The self-serve aspect of the app means that students whose schools do not offer AP biology can learn the coursework entirely through Inspirit, and it can also act as a supplement for those who need extra help. Inspirit’s first full curriculum, advanced placement (AP) biology, will be released this fall. Inspired by games like Candy Crush and Minecraft, features such as leaderboards, lives, avatars, and forums incentivize players to keep learning. Students can break apart the human respiratory system, travel inside a plant cell, or explore the DNA replication process, taking quizzes to unlock new levels. Now, the Inspirit smartphone app includes more than 1,000 accurate, 3D interactive models that facilitate learning through an immersive experience. After signing with their first investor, Vasan quit her job at P&G and moved back to her home country of India to build a team of employees and work full-time on the startup. The co-founders continued to work on Inspirit for another year and started pitching the company to venture capital (VC) firms in the summer of 2019. “STEM education is supposed to be experiential, and students should be driven by curiosity.” “It wasn't really the VR that mattered, it was the interaction - that's what drove the learning outcomes,” Vasan said. Through their experiences, the pair realized that above all, they needed to tap into core pedagogical principles. Working in the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, Vishwanath’s studies centered around improving learning outcomes, engagement, and retention. in learning sciences and technology design. But how did they develop this technology, thus unlocking a new form of virtual learning that is changing the possibilities of education?Īfter graduating from Georgia Tech in 2018, Vasan took a job at Proctor & Gamble (P&G), and Vishwanath headed to Stanford University for a Ph.D. The app they designed, which teaches STEM concepts through 3D models built in the game engine Unity, combines Duolingo-style learning with the highly interactive environments of popular games like Minecraft and Fortnite. Several years later, Vasan and Vishwanath have transformed what was once a research project into the ed tech startup Inspirit. They tested the effectiveness of their technology in a study involving almost 350 high school and middle school students, seeing promising results in not only improved grades but also in engagement and interest levels. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) when she and fourth-year computer science student Aditya Vishwanath began working with Neha Kumar, associate professor in the College of Computing, to develop smartphone-based virtual reality (VR) content for the classroom.
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