Inventing a New Way of Teaching Math in 12 Months

Prisms 1st Annual Report

Why? 

It’s the question math students, especially those in algebra, seem to ask the most. I don’t blame them. The majority of students do not find tangible relevance in most modern classrooms, because there isn’t any.

I founded Prisms just over a year ago with the belief that solving this “math problem” doesn’t mean redefining how we learn — it means redefining how we teach. 

Prisms does not exist to champion cosmetic changes to the current teaching model or to make incremental improvements to student learning outcomes. We’re pioneering a brand new paradigm for math education. Our studied approach leverages peer-reviewed research and decades of educational leadership experience to address the two often-elusive skills critical to STEM success: (1) the ability to use spatial reasoning and (2) the ability to abstract from a concrete, real-world situation. We are determined to deliver this new paradigm to students everywhere, regardless of their current context or socio-economic status. 

So let us be audacious in this moment, as pioneers in education reform creating a common-use platform for all students that delivers an uncommon result: enduring fluency in math. 

We began engaging students by tapping into our shared lived experience with the outbreak of COVID-19. See our first module titled “Pandemic” here and hear testimonials from students themselves, and you’ll understand the scope of the change we’re just beginning to drive. 

Our dedicated team of former teachers and top school district administrators - along with leading-edge virtual reality designers, developers, and research scientists - translated a raw frustration for the status quo in math instruction into scalable and pedagogically-sound action. In one year, we have built a full algebra content course in virtual reality, created the implementation apparatus for teachers and districts to roll out this powerful emerging technology, and energized our first cohort of passionate educators and leaders across the country ready to stare down learning loss and Algebra recovery in an unprecedented way.

Momentum is swelling as we all feel the urgent need to equip this generation of students with the mathematical fluency to help solve increasingly complex global issues, from slowing climate change to creating new sustainable business models.

Watch this video on what reinventing math education means for Prisms: 

Here’s a quick overview of the major milestones from this past year, as we eagerly look forward to the work and success ahead:

The Audacity of Now

Right now, 9,000 students in districts across the U.S., from NYC and KIPP Massachusetts on the East Coast to Montogomery and Butler Counties, Ohio in the Midwest to Highline, Portland and Mt. Diablo on the West Coast, are early adopters piloting our platform solution. 

The support and desire of superintendents, principals, and teachers to drive transformative outcomes and the availability of funding through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) Fund is creating a once-in-a-lifetime moment. We’re synchronizing urgent need with readily available funding to transform the modality of learning across public schools in the U.S.

Our initial pilot lays the groundwork to engage more than 50,000 students in more than 200 medium and large districts across the country by the end of the year.

If your district is interested in enrolling in the pilot, please reach out here.

Validation: Education not Edutainment 

We’re committed to more than just talking about the pilot and the efficacy of our work. We’re rooting everything we do in statistical rigor and third-party validation. 

There’s an industry stigma we’ve been fighting against from day one: edutainment. Engaging students in the digital world, whether through apps, tablets, or software solutions is easy, but educators rightly question whether these initiatives generate meaningful learning outcomes. We’re starting our journey in this first year dedicated to rigorously evaluating our learning model. We’re partnering with the esteemed educational research agency WestEd to deliver an independent analysis of the feasibility and efficacy — through a randomized-control study — of our solution over the course of school year 2021-22. 

Follow this blog and Prisms on Twitter and LinkedIn to learn more as those studies are released over the next several months.

Nearly $3MM in New Funding from Strategic Partners

Prisms launched last year with an SBIR Phase 1 National Science Foundation (NSF) grant totaling $250,000. Our team hustled to build the frontier of virtual reality learning. We created a nuanced, effective, and scalable instructional arc which drives student focus and learning (through our first beta module) in less than eight months. We’re now accelerating to building and launching the remainder of our content libraries for grades 6-12 math and science for the 2022-23 school year. 

We’re proud to announce that we recently earned $1.2MM in SBIR Phase II and Phase I grants from the NSF and NIH (plus an additional 500K in matching funds) to further accelerate our work. We’re coupling non-dilutive grants with venture funding partners with whom we share common values and objectives. We recently raised a strategic round of $1.2MM seed funding with participation from WndrCo and the WXR Fund, making 50 percent of our funding to date from female-led firms. $175,000 in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) support from T-Mobile has accelerated hardware adoption, to outfit our first 10 Title I schools with VR headsets.

Team Traction

We’re thrilled to announce that after aiding Prisms’ growth over the past year, EdTech luminary John Gamba has joined our team as a Formal Advisor focusing on strategy and business development. John has advised some of the most prominent names in EdTech and has served in founding roles of startups that were successfully funded, scaled, and exited with strong ROI for stakeholders. 

We’re also scaling our customer success infrastructure with the addition of two outstanding new hires: Nathan LaBarba and Ryan McLaughlin. Nathan, our Customer Success Manager, spent the last eight years at high-growth companies in NYC and as a Leadership Fellow with Success Academy Charter Schools. Nathan leads our customer onboarding experience while building out our longer- term strategy for customer success at scale. Ryan, our Customer & Curriculum Specialist, is a seasoned math educator, curriculum designer, and VR evangelist. He leads Prisms’ professional development efforts and supports our teachers in instructional outcomes, implementation, and pedagogical excellence.

We will continue to make strategic additions to our dedicated team as we grow and scale. We’re currently looking for a VP of Sales and Unity Engineers to scale our platform across subject areas, schools, and geographies. Learn more and see all of our open positions here.

The next twelve months will prove critical as we further validate, iterate, and accelerate Prisms’ potential for educational impact through operationalizing a new modality of learning. Virtual Reality isn’t the future, it’s now. We’ve seen it in our students’ faces — and in their test scores.

While Prisms is just over 12 months old, the problem we’re addressing has existed for generations. Success in Algebra has been a core civil rights issue for some time. We must position districts, schools, and teachers with tools commensurate to the gravity of the problem at hand.

Together, we will lead and inspire change in our world. That begins in the math classroom. And it begins now.

--- Anurupa Ganguly, CEO and Founder Prisms of Reality

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