Spaghetti Brain

Spaghetti Brain® is a personalised digital metalearning coach that helps each student to understand and manage their own learning.

A 'fixed mindset' - the belief that intelligence is fixed - lowers students’ motivation to learn, makes them afraid of effort, and makes them want to give up in the face of challenge (Dweck, 2008). Poor metacognition - a student's ability to reflect on, manage and monitor their own learning - can lead to a fixed mindset and patterns of low achievement.

Last year, 39% of primary school students failed to meet the expected standard in reading, writing & maths at the end of year 6 (grade 5) (Department for Education, 2017). Many of the lowest-performing students are still from the poorest families, of whom nearly two thirds are not 'secondary ready' (Education Policy Institute, Dec 2016).

These students often show poor metalearning and metacognitive skills: they struggle to reflect on, monitor and manage their own learning. Evidence shows that metacognition instruction is particularly effective for low achieving students, and recent trials also indicated that the programmes were particularly beneficial for students from low income families (Education Endowment Foundation, 2017).

These students often benefit from personalised 1:1 support. However, most schools have limited additional adult provision and a teacher will have on average just 8 minutes per day per child. Unfortunately there is also a shortage of programmes which support teachers to improve students’ metacognitive skills effectively (EEF, 2017).

Low attainment is a strong risk factor for disadvantaged students’ later attainment. Early identification and intervention are therefore vital (DfE, 2015), and it is essential to embed good metacognitive skills before the transition to secondary school.

Spaghetti Brain® is a digital app that helps 9-11yr old school children to manage, monitor and reflect on their own learning when they are stuck. It empowers the child and gives valuable insights to their teacher.

For the child, it is a tablet app to be used in the classroom, in that moment when they get stuck in their independent learning. It works like a personal coach and asks them key prompt questions: ‘Why am I stuck?’ ‘Is it because I can’t concentrate?’ ‘Is it because I don’t understand?’, etc. and leads them through more layers, prompting them to try different strategies, add their own and reflect on their process. Over time, the adaptive app shows them what they struggle with the most and which strategies work best for them – to help them build metacognitive skills and give them insight and agency in their own learning.

For teachers, the Spaghetti Brain® software shows patterns across the class and groups of students.

Spaghetti Brain® encourages children to respond positively to challenge, by scaffolding the process of experimenting with different learning strategies rather than giving up. Students take ownership of their own learning and are equipped with better knowledge of their specific barriers, the strategies that work well for them, and how and when to apply those strategies effectively.

These are life-long skills that tap into the way a child perceives and approaches their own learning at a fundamental level.

Spaghetti Brain® is digital, adaptive, and bespoke to every child. It engages them at the centre of the learning process and provides immediate, personalised support in the moment of struggle. It is a cost effective addition to adult support.

Most tracking resources for teachers and other adaptive software are purely outcome oriented. Spaghetti Brain® generates data which reveals unique insights about the individual learning process to both child and teacher, who can see whole-class patterns to provide effective targeted interventions.

Spaghetti Brain® is deployed on tablet computers and used in the classroom. It gathers information about children’s individual learning journeys, what they struggle with the most, and what strategies work best. Over time, this hones the adaptive element of Spaghetti Brain®, which can suggest personalised strategies at the appropriate time for each individual child.

Spaghetti Brain® relies on machine learning elements to deliver a personal and ever more effective experience to both the children and their teachers. Educators can see trends across the class, and are able to correlate data against demographic and attainment data.

We are currently working with our partner school in Brixton, London, to develop a Minimum Viable Product. We are working with 40 year 6 (grade 5) students and their teachers to (co)design, rapid prototype, test and iterate the first version of the app. We will pilot this from September 2018 in up to 5 London primary schools, whilst we continue to develop additional functionality.

We aim to be in 20 early adopter London primary schools by the beginning of September 2019, reaching 400 children across year 5 and 6 (ages 9-11).

We plan to expand to London secondary schools from 2020 onwards, and roll out nationally the year after. In three years time, we plan to reach around 30,000 - 35,000 pupils in the UK. By year four, we will start to look into the international market, i.e. the almost 200,000 other English speaking schools worldwide. Around that time we also plan to develop a home product to not only facilitate the learning process at school, but also at home – and to give parents the tool they need to better tailor their support for their children.

We will reach our first early adopter schools through our own networks within education (TeachFirst, EDUCATE), our partner school and other education partnerships (Bridges for Children). Spaghetti Brain® will be sold directly to schools by annual subscription and can be downloaded from online servers for easy access. Through our customer schools, we will reach the lowest performing students. Schools will be able to see the positive impact of our intervention on these children's learning through the data collected on their progress in key learning indicators, as well as gaining valuable data for their teachers to better personalise their individual support.

We are currently working with 40 students aged 10-11yrs and their teachers within our partner school. They are co-designing particular functionalities of Spaghetti Brain® together with us to ensure the intervention is actually helpful and useful in the classroom setting. The students use the Spaghetti Brain® app on school tablet computers, currently to get back on task should they digress. In a playful way it encourages them to continue with their work instead of staying off task, and in the process supports them to gain insight into what their most common barriers are.

In 12 months we will still be serving 9-11 year old primary school children in London. By then, we expect to reach between 500 and 800 students. They will be using a more comprehensive version of Spaghetti Brain® that is able to help them with strategies to get out of stuck moments by themselves, boosting their agency and understanding of their own learning process – and therefore their resilience and motivation. In 3 years, we will have added older students to our users by expanding to secondary schools, and will have clearer evidence of the impact of Spaghetti Brain®.

Hermione has 6 years’ experience as a primary school class teacher, literacy coordinator and teacher trainer for the education charity Teach First. She met Ralf on a joint MA/MSc Design programme and they have worked successfully together for 3 years. Ralf has a background in industrial design and specific expertise in working with users to co-design products/services. Oscar is a Cambridge Alumnus and has the programming skills to build the prototypes and products. We have gathered experts in the fields of ed-tech, start-ups and education as advisors, and made connections to schools and leading organisations within the sector.

Spaghetti Brain® will sell directly to schools via annual subscription: an annual £300 school software license, and an annual £10 login fee per student. For an average UK primary school that is £800 out of a dedicated annual resources budget of over £35,000. For secondary school, the budget is over four times that.

Later we will develop a business model for parents, but we want to get a core market right first: the 27,000 schools in the UK. We will focus on the 500 primary schools we can currently reach in London first, expanding to secondary schools the year after and then nationally in year 3, when we will reach break even. Since our product is not curriculum or subject-based, it would also cater to the US market and the nearly 200,000 other English speaking schools worldwide, and we plan to expand internationally in year 4.

Through the development of this product we will acquire large datasets and institutional knowledge, insights and frameworks of how to support learners to understand and manage their own learning. There is significant potential to apply this to different products and users - learners in a variety of contexts from school children to corporate trainees.

We want to make our intervention as effective as possible. Metacognition - learning about learning - is naturally a very individual process: we all think differently and we all learn differently. Adding this adaptive element to Spaghetti Brain®, using machine learning technology, would make the app so much more effective to support each student. The partnerships and expertise available through Solve MIT would allow us to make a leap forward in building our capacity for product research and development in this area, as well as supporting us to measure and validate our impact as we move forward.

One of our key barriers to product development is our lack of resources and networks to recruit core team members with essential skills and experience, particularly in software development and computer science, and sales and marketing. We would profit from contacts to the very best potential employees, contributors and advisers with the shared ultimate goal to make the world a better place. Solve MIT would help us to connect to investors who know the education space, and can give us longer term support to become sustainable and make a difference on a large scale.