Tyto Online

Women are highly underrepresented in STEM careers. While 60% of college attendees are women, only 35% of STEM graduates are women. Similarly, although women make up half the labor force, they only account for 25% of STEM jobs. Improving this gap is essential for achieving equity and growing a broadly scientifically literate public.

While this solution focused on girls, it’s important to note the intersectional nature of this problem: many of the same factors impacting women also reduce the participation of underrepresented minorities.

What causes the STEM gap? It is not due to ability: girls and boys perform equally well in math and science during school. However, from age 11 to 15, girls lose interest in STEM. There are complex social factors, but two of the primary are stereotypes and misconceptions about STEM careers.

(1) Stereotypes and stereotype threat.  Due to stereotypes around STEM careers being masculine, girls often experience stereotype threat, the phenomenon where stereotyped groups actually do worse on tasks when reminded of the negative stereotypes. Girls report lower self-efficacy in STEM despite performing as well as or better than boys, internalizing the stereotype that girls are not as capable in STEM. Further, the chance of leaving a STEM major is increased when women are exposed to stereotypes that STEM is masculine.

(2) Misconceptions about STEM careers. Some factors that contribute to womens’ lack of entrance into STEM include the perception of STEM careers as a solitary profession, women in computer science being presented as “weird,” and presenting the activities as machine-focused rather than being focused on people or social issues.

While fifth grade girls often say they want to help people for their career, they dismiss engineering as boring. In one study, only 17% of girls ranked engineering as a very good career (½ the rate of boys’ rating). But then when asked if it would be appealing to protect rainforests by developing new ways to farm, use DNA to solve crimes, or build cars that run on alternative fuels, they were 2.5-3x more likely to say they were interested. There is a lack of information communicated to students about what STEM can accomplish, and the impact the careers have, which are important factors in girls’ decisions to pursue STEM careers.

Promising research shows that this divide can be closed through efforts to develop spatial skills in girls through training, providing more information about STEM careers, making connections to how STEM careers benefit society, providing positive role models, and demonstrating what scientists actually do and how their work benefits society.

However, current solutions have not raised this interest, and some researchers suggest that targeted initiatives may actually “have the unintended effect of signaling to women an inherent lack of fit… [and] send subtle signals to women that lead them to underestimate their success,” actually strengthening the associated masculinity of STEM majors.

We’re creating a video game as a learning platform to inspire young women with the impact of STEM.

Based on the research, an ideal solution would empower girls to collaboratively solve problems that have a social impact while building their STEM skills, self-efficacy, and a sense of belonging. For example, students could examine a coral reef that has bleached, using data and performing experiments to build evidence for why the bleaching is happening and how to solve it. Alternatively, they could collaborate to test and iterate on engineering solutions to increase food yield and solve a hunger crisis.

These are both examples that exist in our first version of our solution, Tyto Online. Our initial content focuses on STEM for middle school students — the age where girls tend to drop off in STEM interest.

(1) Fighting Stereotypes. In contrast to many efforts, Tyto Online does not “pink-wash” the product, instead creating an experience that students of any gender can use (right now, directly as part of curricula in class), while utilizing strategies shown to increase underrepresented groups’ interests. This approach is unique compared to many current efforts, and has promise in helping to reduce the spreading of stereotypes that pink-washed efforts can unintentionally spread.

Other ways Tyto Online can fight stereotypes include:

• showing that STEM careers are creative and collaborative, accomplished by having students work together to solve problems in a variety of ways;

• including diverse and non-stereotypical role models within the game, including intersectional ones representing several areas of diversity;

• demonstrate what scientists actually do, which we accomplish by having the student directly perform these actions within the game; this focus on doing science rather than being a scientist is actually shown to increase girls’ persistence.

(2) Social Relevance & Impact. The way students interact with problems in the video game focuses on how STEM benefits society, as they solve authentic, impactful problems. Tyto Online is used for context to set up these relevant problems in a hands-on way, strategies shown to appeal to girls.

(3) Sense of Belonging. The difference in choosing STEM majors can also be partially explained by social belongingness, or teenagers feeling they will fit in better with subjects that have more of their own gender. Tyto Online is a virtual world, providing social, cooperative learning experiences to create a pro-social community that girls (and other students) can support each other in, to help young women have more positive expectations of their sense of belonging in STEM careers. Current solutions often fall short here, focusing on individual activities or not designing to promote a broader community of support.

(4) Benefits of a Video Game. Using the medium of a video game also has inherent advantages. Action video games have been shown to increase spatial skills equally to training programs, which generalizes to improving STEM skills. Also, girls who spent 9+ hours a week in video games at 13-14 years old are 3x more likely to enter into a physical science, technology, engineering, or math degrees.

Our target population is middle school students (where STEM interest drop-off often occurs), focusing on the public school system, where we’re more likely to serve diverse students. We do not focus just on girls, for two reasons:

1. “Pink washed” efforts can backfire. Instead, we incorporate strategies that we know engage girls and other underrepresented groups in STEM.

2. Outreach programs struggle based on opt-in: who decides to take an extra course, or participate in a program?  By going through the public school system, we reach a diverse and inclusive group of students, which are 50% girls. They are also representative of BIPOC, low SES, and we get access even despite all the barriers normally present in rolling a STEM-focused program out to girls.

To show that our outreach is working:

• In a study where we examine usage and collected demographics, we saw that girls and boys have statistically equal gameplay amounts.

• Currently, the population of schools we serve has 10% more BIPOC students than the national average.

The proximal outcomes in our theory of change, such as improved STEM engagement, STEM mindsets, and improved science learning represent immediate improvements to students’ lives. The most meaningful impacts would be regarding the distal outcomes, such as students’ improved learning leading to better achievement, entering STEM careers, and engaging in lifelong learning.

We know we’re just one part of an ecosystem designed to support students, but the research base connecting the theory of change to these outcomes, and our own initial pilots, both provide strong initial evidence.

We prioritize engaging directly with the students we serve for product feedback. When we first started building our product, we had a group of 10 middle school students who joined us every week for two hours for 2-3 months, providing feedback on every aspect of what we were building. Now, we regularly still collect feedback and engage students directly in addition to feedback from teachers: we talk with them on our support live chat, we send out surveys to guide our next R&D, conduct usability sessions and new feature play-tests, etc. In June, we are launching our first Student Advisory Board in which a group of middle school students, at least 50% female, will regularly provide feedback and have opportunities to help guide the design of new content.

Our Founder & CEO, Lindsey Tropf, was working on a PhD in School Psychology (Education) when she founded the company. She brings a strong pedagogical understanding and has thousands of hours of experience in school and districts to better understand how a curriculum is implemented with students. She also, personally, is a woman as a CEO in the gaming field, underrepresented as a high-level woman in STEM. She has faced discrimination in this process, and managed to build an inclusive community within her company.

The rest of our leadership team includes Caroline Lamarque (Creative Director), Kyle Trussell (Technical Director), and Florencia Bonarto (Art Director). 

Overall our team is 47% women, 47% BIPOC, 12% LGBTQ, and comes from varied socioeconomic backgrounds. We have multiple team members who are former teachers, and their insight from the classroom and education system as a whole help support decisions made surrounding the game and content created.

Incorporating student voice into our decision making process is a priority. In June we are launching our Student Advisory Board in which a group of students will participate in monthly meetings to help incorporate voice into our decision making process. 50% or more of this Board will be represented by girls, and other diverse voices including students with disabilities. We regularly collect feedback through the use of a customer feedback management tool, Canny, and interact with students through in-person classroom visits and our live-chat messaging system. These conversations help us better understand how students are thinking while using the game and determine where changes need to be made. 

Our team’s diverse perspectives influences decisions, for example LGBTQ team members suggested we use body styles instead of forced gender choices in one of our first-ever design meetings. We have utilized feedback from female students who play Tyto Online to include items such as Hijabs and more inclusive hairstyles to represent girls, and boys, of different cultures. 

Tyto Online has reached over 18,000 learners, which means an estimated 9,000 girls. In the last 3 months, we’ve reached 2,000-2,500 learners/month (again, estimated 50% girls).

We have some specific scaling challenges to figure out over the coming years. In particular, we’ve started having discussions with curriculum partners about working together to create new content. We’re excited about this as a way to more quickly scale our impact with this approach (all our content will be built with these same strategies in mind), reaching through partners with hundreds of thousands to millions of students.

We’re excited about support on how to model those relationships, find new ones, and structure ourselves for significant continued impact even as we begin working with partners.

We also have opportunities for “freemium” sponsorship of free content, and working with organizations who want to make this type of content available for free in out-of-school contexts. We have immense ways to make an impact across several creative scaling models, and having partners and a peer group that can help as we explore this could be catalytic.

We are a nationally-reaching product due to being created as a software solution that does not need to be specific within individual geographic communities.

That said, we’re part of a variety of communities in terms of educators, women in STEM, etc.

Our Team lead is our Founder & CEO, Lindsey Tropf. She is part of the community of educators, as she was working on a PhD in School Psychology (Education) when she founded the company and has been an instructor for high school and college. She brings a strong pedagogical understanding and has thousands of hours of experience in school and districts to better understand how a curriculum is implemented with students. 

She also, personally, is a woman as a CEO in the gaming field, underrepresented as a high-level woman in STEM. She has faced discrimination in this process, and managed to raise funding and build a team. 

Lindsey is active in directly collecting feedback from middle school aged students through the live-chat and in-person visits to schools, and directly with school district leaders, teachers, and parents to understand their needs.

To help disseminate knowledge, she regularly speaks to groups of students, especially girls interested in STEM and entrepreneurship or to educators about topics like improving culturally responsive practices in curriculum.

For decades, scholars and futurists have dreamed of game-based learning’s potential, but the reality is that most game-based learning platforms are simple, pop-up multiple choice experiences where students can review in a more engaging way, but not actually build conceptual understanding and skills. We’ve built a scalable platform that actually meets these ideals, with a content authoring system so everything isn’t hand-coded and we can build out more content affordably. We’re even working on a content authoring system for live, cooperative simulations so those can be spun out quickly without months of coding, too.

Specifically, we incorporate key strategies into a game-based learning platform that haven’t been utilized together before. These include:

• Authentic problem-based learning at scale, so we can show the creative and collaborative nature of STEM and how it makes a difference, through a series of many different scenarios where students help communities through STEM.

• (Coming soon) Allow for collaboration to solve in-game problems, giving girls the opportunity to directly influence solutions and become further empowered, as well as build community and belonging.

• Deep representation. Representation isn’t skin-deep, and we include cultural identities, LGBTQ and nonbinary characters, neurodiverse representation, show nontraditional family structures, and characters with disability that aren’t tokenized by it.

• Similarly, we go far beyond most character customization in educational games and don’t make students choose a gender, being inclusive of nonbinary and fluid students as players simply choose a body type and all options are available. We added hijabs on the request of muslim female students who wanted to be able to represent themselves -- working towards all students being able to have true ownership and actually visualize themselves in the game doing science.

• Create career connections in-game and through printable resources that inform girls of potential careers relating to quests completed in the game and to characters they interacted with.

• 3D games build spatial awareness, which is critical for advanced math and STEM success.

We’ve seen early results from a study, where after at least 1 week of usage with 1-7 hours of Tyto Online:

• 39% of students had an increase in STEM career interest

• 53% had an increase in STEM engagement

• 23% had an increase in STEM career knowledge

• 21.5% had an increase in STEM identity

“My gender fluid students embraced the ability to create an avatar that reflected themselves.”  — Mark, STEM Teacher in Rhode Island

“Students seemed to relate to the psychological impacts of the storylines. They could relate to the emotional and sociological nuances of the storyline as much as they could the scientific content.” — John, Teacher in Bridgeport, CT

We’re also beginning to use our content authoring toolset with third parties to help them build this same type of empowering, inclusive game-based learning content. This innovation is both on the technical and business model side, and we consider critical as we reach towards scaling our impact. Being able to work with partners that already reach millions of students will greatly accelerate our ability to reach and support students.

In the next year, we aim to reach financial sustainability while growing our current impact to over 350,000 students (end of 2024). As part of this, we’ll partner with curriculum providers to build Tyto Online’s inclusive gaming approach into their core curricula, increasing reach substantially. This also provides the opportunity to meaningfully transform curricula with more girl-empowering learning focused on authentic problems and social impact uses of STEM.

In the next 5 years, we aim to have impact data to support all of the proximal and distal outcomes outlined below. We also predict reaching over 10m students.

These proximal and distal outcomes would be:

• Improved STEM learning. Going from a single 12% increase in science skills pilot from a short experience into a longer, ESSA Tier 1 eligible study about the impact of Tyto Online on science skills, 15% improvement minimum.

• Improved Engagement & STEM Mindsets. Scaling up this impact by reaching 75% of students having an increase in STEM engagement, 50% increase in STEM career interest, 50% increase in STEM career knowledge, and 40% increase in STEM identity.

• Improved STEM Achievement & Literacy. Obtain state-level assessment data via partnerships with districts to compare performance and establish an improvement with STEM subjects (science, math).

• Increased STEM Career Participation. Proxy of 50% increase in STEM career interest, and obtaining shared data from some sites showing more students choose advanced STEm classes in 8th grade.

For each of these, we’ll compare across self-reported girls and boys, to ensure an equitable impact for girls from this intervention.

We’ll do this through a combination of our direct efforts with our existing STEM content into schools, as well as layering on content partnerships. For example, we’re talking with multiple curricula providers right now about creating math content for them to embed in their curricula.

Proximal Outcomes: Impact can be measured in under 1 year

Improved STEM Learning

• Science assessments with the Next Generation Science Standards; there are a number of published options available. Can be pre/post, comparison, etc.

• For example, with one pilot we saw a 12% increase in Science & Engineering Practices, using a measure by the Research + Practice Collaboratory.

• [Not Yet Measured] As we build new areas with content partners, can do similar standardized measures for math, engineering, etc.

Improved Engagement & STEM Mindsets

• Currently using PEAR’s Common Instrument Suite, which looks at Enjoyment of STEM, STEM Career Interest, STEM Career Knowledge, STEM Activities, STEM identity, Relationships with Peers/Adults, Critical Thinking, and Perseverance.

• In our study with this so far, we saw strong results with 39% of students having an increase in STEM career interest, 53% an increase in STEM engagement, 23% an increase in STEM career knowledge, and 21.5% an increase in STEM identity.

Distal Outcomes: Impact evidence can be measured within 3 years, some of which would be a proxy for the long-term impacts

Improved STEM Achievement & Literacy

• [Not Yet Measured] Improvement of schools/grades/classes using our product on the 8th Grade Science Assessment.

• In the future, adding in other STEM assessments, such as math, as we expand content offerings with partnerships.

Increased STEM Career Participation

• [Not Yet Measured] The number of students who choose advanced STEM classes in 8th grade and high school, as this is a primary predictor of STEM college major and career choice.

• Measuring STEM career interest, such as the current 35% increase in an existing study.

Compare all measurements across demographics for impact on girls

We have not yet compared more than engagement measures, but in our next studies will take an assessment of whether the impacts such as STEM career interest were disparate for girls/boys or other demographics. Our goal of course is to ensure we’re serving students equitably, and that girls are developing these critical STEM skills as well. So far, we know they have equal engagement from our assessment.

Please see the following logic model diagram explaining how these components fit together:

The description of the problem and our solution earlier was also jam-packed with citations, although there was not enough space to provide them here. 

Each aspect of how we’ve approached building this innovation is linked explicitly to research about increasing girls’ interest in STEM, and strong STEM instruction. Creating these storylines with direct input from students, educators, and now curriculum partners is our direct input -- outside of maintaining the technical side of the platform.

We then create these meaningful storylines that provide a rich opportunity for breaking down stereotypes, seeing themselves in science, and building efficacy and interest. The research shows these strategies are likely to lead to more interest and engagement, and thus improved STEM learning. These are likely to lead long-term to better STEM achievement and increased STEM career entrance (measured by our proxy of STEM career interest in middle school).

We’ve created an online video game as a platform, so we have an immense amount of technology behind Tyto Online.

The video game client. We built our game with Unreal Engine, but have developed technology* so that it runs in the web browser, including on old Chromebooks with 4 GB of RAM and near end-of life. We’ve also ensured it can work with only 1 Mbps of internet, to support a diverse set of low-resource environments.

Video game server infrastructure. Outside of the client that runs on the student’s device, we also have an entire stack of  server infrastructure. As an online game, the students must connect to a live server to see each other and be able to communicate. This means using AWS Gamelift’s service to scale servers on-demand for learners.

Educator dashboard. We needed a dashboard for teachers to manage classes, assign content, and receive assessment dashboard.

Student dashboard. Similarly, students have their own dashboard that shows their assignments and lets them quickly log in to complete assigned quests. This is where we can also add more improvements in the future, such as information about STEM careers after students have engaged with them in the game.

* we actually open-sourced the technology behind bringing our game to the browser, so that the developer who did it was able to spin out an entire company specializing in web-based support. We’ve been able to benefit from this ecosystem of improvements for even faster versions of the game supporting more student types of devices and internet speeds.

We currently have 5 full-time staff, 10 part-time staff, and 2 contractors on this solution team. 2 of the full-time staff focus on business development, 1 on customer success, and 2 on the product. Of our part-time staff, 1 focuses on operational support and the rest work on the product. The contractors are a sales operations support person, and an instructional designer who particularly supports on culturally responsive practices and our entry into math.

We started working on Tyto Online in 2016, so it has been 7 years. However, we initially focused on consumers then pivoted into schools. We also originally were an install app then pivoted our technology onto the web browser after COVID and schools not wanting to install software. Due to this, the 2022-2023 school year was the first where we put sales resources into scaling.

This is a critical topic for my team members. 60% of our management team are women, 40% are BIPOC, and 40% are LGBTQ. Of our entire team, 70% are BIPOC and/or women.

—  Inclusive Workplace with Support Opportunities —

Our workplace is diverse and inclusive. Our hiring practices consider growth and how much a person has accomplished vs. where they started, and we seek to build diverse teams as research shows this reduces groupthink and improves performance.

Additional aspects around our diversity/inclusion include:

• Allowing people flexibility of expression and behavior based on their needs, such as people with ADHD being able to pace or stand during group meetings;

• Removing gendered signs from bathrooms (which was then a sign to a Muslim intern that he could ask for a safe place to pray... inclusion of even one group lets others know they’ll be supported!);

For equity/justice, some examples of how we work on these ideals:

• Right now, all make the same salary. Since we’re under market as a startup, we all “suffer” together — from the newest team member to the CEO;

• Have flexible schedules and paid parental leave;

• Have sponsored immigrants on staff; even at this early stage, we don’t mind sponsoring and figuring out the visa process as we want anyone to be able to join our staff;

• Performance reviews focus on growth goals for team members, particularly triangulating based on what they want their career trajectory to be and how we can help them get that; including a section on what their managers need to do to help them be successful (such as removing barriers, providing resources/opportunities, etc.).

—  Breaking Down Barriers for Diverse Interns —

We have run large internship teams to provide opportunities for students wanting to enter the game industry (a STEM career), particularly through a program for paid internships that was available when we were located in North Florida. We were the most prolific company in the region, with 94% of our majority women and/or BIPOC interns finding full-time industry jobs within a few months.

We also allowed interns to work on any part of the pipeline they were interested in, letting them develop skills in various domains to determine their ideal careers and get experience. Many interns stayed for multiple years, developing skillsets to take to careers or a competitive graduate school.

—  Team Social Justice Opportunities —

Our team also has opportunities to participate in social justice issues and discussions together. For some examples:

• Speaking at schools about video game careers; we work to always send diverse team members for representation with students.

• Multiple times, groups of team members were given time off work to protest together about a social issue important to them.

• Holding roundtables with interest/demographic groups after traumatic events or other needs for discussion.

Direct Sales of Science Content

To date, we've primarily focused on K-12 direct sales of our own science content, available on our website through digital delivery as a SAAS product. The ideal customers for these have been Science Coordinators or Principals, working with teachers as influencers to decide if there’s interest in using Tyto Online as part of their classroom instruction.

Pricing is $10/student with $2,000 professional development.

Our outreach is primarily driven by outbound calls and emails, but also doing some light in-bound content marketing and conferences.

Content Partnerships

As we pivot to focus on working with curriculum providers rather than direct K-12 school sales, our ideal customer has now become a mid-market K-12 curriculum provider, such as one in the $10-50m revenue range. This target has a significant enough budget for a large deal size, but is less likely to make demands that will control our roadmap and strategic choices. They also need to be doing active development or updating of a curriculum, but so far in our discussions there is always something being updated within these types of companies; it will mainly guide the subject they bring us on for first.

We're still developing our pricing strategy, but as a whole it's: (1) up-front content creation cost, depending on how much content, art needs, etc., and then (2) ARR with an annual student license. As more of an enterprise-style deal, these are being individually negotiated. In general, we expect it to be around $50,000 per storyline (1-1.5 hours of gameplay) and $2 per active student per year licensing. 

Our pricing model is covered in the prior response.

To date, we’ve brought in a mix of grants (eg: NSF SBIR) and investor funding. We’re currently raising around $400,000 more of investor funds which we expect to bring us to a break-even point in 2024. This is due to the new strategy of content partnerships, developing for inclusion in core curricula.

We can grow this side of the business more affordably, with our CEO on business development, and have modeled out reaching $3m, $12m, and $28m in 2024-2026 as we add customers. After about 8 weeks of content partnership outreach, we have a sales pipeline of 10 partners with 4 in the proposal development phase, and multiple are potentially 7-figure deals.

Here is our modeled profit by revenue streams, showing:

1. K-12 revenue with direct sales of our science content

2. Content partnerships, as discussed

3. Self-service platform (not discussed much, but opening up for anyone to build content)

4. Consumers (not focused on, added as an option in our projections)

Investment. Raised over $2m in private capital from investors to date. These include angel investors/networks (eg: Darin Cook, Gaingels), small impact/education-focused VC firms (eg: Community Impact Ventures), and an economic development initiative (43North).

Grants. Granted over $2m in grants to date. These include:

• NSF SBIR, Phase I, II, and IIB

• IES SBIR, Phase I

• MIT Solve

• Overdeck Family Foundation

Revenues. Over $600k in revenue to date. We plan on relying much more heavily on this source going forward, as we scale revenues heavily with content partnerships.