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 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, our initial focus is to serve 14% of the primary education's later years in the private network, which means our solution may positively impact the life of approximately 252 thousand students. In addition, for every paying private school we plan to offer our services for a public school free of charge through our social program SagaPro Social. The 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 mitigate 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 relate to each other, since we focus on the individuals' emotional states, before addressing learning goals. 

Our solution promotes perspective training and empathy as ways to solve conflicts, both personal and social. We work with motivational systems such as care and affiliation, aiming to improve prosocial behavior, as researched in the work of Tania Singer Queimado. We believe these socio-emotional skills have never been more needed.

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.

The technology necessary to run our app is a smartphone, on the back-end we run on cloud services. In our server we develop AI, machine learning models and data visualizations personalized for school staff daily needs. 

Our solution conveys and directs mood-oriented approaches to one's self-monitored emotional state using AI in pursuit of strengthening self-awareness. 

Artificial intelligence will be used 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.

It has already been evidenced in several academic works and by the UN that well-being is a topic that must be taken into account, leading to very positive factors in its presence and maintenance or very negative in its absence. Due to this factor, SagaPro is concerned with mapping these feelings, helping the institution to observe more closely the well-being of students and professors, helping them to feel comfortable to complete their activities in the best way possible.

Using Unity as game development tools and artificial intelligence, we created an interactive, empathetic, engaging environment, attentive to well-being and pedagogical development, methodologies used for games, creating a favorable atmosphere to develop cognitive skills through active teaching methodologies.

Cartilha traz orientações para sociedade sobre prevenção ao suicídio — Português (Brasil) (www.gov.br)

Tecnologias digitais2.indd (scielo.org)

SciELO - Brazil - Gamificação como estratégia de aprendizagem ativa no ensino

SciELO - Brazil - Aspectos maturacionais e engajamento social de adolescentes

https://www.google.com/url?sa=...

1562-4730-biblios-70-17.pdf (scielo.org.pe)

O jogo como recurso de aprendizagem (bvsalud.org)

https://www.google.com/url?sa=...

The main risk we have to account for is the (over)-exposure of sensitive data from our users, mostly underage ones. We take cybersecurity very seriously, constantly studying and implementing improved security solutions to our app, server and database. We are also fully aware of Brazilian legal dealing of sensitive data as stated in the LGPD guidelines.

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.

Next year: For the next year, we seek to support the well-being and institutional education of partner schools. Our solution 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.

Five years: For the next five years we want to expand to reach a larger share of schools, reaching at least 100 schools, impacting more students and educators. Advancing in development, we intend to implement new mechanics of pedagogical activities, aiming to improve student achievement and learning, likewise we intend to refine AI to bring greater well-being.

How achieve them: Through the metrics obtained during the use of the application by users, we will make the implementations aiming to encourage the largest and most relevant data, with the objective of favoring institutional well-being and student learning. Focusing on reaching the desired number of schools, we will seek to use digital marketing to expand our users

Given that our impact goal is to close the gap between Brazil's private and public schools as well as improve our students' well-being through quality equitable education, we currently measure our progress toward these goals by monitoring the number of schools we serve (including both private and public schools), the number of students and educators who use our platform, the number of pedagogical activities currently crowdsourced in our platform as well as we monitor through our user's entries whether their emotional state has been positively impacted over time, in addition to recommending the students to revisit and redo the pedagogical activities in which they had greater difficulties, through a individual and personalized follow-up.

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

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 

expansion of the national and international customer base, targeting the international market

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.