SCHOOLASTIC

As widely publicized by the World Economic Forum in its annual reports on the Future of Jobs, 80% of the skills and competencies expected of a 21st-century citizen are life skills and socio-emotional competencies, commonly known as soft skills.

Schools have specialized over decades in developing hard skills, knowledge, and technical development, packaged into core subjects that do not necessarily guarantee employability.

Recent studies in Brazil show that companies hire based on a resume, and 90% of dismissals are due to the lack of behavioral skills required for the roles.

This excerpt above reflects the portion of students already at the point of entering the job market, in other words, at the onset of their adulthood. These individuals have been shaped by a Cartesian educational model, which has left them in a state of socio-emotional development limbo. At this stage of life, many underdeveloped skills and competencies have already become limiting beliefs, with individuals often believing they are not creative or not good at communication, etc.

When we delve into the educational cycles covered by K12, we realize that children and young people do not receive a truly nurturing approach to their skills and competencies. Schools often fail to efficiently monitor behavioral patterns that could shed light on issues such as emotional and neurobiological disorders (health), and students go through the most malleable phase for change without being adequately stimulated.

For instance, it is estimated that around 20% of the global population has dyslexia, at various levels of severity. Many will have their lives significantly impacted, yet approximately 90% of cases will NEVER be diagnosed.

And what about the increasing cases of self-harm, teenage suicides, or school shootings committed by teenagers, leaving school communities without answers?

We've created an AI powered by a specialized algorithm to identify patterns of students' life skills and socio-emotional competencies (soft skills) across all education levels. It analyzes behavioral patterns and generates personalized intervention content for each student.

Our research draws from internationally recognized theses in human behavior, education, neuroscience, and psychology, supported by leading experts in these fields.

The platform provides its own interfaces or integrates with existing solutions used by schools, allowing for the capture of student behavioral data to reveal their thinking styles and brain preferences through gamified activities.

Delivered as a 100% Software as a Service (SaaS), the solution is accessible on smartphones, tablets, or desktops with minimal connectivity requirements.

For educational managers, the platform generates reports mapping over 20 dimensions and nearly a hundred skills, crafting personalized action plans and content suggestions for individual students or groups, tailored by age group.

For students, the platform monitors skill development over time, offering personalized content and activities even for family involvement outside of school.

The platform serves as a valuable tool for early education, assisting teachers in recording behavioral evidence and encouraging them to focus on students' expression rather than just cognitive development. By mapping behavioral patterns, it provides insights into students' thinking styles and brain preferences, offering over 20 indicators for personalized teaching.

Families are encouraged to engage in daily observation, enhancing their involvement in their child's education. This collaborative effort between teachers and families allows for early detection of potential emotional or neurobiological disorders, supporting students' unique needs.

In later education stages, the platform acts as a safe space for students to reflect on their behavior and its impact on their future career choices. It ensures privacy and eliminates the pressure of traditional assessments, offering a straightforward and gamified approach to self-discovery.

Through this journey of self-awareness and reflection, students can align their skills with their life goals and explore their innate potential to the fullest.

Our team consists of entrepreneurs, educators, technology experts, psychologists, and neuroscientists. Since 2015, this team has been feeding our AI with data involving the theses we base ourselves on, educational models, curriculum syllabi, and studies gathered from other communities, so that we can deliver the best and most accurate information for managers and content for teachers and students.

We are a very resilient team.

We started our actions at a time when people were afraid of the unknown. They did not understand the potential of Artificial Intelligence, and there was nothing in the market that gave an idea of the tangibility of AI utilization. Despite facing a lot of resistance, especially from managers and educators who still had an outdated mentality regarding education, we pushed forward.

With the pandemic, we had to enter operational freezing. However, we realized that the educational community needed to become more proficient in using technology overnight. With the launch of Chat GPT, we felt that the market ended up creating a mindset around the use of AI, with more palpability.

And it is exactly this scenario that makes our offer a high-value proposition for this new environment.

We have just been chosen to be the AI for the largest educational conglomerate in the world, COGNA EDUCAÇÃO (COGN3), and we have a universe of over 1 million students to scale our platform to.

With this boost to our cash flow, we will have the resources to meet demands from new networks, not only in Brazil but immediately in Portuguese-speaking countries as well.

We are being monitored by various funds, which can help us with the internationalization of our platform, which has a unique model in the world.

We have already been listed by HOLONIQ as one of the technologies that can change the future of education in 2021 - 2021 Global Learning Landscape | HolonIQ - and recently, we have been mapped by them as one of the 100 most promising startups in Latin America - 2023 Latin America EdTech 100 (holoniq.com).

Because validation from an institute like MIT will give us enormous visibility and credibility in the market.

More than an educational platform that uses Artificial Intelligence to map, monitor, and measure the development of socio-emotional skills and competencies in students of all ages, which in itself would already make us unique in the world, we have created a new pedagogical approach/model, based on Design Thinking, that helps in converting the teacher’s mindset to Education Design, while automating a series of educational demands, relieving teaching activity, enabling the personalization of content, welcoming students in their behavioral issues, and has the potential to engage families more effectively. All in a single solution, from a single additional data entry, which would be our behavioral observation matrix for mapping brain preferences. (observation and self-observation)

Furthermore, our model oriented towards exponentiality ensures our possibility of accelerated growth, since we monitor 1 student or 1 million students, just by tuning computational resources in our private cloud.

All these simultaneous impacts on the various actors of the educational ecosystem can be enabled by investing just a few cents per active student on the platform monthly.

Based on the U Theory, for example, which was consolidated and systematized by Otto Scharmer, an economist and professor at MIT, in 1996, it becomes evident how lengthy the cycles are for implementing a new mindset. The U Theory itself emerged in the late 1960s in the Netherlands amid research on innovative pedagogical methodologies.

In 2024, only a small fraction of teachers worldwide have even heard of the U theory, let alone understand the concept of Educational Design.

Educational Design Thinking has gained recognition as a formal discipline, offered by prestigious universities; in fact, one of our educational team members holds a certification in Educational Design Thinking from MIT. However, implementing an educational design thinking mindset within schools seems to be no easy feat.

Teachers continue to go to their schools to deliver predictable lessons based on rigid curricular agendas, content-centric, and structured around conventional subjects.

19th-century schools and 20th-century teachers need to align with the expectations of 21st-century students. The world requires educational ecosystems (teachers and families) to teach students what to do with the knowledge they acquire, every time the world undergoes the VUCA, BANI normality. This entails developing the 21st-century skills outlined in the World Economic Forum reports.

We believe that, more than the possibility of higher education for teachers in disciplines like Educational Design Thinking or the U Theory, teachers need tools to help them operate daily. They need a framework to ensure they are thinking beyond Cartesian practices and the paradigms built by 19th-century schools. They need insights that only a true data culture can provide.

Students need to be recognized, welcomed in a more personalized and attentive manner, even amidst classes of 15, 20, or 30 students.

Schoolastic is a crucial tool within these presented contexts.

Taking into account the UN SDGs, we believe in focusing on impacting SDGs 3, 4, and 8.

Concerning SDG 3, health and well-being, how do we impact and measure it? Our socioemotional, multiple intelligences, and learning aptitudes indicators can unveil a range of disorders, whether emotional or neurobiological, which can impact not only the student's learning but also their emotional development. By periodically measuring (indicators) over 20 dimensions and a hundred skills inherent in these dimensions, we ensure that we can create prognoses indicating the need for student support very early on. From family support to professional support from a psychologist or educational psychologist, we ensure a more attentive look at each individual's condition. As much as we identify, we can also refute suspicions that would not be justified in a positive mapping scenario. One of the students monitored by Schoolastic, for example, was diagnosed with ADHD, but after analyzing our indicators, this diagnosis was questioned in the face of our indicators, which was proven true with his educational performance improvement after teachers and parents began to provide appropriate stimuli to the student. He didn't have attention deficit... He was just bored with school. In contrast, imagine students who have ADHD, dyslexia, or even a mild degree of autism, who are not identified? They often struggle without talking to anyone, afraid of being stigmatized as lazy or stupid... We are also facing a moment when the numbers of youth suicides or even young people committing crimes are on the rise. We believe that observing their behavioral patterns in a structured and scientific way can help us administer an important antidote to the student's health and well-being.

Regarding SDG 4, quality education aligned with the future of society involves helping students develop skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, self-management, leadership, communication, cooperation, self-confidence, and creativity. These skills can even become drivers for learning, as long as they are used intentionally and guided. Our indicators assist in this process. We have a case of a Brazilian student who improved his math grades as soon as he started learning math in English. Indicators of logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligences are complementary.

Finally, regarding SDG 8, today we are working with the world's largest private education group, Cogna (COGN3), helping university students understand whether their behavioral skills and competencies are aligned with the future professions they have chosen, and creating content to try to help them develop fundamental competencies that are not somehow at their peak of development. I believe that this will ensure that people, in some time, will make choices for careers more aligned with how they naturally express themselves, where they can be happier, valued for who they are. This is the best condition for full, productive, and decent jobs.

The technologies that comprise the core of our Proposal are:

Artificial Intelligence: Algorithms, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Big Data, Data Analytics  and  Cloud Computing.

These are the technologies that drive the framework of fundamental practices by our educational thesis, which depend on inputs from teachers, families, and the students themselves, from interfaces accessible under minimal connectivity conditions (internet access), to generate all the reports, indicators, and action plans.

4 people full-time staff and 4 people part-time stuff.

Since 2015.

Between 2015 and 2018, we underwent the research and development phase of the project.

From 2018 to 2019, we completed the first operational phase in the market.
Between 2020 and 2023, we experienced operational freezing due to the pandemic.

In mid-2023, we resumed operations in the second market phase.

Our own solution deals with the perspective that all individuals need to be looked at with attention and acceptance of their abilities and competencies. Including their limitations, whether physical, emotional, or neurobiological.

I, Luiz Orlandini, recognize myself in an inclusion group, as I am dyslexic and have very peculiar ways of expressing myself.

To compose our team, we seek technical capabilities and knowledge that can support our technical proposal through each member's formations.

But not only that, we look for unique skills and competencies that can add the necessary dynamism to our ecosystem, without losing focus on the balance between dynamism and comfort zone.

We value light environments where people can be happy.

Men and women practically make up 50% of the team, even without us intentionally planning this, but as proof that fluid environments are free from sexist prerogatives or anything else.

We complement each other in hard skills and soft skills, through the life experiences we have had in our trajectories.

Our sales model is B2B/B2G, delivered exponentially through a SaaS business model.

Our clients are public and private schools, who need our services to:

• Adopt a human development model oriented towards the development of life skills and socio-emotional competencies;
• Enable personalized teaching plans;
• Enable distribution of personalized content;
• Conduct ongoing teacher training with a focus on educational design thinking;
• Incorporate the expertise of educational psychology to the majority of teachers who are only educators;
• Promote family engagement in the mission of socio-emotional development of their children;
• Relieve teachers of part of their time by digitizing activities while creating a culture of data that can guide their actions;

Among many other possibilities that can find support in our unique product!

In mid-2019, when we pivoted our business model, we decided to stop operating in retail, school by school, or organically capturing schools, due to the complexity of our approach and the sales cycle. We resolved that we would externalize our APIs to reach schools "embedded" in educational platforms and offerings already consolidated in the market, adding greater value, intelligence, and functionality to them.

Due to the pandemic, we were only able to launch this new model in mid-2023, and right off the bat, we were hired by the world's largest education conglomerate, Cogna Educação (COGN3), to be their artificial intelligence for higher education, which theoretically proves that our scalability vision was correct.

In addition to new partnerships like this, and like the one we are also building with Brazil's largest technology company, TOTVS, we are focusing our efforts on working with governments, ensuring that each business brings a considerable volume of students.