ARK: AI copilot for career based learning

High School Teachers cannot be expected to be experts in every field, especially in emerging fields like AI, Automated Farming or climate science.

In a world of rapid technological and social change school and university curriculum design cannot keep pace with demands of our world. 

For teens and undergraduates, there's a disconnect between the world they know is out there on social media, and the content they're going through in school. 

If they have aspirations or interest in a certain field that's outside the curriculum they're forced to wait until after graduation, or give up on their interests. There's no way for them to explore their interests or ideal careers in a bitesized way before graduating.

They want to be connected with mentors and content that can tell them about the things they're interested in. 

They need a pathway that shows them clearly how to get from where they are to where they want to go. School offers no such pathways, and university courses are either chosen because of parent pressure or lack of clarity on their own interests because they were not able to explore them in school. 

Even if their interests lie within standardised curriculums, the content is never personalised and may never allow them to go deeper because teachers are resource constrained. 

There is a massive cost to all of this. The cost of 'indeterminism', the combined cost of millions of students just floating through schools, disengaged, underserved, and undecided about their own futures.

ARK is an AI copilot for anyone aged 14+ to build a portfolio that unlocks their dream career in half the time using AI.

They can

- Input job descriptions and ARK will turn it into a learning pathway for them to understand the key skills, concepts and certifications required to get there.

- Generate pathways and create an AI tutors that can help them understand  any domain through conversation. 

- Aggregate job opportunities for them based on their location and dream occupation for them to review tell the AI which jobs are appealing and which are not to help refine their search. 

- Input project ideas for their portfolio and have ARK structure the project todo's, generate the next todo, bring them the best resources and coach them through project to help them build the projects.

- Wrap all of this in a shareable portfolio that allows them to unlock opportunities with employers, collaborators or further education. 

Our target population consists of 14-25 year-olds who are underserved by traditional education in the US, UK, Australia, and Japan. We hope to expand to Latin America later this year.

Broadly, this group includes neurodivergent individuals, dropouts, homeschoolers, and those who are career-focused rather than grade-focused.

We serve an approximately equal number of male and female learners.

They are underserved in multiple ways:

1. In the UK, they might be placed in what is called 'alternative provision' due to violent behavior, mental health issues, or apathy, leading to rejection from state schools.

2. As homeschoolers, they face a scarcity of resources and struggle to find the best options due to an overload of choices.

3. They are chronically disengaged at school or university and seek to pursue a career instead of further education, or they are scrambling for a job post-university.

4. They learn faster than their peers, and there are no resources in schools for extracurricular or gifted and talented groups.

How does ARK help?

1. ARK allows them to learn by pursuing their interests and career aspirations. By finding competence in non-traditional subjects, this often serves as a gateway back into traditional education or into a career, rekindling the learner’s appreciation for the value of learning, which is often lost in school.

2. Instead of decision paralysis, ARK curates the best resources tailored to the learner’s evolving interests. Parents can rest easier knowing they have an AI assistant to keep up with their child’s curiosity and changing interests. The learner can explore subjects as broadly or deeply as they wish.

3. ARK enables learners to explore topics and careers in bite-sized segments. This builds their confidence in their choices and skills, helping to reduce their anxiety about pursuing a career or finding a job after university.

4. ARK personalizes learning to keep learners engaged. Teachers trained in its use can always assign tasks on ARK, allowing learners who want to advance to progress at their own pace without needing the teacher to set extra assignments just for them.

For me personally, growing up in an economically impoverished area of Bristol in the south west of England. When I made it into University I used some of my free time to teach music production to youth in the St.Pauls area. 

For many of the teens there, learning new skills that they couldn't find in school, like rapping and writing lyrics, playing instruments for the first time, recording vocals was their first taste of self-empowerment. 

Getting some to step away from selling drugs and petty crime was just the start. Many went on to become great community leaders who in turn transformed more lives through their own creative and professional work. 

Seeing this first had as led me to building a team who thinks like anthropologists but experiment in small 'bets' like great startups should.

We often push into new geographies by visiting for weeks or even months at a time. We start with finding a design partner in a new location and run a 4-8 week program with a multi-stakeholder cohort of teachers, parents and students. In those weekly calls and 1-1 check ins we facilitate peer-learning discussion with minimal instruction on the use of ARK. The real value is in teachers, parents and students sharing their insights with eachother about what they discovered they could do with AI. This often leads to feature request which we then factor into our road map.  

For Columbia Ohio with our partners The PAST foundation and Education Reimagined. Myself and the lead software engineer spend time in Columbus engaging in trash pickups, community events and other extra curricular learning activities organised by the PAST foundation to embed our-selves in the industrial milleur and the lives of local Columbians.

We're also partnering with https://www.somoslala.org/ in Brazil Sao Paulo to expand our work into LatAm. Our immersion with them starts later this year in august.

As a native-Dayak, Taiwanese, Indian English mixed-raced multi-faith person I identify with service to black brown, asian, native communities. 

We currently have 520 users. 

We currently sustain our efforts through selling a whitelabled version of our technology to larger organisations.

This allows us to fund features already on our road map and gives us clients who are essentially a 'design partner' who gives us new features to implement. 

We're still integrating newly developed features that we build with client back into our core codebase. For this reason I've selected the Pilot Phase. 

We currently have a product that we know helps marginalised groups in the global north.

We would really appreciate help moving to serve the global south and finding design partners and existing initiatives that we can dovetail with in India, LatAM, Africa . 

From a founder's perspective I'm most excited by connecting with other founders who are building in a simlar space and problem solving with them. 

Technically and Team wise we're looking for new talent who understand the cultural nuances of these new markets and mentors who could help us think through how to adapt our current product to better suit design / cultural norms in the global south.  

The City as a School platform in general provides a new opportunity for learning that is accessible and scalable. We empower students to discover and pursue their passions, find opportunities to learn new skills and assemble a portfolio, build a professional network by connecting with mentors and professionals, and ultimately discover internship and career opportunities. We advance a new educational paradigm by flexibly leveraging the best of in-person and virtual learning, individual study and community-embedded practice, and human-centric engagement and AI technology, ultimately giving students their own agency to navigate these different modalities of learning.

Pedagogical Innovations:

• Personalized learning: City as a School provides a personalized learning experience that allows students to discover and pursue their passions, and learn at their own pace.
• Flexible learning modalities: The platform leverages the best of in-person and virtual learning, individual study and community-embedded practice, allowing students to navigate different modalities of learning.
• Human-centric engagement: The platform fosters human-centric engagement, providing opportunities for students to connect with mentors and professionals, and to engage in direct service with partner organizations.
• Hybrid format: City as a School's hybrid format allows for specific locations to become interconnected hubs of youth civic action, while also broadening the global reach of remote-first opportunities.

Technical Innovations:

• ARK enables ‘Just-in-time’ learining to create active learning materials and construct concept and skill maps in the domain of interest.
• Digital learning records: The platform allows students to create digital learning records, which capture code, images, videos, and documents that can be used as evidence of learning.
  
  Our hope is that by delivering 10x outcomes for underserved populations the effects can also be replicated more broadly in education. We hope this shifts the narrative of what and how success is acheived in the modern world. 

If we provide personalized AI-driven learning experiences that align with the career interests and aspirations of young people aged 14-24 then they will engage more deeply in their education and career preparation so that they can quickly and effectively enter the workforce or advance in their chosen fields.

Goal: To equip young people with the skills, resources, and personalized learning pathways needed to efficiently and effectively prepare for and succeed in their careers.

Assumptions:

• Young people are more motivated to learn when education is relevant to their interests and future career goals.
• Traditional educational models often do not provide the personalized or practical skills young people need to succeed in today's diverse and dynamic job markets.
• Providing young people with AI-driven, personalized learning experiences can help them explore and prepare for careers more effectively.

Activities:

• Provide personalized learning experiences through an AI-driven platform, ARK.
• Develop AI tools that allow young people to explore various career paths by inputting job descriptions or fields of interest.
• Offer step-by-step project management guidance to help learners build meaningful projects for their portfolios.
• Facilitate connections between learners and industry professionals for mentorship and practical insights.
• Implement a portfolio system within ARK to track and showcase learners’ progress and achievements.

Outputs:

• A network of young people actively using the ARK platform for their educational and career development.
• Young people equipped with personalized skills and project portfolios relevant to their career aspirations.
• Increased engagement and satisfaction among learners with their educational experiences, as evidenced by platform analytics and user feedback.

Outcomes:

• Young people transition into the workforce more effectively, with relevant skills and robust portfolios.
• Young people achieve greater clarity and confidence in their career paths, reducing anxiety about their future.
• Traditional education systems are complemented by a viable alternative that offers personalized, career-focused learning experiences.

Impact:

• Society benefits from well-prepared, confident young individuals entering various industries.
• Increased innovation and productivity in the workforce as young people enter career fields aligned with their passions and skills.
• Long-term improvement in job satisfaction and career success rates among the young population.

• Number of students engaged: This will be measured by tracking the number of students who participate in your courses and mentorship sessions.
• Placement rate: This metric will measure the rate at which we are successfully able to place students in fellowships, internships, or opportunties with your partners
• Learning record posts: Students are prompted to record learning in their learning record and include code, documents, images and videos as evidence of learning in their projects. We will track the number of posts that students add to their learning record as evidence of learning.
• Deliverables produced: We will monitor the deliverables produced by young people related to civics and the associated skills tags.
• Alumni engagement: We will engage with attendees of mentor and classes in interviews to understand the opportunities that we helped them discover and the nature of their work once they’re hired.
• SDG 4.3.1: Participation rate of youth and adults in formal and non-formal education and training in the previous 12 months, by sex
• SDG 4.4.1: Proportion of youth and adults with information and communications technology (ICT) skills, by type of skill
• SDG 4.7.1: Extent to which (i) global citizenship education and (ii) education for sustainable development are mainstreamed in (a) national education policies; (b) curricula; (c) teacher education and (d) student assessment
• SDG 4.b.1: Volume of official development assistance flows for scholarships by sector and type of study

The core technology powering our solution, ARK, is an advanced AI-driven platform designed to personalize the learning experience for young individuals. This system harnesses the power of machine learning algorithms and natural language processing to tailor educational content and career guidance based on the specific interests and aspirations of each user.

ARK functions by analyzing input from users—such as job descriptions or fields of interest—and uses this data to curate personalized learning pathways. These pathways are composed of highly relevant educational content, hands-on projects, and opportunities for engagement with industry professionals. This tailored approach ensures that learners are not only absorbing information but also applying their knowledge in practical, meaningful contexts that directly align with their career goals.

Additionally, ARK integrates with existing educational and labour frameworks such as light cast, indeed and ESCO EU jobs framework which are essential for demonstrating skills and competencies in the real world. 

2 Full time: 

Myself & CTO Andre Lacke

1.5 years

Serj Hunt the founder and CEO is mixed race, British, Indian, Chinese, Melanau. It’s in the DNA of the organisation to embrace multicultural, interdisciplinary thinking. Cultural diversity within our team and network of teachers is key to innovation and our interdisciplinary pedagogical stance.

At City as a school movement, we are committed to ensuring that young learners who are most marginalized or underinvested, in particular Black, Brown, and Indigenous youth, have the same opportunity to participate in learner-centered environments as any other young learner. This means confronting and mitigating the structural, systemic, and individual impediments to access and where possible, eliminating them entirely.

Furthermore, diversity itself is valued as an asset within our learner-centered ecosystem. The aim is to respond to and support the uniqueness of each child with unique pathways for learning. In standardized, one-size-fits-all education systems, the differences between learners can be seen as a problem; by contrast, in the learner-centered system, differences are welcomed as opportunities to create more meaningful and relevant learning experiences for each learner.

The presence of differences is recognized as an opportunity to draw on and enrich learning with different perspectives, different lived experiences, and different concerns. 

Equity:

Commitment to teachers: City as a School is a community owned company. We run a phantom share scheme that enables our teachers to access wealth generating opportunities by taking specific actions on our platform

Commitment to our learners: Our relationships with sponsors and industry partners allows us to subsidise learning on our platform. This makes certain classes and pathways on our marketplace free to the learner as part of our mission to reduce the financial barrier for more young people to access knowledge, skills and networks.

Ensuring equity for each young learner requires that we actively combat the barriers and challenges in our society, culture, and education system that operate knowingly or unknowingly for people and unduly impact children of color and other marginalized children. We strive to:

1. provide an environment that is sensitive to different cultures, identities, and back- grounds; that allows for different ways of learning and of demonstrating that learning; and that responds effectively to the different needs and aspirations of individual learners;
2. Set individual outcomes that are aimed at each learner reaching their full and unique potential as whole human beings; and
3. Mobilize funding resources, provide needs based pathways, and empower learner agency appropriately for each learner’s self defined goals .

Inclusion:

At City as a School, we see our individualized pathways, the cultivation of learner agency, and the fostering of a healthy learning community as supportive of our efforts to include every individual learner. Inclusion is the shared responsibility of every member of our learning community. Inclusion is achieved when everyone sees their own role in the inclusion of oneself and of others; takes decisive action to elevate, honor, and amplify the voices of those who have been historically and are presently marginalized or excluded; and attends to all dimensions of inclusion: mental, emotional, physical, social, and spiritual.

We are a marketplace that takes a 20% commission on all transactions. Learners and their families purchase classes with 1-1 mentor / tutor sessions that we recommend in the learning pathways.

We subsidise specific collections of classes on the marketplace with industry sponsors and contracts starting at $500 a month. In exchange the industry partners receive access to our talent pool.

Industry sponsors and contracts allow us to offer free classes and mentorship to our learners.

Marketplace Transaction Commissions: Our plan for becoming financially sustainable is to generate revenue through our marketplace platform, where teachers and mentors sell their offerings and we take a 20% commission fee on all transactions. We will generate revenue through the sale of classes, guided projects and mentorship sessions, digital products and services on our marketplace platform. To date this has brought us 12000 USD in GMV or 2400 USD in revenue.

White labeling contracts: We've closed 2 whitelable clients who are able to custom brand ARK and add new feature. To date this has brought 20K USD Revenue.

Custom AI trainings: Since launching ARK we've been asked to run workshops for schools and universities integrating AI into their practice. To date we've generated over 10K USD in revenue in training.