activities are crowdsourced in our platform, how students' emotional well-being (as self-monitored in our app) is or is not improving and if there is any performance improvement in exams over a longer period of time using our services.

Three full-time founders and one contractor working on development of app with founders

Filipe Russo CEO, Degree in Mathematics at IME-USP, Grad Student in Computer Science  Applied to Education at ICMC-USP, Data Scientist Freelancer, Advisory Professor at OBMEP, Exchange student at the Technical University of Munich, Internship at the Max Planck Institute, Scientific Researcher at IQ-USP and Scientific Researcher at IME-USP

Phelipe Braga CTO, Undergrad Student in Physics at IF-USP, Former Undergrad in Geophysics at IAG-USP, Former Undergrad  in Information System at EACH-USP, IBM Cloud, AI, IoT Specialist, Azure Specialist for Cloud, Dev Ops and Data Analysis, Worked at Informática Portal do Morumbi, Extension Project: Art & Science at the Park

Guilherme Mendes Art and Communication Director, Bachelor in Architecture and Urban Planning - UNESP Bauru, Exchange student at Engineering & Architecture School - University College Dublin, Freelance Illustrator, Graphic Designer and Lina's Father

Filipe: indigenous lgbt+, Guilherme is a father and we plan to have at least 50% of women in our staff as well as employing people of color.

First and foremost, we believe in the positive impact of our solution on education and school and institutional well-being. Also, we understand that SagaPro contributes to the achievement of the UN goals established in the 2030 agenda, aiming to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.” In addition, we believe that as a result of our participation in Solve’s 2021 Global Challenges we could greatly benefit from the acknowledgment of our solution as well as possible fundings, which would be entirely used in our acceleration and growth so that we can operate in a growing number of schools.

Business model (e.g. product-market fit, strategy & development)

Legal or Regulatory Matters 

Technology services to fund or assist with web services, AI and server services; software and hardware discounts, new technology facilitating accessibility and communication.

Technology services like Azure, IBM, AWS to fund or assist with web services and server services; Discounts on software and hardware to improve infrastructure

Partnership with Google Classroom to take advantage of the service that already exists in some schools, facilitating accessibility and communication. 

Google or Facebook for digital marketing and expansion either nationally or internationally

We believe that the solution offered by SagaPro is very much in line with the precepts set by The ASA Prize for Equitable Education, once as our solution is highly scalable and easily internationalizable, and our ultimate goal is to ensure the students' well-being while establishing an equitable and accessible education.

Our solution, which should be implemented in a growing number of public and private schools within the Brazilian context. internationalizing our services which would benefit students and teachers alike on a global scale. Artificial intelligence will be used, most importantly, in the management of crowdsourcing of pedagogical activities for students, suggesting them the scholar subjects in which they have the greatest difficulties and propounding individual and personalized re-studies.

Through our solution, we seek to observe students' frame of mind while promoting an inclusive and equitable education via a crowdsourcing of pedagogical activities. We believe that through socio-emotional education and sharing activities on a global scale we will be able to contribute greatly to the diffusion of studies in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics in an accessible and equitable way.

We consider ourselves eligible for the The AI for Humanity Prize as our solution makes extensive use of artificial intelligence, especially concerning the application of pedagogical activities to students. Our goal is that, through the use of artificial intelligence, students will receive reports detailing their performance in school activities, so that the areas of knowledge in which students receive lower grades or demonstrate greater difficulties should be made up for through repetition of exams and activities, solving any doubts and establishing a solid learning.

The AI for Humanity Prize would greatly help us to accelerate the application of our solution, which should be implemented in a growing number of public and private schools within the Brazilian context. Starting with our establishment in Brazilian schools, we believe our solution may be conveniently internationalized, which would benefit students and teachers alike on a global scale. Artificial intelligence will be used, most importantly, in the management of crowdsourcing of pedagogical activities for students, suggesting them the scholar subjects in which they have the greatest difficulties and propounding individual and personalized re-studies.

We believe our solution can positively impact a number of local communities with respect to their educational needs. Through crowdsourcing pedagogical activities and creation of a library of globally shared school exercises, students and teachers from different contexts will have access to quality teaching materials made available by renowned institutions. In Brazil, for example, there is a marked contrast between the quality of education in the public and private sectors; we believe that by virtue of our solution we could reduce this contrast and strengthen the relationship between public and private schools.