CENTURY dives deep to track student performance and help teachers build custom curriculum. That prompted her to start a company called CENTURY, a tool that gives students a tailored educational experience and teachers a way to keep close track of a student’s successes and failures — and where they need to work harder to help that child learn. The teacher side of it materializes as a dashboard that allows them to build custom curriculum for their students, while students log in for their coursework through CENTURY. The goal is to give an overall snapshot of a student’s strengths and weaknesses and help to tailor that educational experience. Instead, CENTURY’s goal is to figure out where in math the student may be struggling, and swoop in and help there. Then I thought about all the other facts I came across, how difficult it is for parents to be involved when they work in jobs.” The service is essentially built around helping teachers reduce their administrative overhead, like tracking grades and figuring out where to target their efforts with individual students. While the company is working through London, the same principles — applying machine learning to a student’s profile in order to determine where to target their education — should work in any school system, Lakhani said. Already, schools are inundated with startups trying to change the educational workflow, and so far there haven’t been that many explosive successes. That’s part of the reason why CENTURY had to be a more complete package, rather than tackling smaller versions of the problem that some apps do, Lakhani said. It’s good to have something target math, but if you want to supercharge your teachers and arm them with real-time data and make that intervention, then you need to be giving them some deeper insights into the data and behavior of students.
When Priya Lakhani went to pick up her daughter from school one day, she asked her teacher how her daughter was doing. It was when she was walking home with her daughter that same day that she realized she wouldn’t always be able to have those types of opportunities to engage with teachers.
That prompted her to start a company called CENTURY, a tool that gives students a tailored educational experience and teachers a way to keep close track of a student’s successes and failures — and where they need to work harder to help that child learn. The teacher side of it materializes as a dashboard that allows them to build custom curriculum for their students, while students log in for their coursework through CENTURY. The company showed off its technology on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016.
The goal is to give an overall snapshot of a student’s strengths and weaknesses and help to tailor that educational experience. It’s all well and good for teachers to give a broad overview to parents of how their kids are doing, but it doesn’t do much good if a teacher just says “she’s not doing well in math,” Lakhani said. Instead, CENTURY’s goal is to figure out where in math the student may be struggling, and swoop in and help there.
“I just thought, hang on a second, what’s gonna happen when she’s 14?” Lakhani, CEO of CENTURY said. “I’m not gonna be able to go to the school gate and say ‘hey, what did she do today?’ They want to walk home alone, teachers don’t bring them out to the gate. I thought, how involved can I be? Obviously there’s parent-teacher meetings, but how do I know how she’s performing every day. Then I thought about all the other facts I came across, how difficult it is for parents to be involved when they work in jobs.”
The service is essentially built around helping teachers reduce their administrative overhead, like tracking grades and figuring out where to target their efforts with individual students. For example, a teacher can dive deeply into which subjects…
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