Personalized AI-driven STEM Learning Platform

In the U.S., there is a significant gap in gender equity in STEM education and careers. Data indicates that while half of the total U.S. workforce is female, women hold less than 30% of the jobs in science and engineering in 2020. This gender disparity starts early, in school, where girls and minority students often don't feel encouraged to explore these subjects. In fact, only 20% of high school graduates are ready for college STEM majors while STEM jobs are projected to grow over twice as fast as other occupations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has widened this gap, with increasing learning losses and a lack of qualified teachers, particularly in STEM subjects. Remote learning has added new challenges, further exacerbating disparities in access to quality education.

Traditional, "one-size-fits-all" teaching models in STEM education fail to meet the individual learning needs of diverse student populations. All students are taught using the same content, delivered at the same pace and challenge level, regardless of their specific needs or abilities.

Also, societal and cultural stereotypes and the lack of female role models in STEM discourages girls, reducing their interest and self-confidence. This means we need to rethink how we teach these subjects to engage and inspire all students, especially girls, and minorities.

In terms of size and scope, this problem affects millions of students nationwide, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, women, and minorities. It limits their preparedness for college, restricts access to STEM careers, and hampers their overall potential for success in the rapidly growing STEM job market. The call to address these educational disparities and promote gender and racial equity in STEM fields is not just timely but urgent.

SciQuiry is an AI-driven platform that sparks interest and persistence in STEM by offering a personalized, question-based learning journey. It is a student-led platform for independent science learning where students learn at their own pace using spaced retrieval practice on schema-building questions that connect concepts to real-world applications. It does not require any installation or specific hardware, as it only needs a browser to be immediately available on all devices, platforms, and screen sizes. Students, upon sign-in, will choose a topic and begin responding to questions with progressing levels of difficulty. SciQuiry can be presented as a supplemental tool to be used in classrooms or remotely.

Our learning engine is based on neuroscience and educational psychology research. We use the method of active recall, where students answer questions that test their memory of a topic, strengthening their understanding and retention. There's also a skill tree feature that introduces concepts gradually, requiring students to answer five consecutive questions correctly before advancing and building their confidence step by step. Moreover, we apply spaced repetition technique, dividing learning into several spaced-out small lessons, enhancing students' memory over time.

Our ultimate goal is to make science intriguing and relevant, increasing students' likelihood of pursuing a STEM career. By applying the three principles of self-determination theory—autonomy, competence, and relevance—SciQuiry cultivates a learning environment where students exercise control over their learning process, gain competence through immediate feedback, and see the relevance of scientific concepts through real-world applications.

We also use machine learning to spot gaps in a student's knowledge and adapt lessons to suit their needs. Combined with game-like features such as earning points and leveling up, we aim to make learning science engaging and enjoyable.

We put a strong focus on encouraging gender equality in STEM. We try to make our questions and real-world examples interesting to all students, regardless of gender. We show the wide variety of people who have contributed to science, including female scientists, to make clear that everyone can excel in these fields.

Our platform's ability to adapt also ensures each student gets a learning experience that fits their individual style, which can often vary by gender. Our machine learning can identify where students need to improve and tailor the learning process to suit them.

Overall, SciQuiry aims to reduce the gender gap in STEM education and inspire a diverse new generation of STEM leaders. Through a student-focused approach and commitment to gender equality, our platform aims to prepare all students for a future where they can thrive in STEM fields.

We hope that with regular use of SciQuiry, students will understand science better, develop a deeper love for science, and feel more confident and interested in the subject. This should lead to more students will likely enroll and persist in physical sciences.

Please visit our product demo video for a more detailed view of how SciQuiry works.

SciQuiry serves students, particularly those in middle school and high school, who are curious about or pursuing studies in STEM subjects. This includes both students who are already interested in science and those who may feel disconnected from these subjects. By providing a platform that encourages engagement and makes science learning more relatable, we aim to nurture their curiosity, enhance their knowledge, and help them gain the necessary confidence to pursue science further.

We are working to understand their needs through regular user testing and feedback sessions. We've created feedback loops, which include surveys and user experience interviews, to continuously improve our platform based on their experiences and suggestions. This ensures that we adapt our platform to suit the needs of our diverse user base, making science learning more effective and enjoyable for them.

SciQuiry is also actively reaching out to educators, as they play a crucial role in student learning. We're engaging with teachers and education experts to understand how to better integrate our platform into existing curriculums and cater to different learning styles and requirements.

Our solution addresses the needs of our target population by making science learning more accessible and interactive. The AI-driven, question-based approach helps students learn at their own pace and according to their preferred style. By incorporating the principles of active recall, skill tree learning, and spaced repetition, we are not only improving knowledge retention but also building learner confidence.

Moreover, we've recognized the importance of addressing gender disparity in STEM, and we've designed our platform to be inclusive and inspiring to all learners. By providing examples of successful scientists from diverse backgrounds and genders, we're aiming to show that anyone can have a fulfilling career in STEM.

In the long term, SciQuiry has the potential to change how students perceive science learning. By making it more engaging, relevant, and personalized, we can foster a love for science that can lead to more students pursuing STEM subjects at higher levels. Ultimately, this can contribute to increasing the number of skilled professionals in STEM fields, driving innovation and progress in these crucial sectors.

Our team, led by co-founders Rashin Taheri and Dr. Hamid Taheri, is well-suited to deliver the SciQuiry solution, given our collective experience in technology, education, and science, combined with a strong understanding of our target audience. Rashin's background in IT and application development and the successful commercialization of Koantum.com, an award-winning online science learning platform, uniquely position her to steer this project. Dr. Hamid Taheri's experience in leading a thriving cardiology practice imparts the team with strong leadership and operational skills.

Additionally, we are supported by a diverse team with expertise in K-12 science education, software development, data architecture, and machine learning. This broad skill set, combined with our experience, enables us to adapt to the evolving needs of our target population. 

To strengthen our expertise, we have advisors such as Steve Schneider, Ph.D., senior director of STEM Research at WestEd, Michael Carter, Ph.D., who led education research at Apple, Dr. Bruce McLaren, a Research Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University with research interests in education technology and collaborative learning, and Dr. Medsker, Research Professor of Education at The George Washington University, who specializes in artificial intelligence, STEM education, and policy and ethics in AI.

To ensure we fully understand the needs of the communities we serve, we have been actively engaging our target population during the development process. We interviewed over 100 secondary students and science teachers for customer discovery as part of the Innovation Commercialization Assistance Program (ICAP) in Virginia prior to designing our MVP. Currently, as part of the VITAL Prize challenge, we are interviewing 80 students and science educators, using their feedback to refine and improve our solution. This close interaction with our community helps us shape our platform according to their needs, wishes, and ideas.

We believe our solution's design and implementation are significantly influenced by the community's input. Their voices guide our development process, ensuring that our platform truly resonates with our users and delivers a meaningful impact on their learning journey in STEM. With our team's unique blend of skills, experience, and commitment to community engagement, we are confident that we can deliver a solution that will drive interest, engagement, and success in STEM learning.

We have currently 500 active users and aim to have more than 2000 users by the end of 2023 and 10,000 users by the end of 2024.

We are part of 4.0 schools and the VELA Education community. Our goal for 2023-24 is to establish more partnerships with nonprofit organizations focusing on equality and diversity in education specifically for low-income and underrepresented students getting free access to our content. The SciQuiry’s content including the library of schema-building questions and feedback is open and free to all students regardless of location, gender, and economic background. This may be valuable for students of color and other historically disadvantaged students to build their competence and interest in science.

We believe that the multidimensional support offered by Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures can help us address several key challenges we're currently facing.

One technical challenge is optimizing our AI algorithms to ensure more personalized and effective learning experiences. The expertise within the Solve and Tiger Global Impact Ventures network could help us enhance our AI capabilities and improve our product.

Our mission is to ensure that SciQuiry is accessible to all, regardless of economic background. While we have plans to collaborate with nonprofits to provide free access to underprivileged students, navigating these partnerships can be complex. Guidance on forming strategic alliances, particularly in the education sector, could greatly enhance our reach and impact.

Culturally, we aim to make SciQuiry as inclusive as possible, striving for gender equity in STEM. Input on how to best design and position our platform to appeal to all genders would be invaluable.

Moreover, we are aware that the edtech market is highly competitive and evolving. Market insight and strategies from seasoned professionals could help us effectively position our solution and expand our user base.

In terms of personal and professional growth, the leadership coaching and peer-to-peer network will provide invaluable learning opportunities. As leaders in a startup, we could greatly benefit from these experiences, enabling us to guide our team more effectively and drive our vision forward.

We see our participation in this Challenge as a unique opportunity for growth and development for both our platform and ourselves as leaders. We're eager to benefit from the resources, networking, and knowledge sharing that the Challenge promises, ultimately accelerating our mission to promote gender equity in STEM through SciQuiry.

The Team Lead for our solution is Rashin Taheri, who serves as the CEO. Rashin is an ed-tech entrepreneur and an immigrant who has a profound belief in equality in education. With over 20 years of IT experience and application development, Rashin has a rich background in commercializing online learning platforms that have been adopted in multiple school districts.

Her passion for improving STEM education using technology and AI is deeply personal and well-connected with the community our project serves. Rashin is an advocate for girls in STEM, having first-hand experience of the challenges and opportunities that lie in these fields. She believes that early introduction to STEM subjects can fundamentally change girls' lives by promoting financial independence and boosting self-esteem. She is the mother of two daughters ages 11 and 14 and actively encourages their interest in STEM.

SciQuiry transforms the delivery of STEM education by leveraging AI and neuroscience research, offering a personalized, engaging, and effective learning experience. This contrasts with the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional classrooms.

Personalized Learning - Our platform's adaptive algorithms create a tailored experience for each student, identifying their strengths, weaknesses, and learning pace.

Active Engagement - Our question-based approach promotes active engagement, stimulating critical thinking and real-world concept application. This stands in contrast to passive note-taking often seen in standard educational settings.

Immediate feedback and reinforcement learning techniques foster real-time understanding and knowledge retention.

Accessibility - Future inclusion of text-to-speech technology will enhance accessibility for learners with reading and visual impairments.

Additionally, SciQuiry supports self-paced learning, promoting autonomy and self-determination, differing from rigid, time-bound traditional learning models.

Lastly, our platform emphasizes real-world applications of STEM concepts, which are often missing in traditional classrooms, making learning more meaningful.

Over the next year, our primary objectives include:

Expanding Content: We plan to amplify our library of schema-building questions substantially, leveraging AI tools such as ChatGPT to speed up the process.

Enhancing the Product: We aim to integrate matching and sequence question types for more precise student assessments and incorporate text-to-speech technology to make our platform universally accessible.

Increasing User Base: Our goal is to grow our active user base from the current 500 to over 2000, accomplished by solidifying our relationships with charter school networks and nonprofits and deploying strategic marketing tactics.

Establishing Partnerships: We plan to nurture associations with organizations that emphasize equality and diversity in education to extend our reach to more girls and underrepresented students.

Continual Improvement: We intend to persistently refine our platform based on user feedback and data-driven insights to enhance both the user experience and learning outcomes. We will gauge our success by user growth, engagement, and improved performance on our platform.

In the next five years, our vision is for SciQuiry to become a leading online STEM learning platform, offering personalized and impactful learning experiences to students nationwide. We aim to extend our reach beyond middle school physics, covering the entire K-12 STEM curriculum, including Chemistry, Biology, Earth & Space, and even Mathematics.

With the growing adoption of remote and blended learning models in schools, we foresee a significant opportunity for SciQuiry to become an essential component of the education ecosystem. Our platform's design allows for constant evolution and adaptability, making us well-equipped to respond to emerging educational trends and needs.

By partnering with organizations committed to educational equity and diversity, we hope to create a more inclusive STEM learning environment. Our goal is to inspire the next generation of STEM professionals, facilitating a transformational impact on their lives.

Success for SciQuiry is defined by the enhancement of learner engagement and persistence in STEM education. We monitor growth in user numbers and improved performance on our adaptive question-based learning tool as key indicators of success. Additionally, successful partnerships with researchers and schools, positive feedback, and increased interest from educators to use SciQuiry in their curriculum signal our success.

User feedback plays a pivotal role in tracking our progress. We actively collect and scrutinize comments, suggestions, and reviews from our users. Rising satisfaction levels and positive reviews from both learners and educators are testaments to the effectiveness of our solution.

We were accepted into the 4.0 Tiny Fellowship program and as part of this fellowship, we conducted a pilot study with 200 middle school students and teachers in November of 2022. More than 80% of students found SciQuiry helpful in learning complex Physics concepts and 90% of teachers filled out the survey at the end of the pilot and mentioned they will be using this platform with their students.

SciQuiry is designed to address two significant issues in STEM education: student engagement and representation. Using a unique approach that integrates AI with established principles of neuroscience and educational psychology, we aim to transform STEM learning for students, particularly those in underrepresented communities.

Here's how and why we expect our solution to make a significant impact:

Personalized Learning: Traditional STEM teaching methods often follow a one-size-fits-all model, which may not suit all learners. SciQuiry's AI-driven platform personalizes the learning process by adapting to each student's pace and learning style. This adaptive and personalized approach helps to improve student engagement and, consequently, their understanding and performance in STEM subjects.

Diversity and Inclusion: The lack of diversity in STEM fields is a well-known problem. Our solution, through strategic partnerships with organizations, focused on educational equality, strives to reach students from underrepresented communities, promoting diversity in STEM learning and, in the long run, the STEM professions.

Accessibility: Text-to-speech technology and an intuitive user interface make our platform accessible to all learners, including those with learning disabilities or visual impairments. This accessibility supports our goal of democratizing access to quality STEM education.

The theory of change is supported by research highlighting the benefits of personalized, adaptive learning, and the need for diversity in STEM. Our ongoing evaluation includes feedback from students and educators, data on user growth, and improvements in student performance on our platform. These provide evidence of our progress and the effectiveness of our approach.

As we reach more students and educators, we expect to see improved student outcomes in STEM, greater interest in these subjects, and ultimately, more diverse representation in STEM fields.

SciQuiry is an education platform powered by advanced technology, designed to create a personalized and adaptive experience for STEM learners. It uses artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to create a tailored learning environment. It delivers custom sets of questions based on a student's individual progress and proficiency. In simple terms, AI helps us provide the right content at the right pace to every student, making learning more effective and enjoyable.

Text-to-speech technology makes our platform more accessible. This feature transforms the written content into spoken words, which can help students who have visual impairments or reading difficulties.

To improve the SciQuiry platform, we consider using a variety of machine learning models, each addressing specific aspects of the learning experience. Collaborative filtering models can be employed for content recommendation, while decision trees or random forests can classify students into different performance levels or learning groups. Deep learning models can analyze student responses, and reinforcement learning models can optimize the sequence and selection of questions. Bayesian knowledge tracing can model students' mastery of different concepts, clustering algorithms can tailor the learning experience to different clusters of students, and sequence models can predict students' future performance.

SciQuiry is a new AI-driven platform striving to boost interest and persistence in STEM. Offering a personalized learning journey, we utilize a unique question-based approach that connects concepts to real-world applications.

The efficacy of our solution hinges on the integration of established neuroscience and educational psychology research. Concepts such as active recall or testing effect, desirable difficulty, skill tree learning, and spaced repetition underpin the design of our platform.

Active recall engages students in cognitive efforts to retrieve information, strengthening their memory retention and connections between different concepts. This aspect aligns with studies that prove the effectiveness of active recall in enhancing educational outcomes (Adesope et al., 2017; Agarwal et al., 2012; Dunlosky et al., 2013).

The principle of desirable difficulty is another pillar of our approach. It refers to deliberately introducing a level of challenge in the learning process, which, in turn, enhances long-term retention and transfer of knowledge. This technique is known to amplify the testing effect (Bjork et al., 2011; Roediger & Butler, 2011).

SciQuiry also employs a skill tree learning approach. This method starts by teaching basic concepts and gradually introduces more complex ones, fostering reinforcement learning (Ghozali et al., 2019; Orner et al., 2019).

Finally, the concept of spaced repetition or overcoming the forgetting curve is utilized. Research has shown that learning in multiple, spread-out sessions improves recall (Maass et al. 2018; Latimier et al., 2021; Tabibian et al., 2019). Thus, SciQuiry is broken down into multiple micro-lessons, and by revisiting information at increasing intervals, it strengthens long-term retention.

These concepts are crucial for maximizing what students learn and promoting a growth mindset. An adaptive setup, instant feedback, and multiple question types are also incorporated in SciQuiry for active recall and learning essential for mastery of STEM topics (Adesope et al.,2017; McDaniel et al., 2011; Roediger & Karpicke, 2006; Dweck, 2008).

Our team consists of 2 full-time employees and 5 contractors.

Our team has been devotedly working on SciQuiry since its inception in Jan 2021, which means we have been refining and developing our solution for about two years now.

At SciQuiry, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are inherent to our operations and ethos. Our leadership is composed primarily of immigrant founders and our team is predominantly female, which brings a diverse array of experiences, perspectives, and skills to our work. We believe that this diversity enriches our work and aids us in creating an inclusive product that can cater to a broad range of student needs.

To ensure we continue to adhere to DEI principles, we have specific goals in place:

Firstly, we aim to maintain and enhance the diversity within our team. We believe that a variety of perspectives will lead to more creative solutions to the challenges we face in improving STEM education.

Secondly, we strive to make our platform accessible and inclusive. We've integrated features like text-to-speech to make our content more accessible to students with varying needs.

Lastly, we aim to build partnerships with organizations that focus on diversity and inclusivity in education, ensuring that girls and underrepresented students can also benefit from our platform.

There are over 24 million middle and high school students in the United States, attending public, private, and home schools that can benefit from this platform. The freemium model (including access to all questions and feedback) will drive early adoption and revenue will be generated through a one-time license model to schools and districts ($8 per learner per year) and a monthly subscription (as low as $5 per user per month) for premium features for parents which include capabilities related to customized content delivery through adaptive learning, progress reports and AI recommendation path for at home expanded learning.

Using these assumptions and a conservative estimate of percent market growth each year from 0.01% to 2% of the market, we anticipate scaling revenue from $19k in U.S. sales at product launch to $3.8M in U.S. product sales after 5 years only from sales to schools. Revenue will be generated with an initial focus on middle and high school students in the U.S. As we gain market traction, we will pursue strategic partnerships with major players for licensing agreements or acquisitions.

SciQuiry has a solid plan to remain financially secure. Our approach includes a freemium model which encourages initial adoption and earns revenue from premium subscriptions and school licenses. Also, we're exploring varied revenue sources like partnerships, sponsorships, and other grants and competition opportunities.

We're working on boosting our reach through marketing and user recruitment, leading to increased subscription revenue. Plus, ChatGPT helps us create other STEM content in a cost-effective way and in significantly less time, supporting scalable growth.

We have secured two microgrants from 4.0 schools and VELA Education, helping our early-stage development. We're also finalists in the Tools Competition, with potential access to $100K, awaiting results by July 15th. Another promising opportunity is the VITAL Prize Challenge by NSF, having advanced to the next phase, with results due by this summer.

Additionally, we've applied for the Department of Education's SBIR grant and the NewSchools 2023 funding, expecting results due this summer.

Our Freemium model is a key revenue generator. We're committed to offering all students free access to our rich content, promoting early adoption. Revenue then flows from subscriptions for premium features (AI and personalization) for parents and school licenses. This approach aligns with our commitment to serving students everywhere, regardless of location, gender, or economic situation. Our model fosters sustainability while supporting our mission of accessibility and inclusivity.