Startup Weekend Receives $250,000 Grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for EDU Events

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 2, 2011 – Startup Weekend, a non-profit organization, powered by the Kauffman Foundation, and Grockit, a social-learning Internet start-up, today announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a grant in support of Startup Weekend EDU, a dedicated education (EDU) vertical within Startup Weekend that is designed to attract and assist the education community working to bring new solutions to the industry. With a grant of $250,000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is backing educators, developers, designers, marketers, product managers, and startup enthusiasts, all of whom share a common goal – to bring new innovations to education.

“The Kauffman Foundation is excited to have the Gates Foundation support this important initiative that will help entrepreneurs with innovative education business solutions learn how to execute their ideas,” said Nick Seguin, manager of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. “Startup Weekend EDU builds upon the Kauffman Foundation’s interest in teaching entrepreneurs how to build successful education ventures that have the potential to be some of the next great high-growth companies of the future.”

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups with the ultimate goal of bringing new innovations to education. October has already seen three successful Startup Weekend EDU events in Seattle, San Francisco and Washington. The first London Startup Weekend EDU event is slated for November, and the series will announce additional events around the world taking place over the next 12 months.

“Given its dedication to education reform and extensive networks in the space, the Gates Foundation is the ideal partner for us to scale the Startup Weekend EDU initiative,” said Farb Nivi, founder of Grockit.

To register for the London Startup Weekend EDU event please visit edu.startupweekend.org. To learn more about becoming a Startup Weekend organizer please visit startupweekend.org/about/event.

Grockit has integrated with Facebook to help you ace your next exam with your friends. In the coming weeks, Grockit will make it easier for students to create online study groups within Grockit and solve problems with friends. What this means is that you’ll be able to find friends to study with, create permanent Grockit study rooms, and share your team’s progress on your Facebook profile.

We’re excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, this solves a big problem for people that use Grockit. Many people want to study with friends they interact with in other parts of their lives, and we haven’t had a great way of doing that within Grockit. Now, with our new Facebook integration, students can quickly select-and-add study partners from among their friends, even if their friends aren’t using Grockit today.

Second, this was a result of amazingly fast design and engineering work. Thanks to the fine folks at Facebook who delivered this API, we’ve been able to build something we think will be beneficial for our users in just a couple of short weeks.

The result is something that we think will make online social learning a lot easier to use. And this cross-team work matches up with our Grockit core value of Collaborteam — our made-up word to describe the transparent, selfless way we work together.

Here’s the press release from F8, the Facebook Conference.

Grockit Announces Facebook Integration to Make Studying More Social

SAN FRANCISCO – September 22, 2011 – Today at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, Grockit, a social learning company, announced a new integration with Facebook that will make it even easier for students around the world to create Grockit study groups with their friends. Now people using Grockit can quickly create “Study Rooms”, invite their Facebook friends and prepare together for college entrance examinations, such as the SAT, ACT, LSATs, GMATs, GREs, and more. Students can also track and share academic progress and milestone achievements towards their academic goals on their Facebook profiles.

“Millions of students are on Facebook, but they aren’t just socializing. They are helping each other with homework, sharing school resources, and in general hacking together a social learning experience online,” said Farbood Nivi, founder and Chief Product Officer, Grockit. “The cool thing about our new Facebook integration is that students can create, control, and access Grockit Study Rooms right from their Facebook profiles. Study Rooms include tons of content to help with studying, from practice questions, to video lessons, and even personal tutoring.”

Earlier this year, Grockit released research showing that students who study together on Grockit do twice as much work — and get answers correct more often — as students who study alone.

In addition to creating new study groups, people using Grockit can share the total number of hours spent studying, the total number of questions attempted, and their progress studying within Grockit via their Facebook profiles. People can control how their activity is shared with friends on Facebook from their Facebook privacy settings.

To learn more about Grockit’s Facebook integration, please visit: Grockit.com/social

Rusty Greiff is Grockit’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer and a resident of the greater Washington DC area.  Rusty has an extensive background in politics and education.

My 8-year old son is a LEGO junky.  He goes through three basic steps to LEGO greatness:

1) he shuts the door to his room

2) he pours the 500 pieces of LEGOs on the floor

3) he lets it rip.

Skyscrapers, spaceships, laser-rovers; massive and intricate structures are built – most of the time with his brother and best buddy next door.  Often, I will peer through the crack in the door to assess their progress.  Rarely do they know where their LEGO journey will take them, but they are comfortable in leaping ahead together, adjusting the pieces, and brainstorming until the creation is complete, often ending in a multi-player “high five”.

Last week, I played and learned with my own set of LEGOs along with some of the most talented educators in the country at the KIPP Charter School’s Annual Summit in Nashville, TN.  Every year, KIPP brings its teachers, directors, funders, experts in the field and students together to discuss best practices.  Alongside KIPP’s finest teachers, administrators and students, I led a 90-minute session, LEGOs in hand, on collaborative and social learning.  The LEGO exercise and talk was meant to help participants better understand the impact of Grockit’s adaptive and collaborative platform as it is applied to KIPP schools.  Currently, Grockit and KIPP are partnering to connect California KIPP students in peer-peer SAT/ACT test prep, with the goal of mastering test prep content and improving scores through social learning.

Not surprisingly, bringing people together (with a massive box of LEGOs) with different learning styles, specific skill sets and expertise, can create a dynamic experience that translates into some beautiful results.

By way of examples, Grace, a KIPP teacher from Washington DC preferred working in a team of 2 to build the foundation while her colleague Jennifer created a three-story roof garden to attach to Grace’s structure.  A KIPP teacher from Newark encouraged her team to strategize first, drawing elaborate plans before finding color-coordinated LEGOs to complete the building.  One AP teacher demanded of his team, “Just have fun” and attacked the LEGOs, building a killer “car-house” that of course could fly.

The LEGO exercise and session was an easy demonstration of existing academic research suggesting that by engaging learners through social games, collaborative problem solving and peer-to-peer studying, companies like Grockit are helping learners master subjects and achieve higher test scores.  Literally, this is what we do at Grockit every day for our hundreds-of-thousands of students.

Watch live video from Startup Lessons Learned on Justin.tv

A distinguished audience that included Ron Packard, CEO and Founder of K12; Julie Young, CEO of Florida Virtual Schools; Jaime Casap, Google Education Evangelist; and Gene Hickok, former Deputy Secretary of Education discussed these topics. In addition, some of the most innovative new companies in education such as Livemocha and Dreambox Learning presented.

Grockit Founder and CEO, Farb Nivi, presented Grockit and also spoke on a panel about how emerging technologies will advance learning. His panel was moderated by Michael B. Horn, co-author of “Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns”.

Farb Nivi, Founder and CEO, Grockit

We would like to thank ASU SkySong for the opportunity to attend and being a great host. The ideas discussed and companies that presented are sure to be a big part of the future of education across the world. We left the conference motivated and as enthusiastic as ever about our mission at Grockit and the product we are building!

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology.

For a sneak peak into Grockit and what Farb will be speaking about check out this video.

Ari giving a demo at the exhibition.

Last week we participated in the DevLearn Conference in San Jose.  DevLearn is for e-learning professionals who are involved in the design, development, or management of emerging educational technologies.  We had the opportunity to show Grockit at the exhibition and also were selected for the DemoFest.  DemoFest was like a science fair for new technologies.  People kept asking how Grockit’s approach to learning could be incorporated into their organizations and we enjoyed discussing ways Grockit could be used outside of our current test prep offerings.

The conference ended for us with our CEO, Farb Nivi, presenting  “How Technology Will Revolutionize Education”.  Farb dicussed how the traditional educational paradigm is broken and how technology offers new solutions for fixing it.  Stay tuned for more on this topic from us in the future.  Many thanks to the eLearning Guild members who organized DevLearn for putting together a a terrific conference.

In addition, we are learning from the many thought leaders in e-learning that are here.  You will see some of this reflected in future Grockit features.

On November 13th, I’ll be speaking at the DevLearn conference in San Jose. I’m really looking forward to the opportunity. The conference hosts experienced and knowledgeable professionals in the e-Learning industry to explore the best ideas and technologies.  Here is a summary of my talk:

How Technology is Revolutionizing Education

There are several ways to resolve the broken process of traditional education. One way to address this problem is to use artificial intelligence to build adaptive learning software systems that are as effective as personal tutoring. Another is to take advantage of how students naturally learn by applying algorithms to optimize several traditional learning environments: study groups, private tutoring sessions, study halls, and the traditional classroom environment.

Game dynamics can also motivate students to study for longer periods, and help students encourage one another. Diagnostics and adaptive challenges offer students individually-targeted study sessions. Students are naturally technologically savvy these days, and making learning fun and accessible in a social networking setting creates a study environment that is approachable for all students. Collaborative learning can be introduced into the classroom, the home, or wherever students may be.

This session will address the issues facing traditional education today, discuss resolutions to these problems, and how technology will revolutionize the educational paradigm.
In this session, you will learn:

• Why and how the traditional educational paradigm is broken
• Some solutions for this problem
• Why technology will revolutionize the traditional education system
• Why game-play and social-networking features are so effective for our students today

Please leave a comment if you have questions or suggestions on other points to discuss in the presentation.  Grockit will also have an exhibit at the conference to show our latest features.  If you will be in attendance be sure to come by and say hello.