sAInaptic founder Rajeshwari Iyer, Co-Founder & CEO, an MPhil from Cambridge and PhD from Imperial, and her co-founder Kavitha Ravindran have not had it easy while raising money for their Ed-Tech start-up.
While Rajeshwari is an experienced research and data scientist with a PhD in computational neuroscience from Imperial College London and an MPhil in computational biology from the University of Cambridge, she also brings in strategy and thought leadership from her experience in both academia and the NHS. Kavitha Ravindran, Co-founder & Chief Content and growth Officer, has a PGCE in secondary science from the University of Cambridge. She has over 12 years of experience as a secondary science teacher and GCSE examiner.
It is not just about building the company, but as part of trying to motivate more women to take technical subjects and more women to just know that anything is possible, if you put your heart and mind to it,” Rajeshwari Iyer told Asian Voice.
Sustaining an Ed-Tech business
Explaining the key challenge to sustain their business model, Rajeshwari and Kavitha said, “We operate two business models - consumer focussed, where kids can use the app for free and upgrade for more features and masterclasses, and schools focussed, where teachers try the app and get their departments to adopt/pay. We anticipate that the consumer app will be used for test/exam prep, which will result in seasonal usage. This could be a challenge but we hope that with the complementary schools model, where sAInaptic becomes part of homework policy and is used regularly, throughout the year, usage will even out. With schools using the app, we will be able to target our users at scale but funding in schools remains a big barrier. More work is needed from the local and national governments to adopt technology like ours at scale across the nation.”
The dilemma around science
So far, the two women have carefully studied and observed some of the fundamental issues related to lesser students pursuing science. Their biggest learning is that teenagers think Science is difficult.
They believe that this could be due to two main reasons: How it is taught - as a content-heavy subject that expects one to memorise a lot of facts. But actually, when you look at exams and the kind of questions that students are tested on, they are very application-based, real-world problems. If the subject is taught in a manner that students can link it to daily life, it will make science a more relatable and 'sticky' subject for students; Lack of confidence - there is very little focus on science in Primary Education, and even up to KS3. Students struggle to keep up with the breadth of knowledge that needs to be covered at GCSEs. This has an impact on their confidence, affecting their grades and leading to reduced uptake of STEM subjects in higher education.
sAInaptic's instant and effective feedback, provided at a per-question level, empowers students to assess their understanding and reinforce their knowledge more efficiently. This feedback-driven learning approach boosts students' confidence in STEM subjects, ultimately leading to a greater number of students pursuing science in higher education.
Learning made easy without guilt or shame of feedback
With sAInaptic, kids don't need to wait for days to get feedback from their teachers. Independent learning and assessments need not be only multiple-choice questions. SAInaptic is the brainchild of 2 British Asian mums, who met in Cambridge while studying, started sAInaptic, an AI-based learning web-app that automatically marks descriptive student responses to open-ended questions to give instant, personalised teacher-like feedback, while drastically reducing the marking workload for teachers. It is commercialised as a web-app and sold to students as a monthly subscription for independent, feedback-driven revision and to schools as annual subscriptions, for auto-marked homework and tests. sAInaptic is entering a global billion-dollar tutoring & assessments market, starting with schools, with a bold vision to integrate with any online course using an API. sAInaptic has over 15k+ users from over 1000 schools and 19 countries; more than 40 schools have used the app, including top grammar schools in the country.
Feedback-driven learning always improves student performance and outcomes
The two Ed-Tech co-founders also explained to the newsweekly that there's a lot of scientific capital to show that feedback-driven learning always improves student performance and outcomes. Rajeshwari and Kavitha are working towards helping kids to consolidate their knowledge. Classroom knowledge needs to be retained in the brain and their app helps students to recall information and then answer questions in a coherent manner as if they are applying that knowledge. This helps with long-term retention of concepts and lessens the burden on the teacher in the classroom, while also taking away the shame/stigma of asking the teacher to repeat a chapter or concept because they weren’t clear to a particular pupil in the class. AI empowers students and teachers that way and sAInaptic is facilitating just that.
The Ed-Tech entrepreneurs signed off by saying, “With our story, we want to encourage and empower anyone to pursue their passion for building products that can make a positive impact in education. Don't be afraid to take risks and challenge the status quo. Especially if you are a teacher, you are already impacting the lives of your own students, imagine having the ability to bring about this change at a global scale.”
After all, PM Rishi Sunak, a quintessential South Asian did say earlier this year, “One of the biggest changes in mindset we need in education today is to reimagine our approach to numeracy.” Iyer and Ravindran have done exactly this in Science.
