What is The Future of Education?

For this month’s FOV podcast, our EIR Tiago was joined by 3 founders shaping education’s future -

Reedah El-Saie from Brainspark Games - building an eduverse of AR mobile games inline with the national curriculum.

Etienne Genvrin from EDAILABS - Scaling 1:1 tutoring, digitalised through AI and avatars.

Mart Lume from Futuclass - STEM learning games in VR inline with secondary schools, also building everything a school needs to set up VR.

Listen in FULL HERE:

and read a break down of some of the ear nuggets below!

The Podcast Covers:

1. Why Education and Gaming Go Hand in Hand

2. What Does AI Enable for Education

3. Go To Market Challenges For Education Businesses

Why Startups are Trying To Crack Education:

The current education system was largely designed to prepare individuals for factory work.

An experiment by German psychologist, Ebbinghaus, in the 1880s revealed that students forget up to 95% of what they learn in school after just three days. 

Nonetheless, it is debatable that forgetting this content is not to the detriment of pupils; as when this system is paired with antiquated technology, the vast majority of content pupils are educated on is irrelevant to the digitally native world we live in.

Education is ripe for disruption.

The Role of Gaming in Modern Education:

In this context, the integration of gaming into education emerges as a promising solution. Today, 91% of under 16s are playing games which makes it a familiar and engaging medium for learning. Reedah’s from Brainspark Games believes gaming is super motivating in its structure, and instead of fighting gaming as a threat to education, it should be embraced.

Brainspark Games is pioneering disseminating educational content through games, developing an “eduverse” of AR mobile games that align with national curriculums. These games offer an interactive learning experience, capturing the attention of students in ways traditional methods struggle to achieve.

The education system itself is inherently gamified - think of grades as achievements, and university rankings as leaderboards - but it is well known that a one-size-fits-all style of learning does a disservice to many. For Reedah, “While [education] is gamified in some ways, if you don’t have a teacher you connect with it can destroy a learning journey. A games based experience doesn’t rely on teacher’s personalities, so it can both be democratised and address a student’s weaknesses.”

Moreover, technologies like VR offers new opportunities for educational engagement. For instance, Mart’s Futulabs, uses VR to create immersive STEM learning games in line with secondary school curriculums. The immersive nature of VR provides a hands-on learning experience, making complex concepts more accessible and engaging for students, alongside the well studied retention benefits of kinaesthetic based learning.

Gaming too, says Reedah, can “Take away the negative experiences of failure in education. There are few chances to go back in the traditional education system. Games celebrate failures, and can go back without you realising.” This provides learners an opportunity to truly retain information, maintain confidence and improve weaknesses.

What Does AI Enable for Education?

AI in education has recently made headlines with ChatGPT and its impact on coursework. While some people are feeling nervous about all this, founders in the space are confident that AI can be used as a force for good.

Most learning experiences today, from online courses for university to corporate education, are designed around the needs of the educational content creator, not the learner.

10 years ago, online learning experienced a boom because it democratised access to content. The next frontier is democratising access to the mechanism of how we learn, from quantum mechanics and Chaucer to idioms and soft skills, adapted to the learner’s own pace and ability.

The founders focused on 3 things AI can unlock for education:

Scalability

AI is a paradigm shift. There are ~1.5BN students worldwide, to ~10M teachers.
AI offers a solution by enabling the expansion of educational reach without the proportional increase in resources.

Large classes are a difficult challenge faced by many teachers. With AI platforms the contact time and feedback from their educators becomes limitless.

Not only do AI education tools enable students, but teachers too. From drafting curriculum plans to producing high-quality teaching resources, AI has the potential to reduce the amount of time teachers spend doing administrative tasks. Teachers can focus on what they do best– teaching and supporting their pupils, a reality already being enabled by AI curriculum companion tools Eduaide, AI4edu, and Century.

Democratising

While ‘democratising’ is often banded around in tech. AI education tools can allow access to information and guiding learners down unique paths based on their interests, skills, opportunities, and challenges.

In the real world, learners’ questions and curiosities don’t fit neatly within the confines of a syllabus. With AI learners will be able to move seamlessly between interacting with a curriculum’s core content and exploring applications or tangential content according to their interests.

At Brainspark games, Reedah says “We try to understand what motivates the learner, user personalisation should not be the assumption of the creator, but what do the learners think and feel... Games and AI can add so much more value to a learning experience, and don’t need to be rooted in a knowledge based curriculum either.”

Personalisation

Etienne believes “AI will do personalisation on a level not seen before. True personalisation will adapt to the user on the fly.”

For instance, platforms like Duolingo centralise content and distribute it to all users, tailoring it based on user interactions, but this only scratches the surface of what true personalisation can be. AI goes further by crafting exercises uniquely for each individual, as and when needed.

The more a student interacts with an AI-powered virtual tutor, the better the system becomes at understanding and creating the specific types of exercises that will most effectively aid in their learning. This approach means no two sets of exercises are predetermined or identical; they are constantly evolving and adapting to the learner’s needs.

Learning now can be centred around detailed, and continuous feedback. Learning is an active process, trying new things, making mistakes, and—critically—receiving constructive feedback. However, feedback in traditional learning delivery models has always been marginal at best.

Equally as significantly, in applications like Etienne's EDAILABS, the option for learners to choose their own tutor avatars - representing a diverse range of cultures and ethnicities - fosters a sense of comfort and relatability, enhancing the learning experience by allowing students to connect with figures they resonate with.

Go To Market Challenges For Education Businesses

The journey to market for education-focused startups is marked by unique challenges. A primary hurdle is the technological infrastructure in schools.

Futuclass's Mart highlights even using children as “tech support”, illustrating how students can facilitate the adoption of new technologies that may seem alien to their teachers. Similarly, Reedah from Brainspark Games shares instances of children guiding teachers in installing and using iPad apps. This bottom up approach, for them, has proved effective in onboarding this tech into the classroom.

However, these advancements are not without their obstacles. Etienne's experience with EDAILABS underscores the challenges of relying on external resources like internet connectivity for AI-driven learning. The requirement for strong internet connections for effective use of Large Language Models (LLMs) can disrupt the immersive learning experience, highlighting a gap in current technological infrastructure.

Despite these challenges, there are positive strides being made. Futuclass has successfully penetrated 12% of Estonian schools, effectively navigating the grant system to overcome hardware barriers. Brainspark Games, under Reedah’s leadership, has secured £555,000 in grant funding and notable contracts, including pre-orders from 40 schools. Their expansion has been remarkable, partnering with six Local Authorities, 38 schools, five Special Educational Needs (SEN) schools, and branching into juvenile secure centers.

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These visions of immersive education aren’t a far-off future. We’re already seeing founders gain traction with these models both in D2C, and centralised education formats.

The vision isn’t dystopian either—a future in which machines replace instructors. The goal is for AI to amplify humans by freeing them up to focus on the things only they can provide, such as inspiration, connection, and perspective.

In an AI-enabled education model, instructors will spend more time helping learners understand why they’re learning and less time scrambling to coordinate the day-to-day details of how they learn. Peer-to-peer interactions will move away from generic discussion prompts and toward rich, ongoing conversations that create space to bond over shared interests and explore other points of view.