Dyslexia Power

20% of the world population has dyslexia.

Being dyslexic means it's 5 times harder for you to read or write.

50% of teenagers in drug and alcohol rehab are dyslexic.

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The problem :

A dyslexic child is not offered the same learning opportunities as a non-dyslexic.

Text books don't work for dyslexic children. 

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The twist:

Dyslexics are 50% of NASA rocket scientists, 40% of self-made millionaires.

Why?

Dyslexics have strengths in other areas: Spatial thinking, multi-sensory learning, episodic memory.

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Those strengths are exactly what virtual reality can provide.

VR capitalizes on the strengths of children with dyslexia.

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Our solution:
An education platform for dyslexic children, in VR.

We're starting with foreign language classes through immersion, in VR.

A real student meets a real teacher virtually.
Our current app is a virtual grocery store in Mexico City  to learn Spanish, not with a textbook but through immersion. :)

209 million kids are dyslexic.  

They are denied equal education opportunities because we force on them a method that works for neurotypical students: textbooks.

Schools can't afford to personalize the education method for each kid so they focus on the center of the bell curve of the neurodiversity spectrum.

The consequence of this unique rigid model is:

-50% of teens in drug and alcohol rehab are dyslexic

-You are 3X more likely to drop out of high-school if dyslexic 

-Dyslexic kids give up on important topics at school such as learning a language

Who are we serving?

We initially focus on dyslexic children aged 10 to 17.

Our pilot is already yielding very positive outcomes with those kids.
This is a message from the mother of one of our student after she took 2 Spanish lessons with our VR app:

Our product is tailored to the neurological strengths of dyslexic students.

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How do we interact with them?

Every week we go sit down next to the few kids (~10 families) that are part of our pilot program while they attend their weekly Spanish VR class. We learn a lot by asking them what worked or didn't work in that week's Spanish lesson.

For instance we thought having a whiteboard in the virtual world would not be helpful but the students said it actually helps increase retention of words if the teacher writes words down at the end of the immersive class. 

We use Virtual Reality because dyslexic students excel in it.

We created a product that teaches a foreign language not in a textbook but through immersion.

A student virtually meets a real teacher in a virtual world.

For instance, for a Spanish class, the student virtually meets the teacher in a grocery store in Mexico City and learns by roaming the store, buying ingredients for a paella, discussing the best recipe with other students.

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What does it look like?

In the physical world, it looks like this:

And once you put your VR headset on, it looks like this:

Note: Teacher and students do not need to be physically in the same room. They can be anywhere. One of our student lives in Norway while her teacher lives in California.

Kids love it, it's fun, collaborative and interactive.

Our preliminary data shows that learning outcomes increase by 43%.

Beyond the learning we also put an emphasis on improving the self-esteem of those kids by showing them they can excel at something.

We hope this will have a positive ripple effect on other aspects of their lives.

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And at scale?

Using AI, our method will be able to identify a student's learning profile and personalize a learning experience that works for other neurodiverse children: ADHD, Asperger's, ODD etc.

2 things make our solution innovative:

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1. Taking a strength based approach to the education of dyslexic students instead of insisting on fixing the weaknesses.

Indeed, most education for dyslexic students today will be about working with them every day with speech-therapists on helping them read faster.

We don't think that's unnecessary, but we think there are other ways to learn than reading. So we looked at the strengths of the dyslexic population: multi sensory, spatial thinking, episodic memory and found that Virtual Reality was doing exactly that. So we're building a virtual school where dyslexic kids can excel.

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2. The importance of social & collaboration

VR for education and training is now established as an excellent method. That's not new. But VR can isolate if you're alone in the virtual world.

We know how connected the new generation is, they need the constant interaction. So we made our Virtual classes fully collaborative: 4 students meet 1 real teacher virtually.

No one else does this today. Except in the movie "Ready Player One" ;)

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Finally, as Peter Drucker says in your article, "innovation is real work" and that's why I quit my job last November to focus full time on building this. 

We use video game multiplayer technology combined with Virtual Reality hardware and SDKs to create persistent virtual classrooms that teachers and students can join and collaborate in together.

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Since VR necessitates low-latency feedback loops between the player and his interactions with the world, we adopted a distributed authoritative model. The client manipulates objects and game elements as if they were local to his instance and broadcasts updates to all other clients, thus having “authority” on these objects. This design is not ideal in a multiplayer competitive video game because it is possible for the clients to cheat but it is completely appropriate in a non-competitive environment like a virtual classroom.

We did extensive research to build a learning method tailored to the dyslexic strengths. Now that we launched, data from our pilot is confirming that our method yields very positive outcomes on learning.

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The research: The M.I.N.D Strengths

Research is showing that, while people with dyslexia struggle with reading and writing, they excel in other areas. Their strengths are known as the M.I.N.D. strengths: Material reasoning (used by architects and engineers); Interconnected reasoning (scientists and designers), Narrative reasoning (novelists and lawyers); and Dynamic reasoning (economists and entrepreneurs.)

The research supporting the MIND theory is extensive. Explained very well in this TED Talk and this best-seller book: The Dyslexic Advantage.

And scientific studies such as this one show that dyslexic students out-perform neurotypical students in Virtual Reality challenges.

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Data from our pilot:

After testing with 250 families, we can already observe increased engagement, attention and interest from the students.

We still have a long way to go and want to do a third party research. But the $436 on our bank account do not allow us to fund this today. If stars align and we go to the finals of the MIT Solve challenge, we hope to be able to find a partner that will help us conduct that study.

Today: 10 families

In 1 year: 1000 families

In 5 years: 10 million families

Today we focus on children with dyslexia.
Eventually we want to serve all children with non-standard neurological profiles: ADHD, Autism, ODD... 

As our user base grows, we have access to more and more data that allows us to detect patterns and personalize each learning experience to each kid's strengths.

An indirect consequence of our approach, we hope, is to destigmatize non neurotypical children who are often anxious, bullied and lack self-esteem. 

It's time we start embracing neurodiversity. Because the neurodiverse are those who build the world: Einstein, Richard Branson, Da Vinci, Kobe Bryant, Agatha Christie, Aretha Franklin, Steven Spielberg...

The dyslexia awareness barrier

Worldwide, dyslexia is not recognized in 2 out of 3 children.

Note that awareness is much higher in the US and the UK.

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The financial barrier

It costs $199 to purchase an Oculus Go VR headset. And our classes are cheap but we still need to pay the teacher for his time. That cuts out too many families that can't afford our product.

Overcoming the dyslexia awareness barrier

Constant communication on social media to increase awareness. We will also join the World awareness tour of NoticeAbility in 2020. Also communicate on the strengths of neurodiversity to destigmatize it.

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Overcoming the financial barrier

We need government and education authorities to subsidize access to these tools for low income families. This will come once a third party independent study shows the benefits of our approach.

Full-time staff

2 full-time founders

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Part-time staff

2 programmers

1 designer

1 3D artist

2 advisors

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Contractors

3 Spanish teachers

Neither Xavier nor Ben have neurotypical profiles.

Xavier was bullied in middle-school because his friends were on the spectrum.

Ben started programming video games as a kid, that's what got him interested in school.

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Ben & Xavier met when they were engineers at Apple and they've been best friends ever since.

We're both extremely committed to this project.

We've partnered with the biggest associations that fight for dyslexia awareness: Dyslexic Advantage, Notice Ability, International Dyslexia Association, British Dyslexia Association, Decoding Dyslexia and one group of parents of kids with Asperger's in Norway.

And I'm hoping Oculus will answer my emails one day. :)

Our customer: Parents

They pay a monthly subscription to have access to our classes for their child.

-59$ for 2 hours of class per month

-109$ for 4 hours of class per month

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Note 1: We pay teachers $30/hour. 

Note 2: we have up to 4 students per class.

Note 3: Some of our customers are expensing those costs to heir charter school.

Today we're fully bootstrapped and growing 52% month over month.

We will break-even once we have 143 customers.

Which will happen on April 2020 if we do not raise capital and maintain that growth.

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If we raise capital in Q4 2019, we can substantially accelerate growth.

The dream is to be able to conduct an impartial third party study to assess the improvement our method yields on learning outcomes for dyslexic children.

The $436 in our bank accounts today do not allow us to fund such a study even though we see countless testimonies from parents saying how much our method is helping their kid learn better.

We think Solve can help us tremendously in 2 ways:

1. Open the door to the MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory, the McGovern Institute or the Gabrieli laboratory to conduct this study.

2. Unlock directly or indirectly some funding to help us to conduct this study.

Connections to neuroscience and dyslexia experts that can guide us and who have the infrastructure and knowledge to lead the study:

-MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory to conduct a scientific study

-The McGovern Institute for Brain Research to collaborate on dyslexia research

-The Gabrieli laboratory of neuroscience

-MIT Teaching and Learning Laboratory, the McGovern Institute or the Gabrieli laboratory to conduct a scientific study on the impact of our VR method for children with dyslexia and autism.

-VR headset manufacturers (Oculus, HTC, Sony, Microsoft) so they can subsidize headsets to low-income families of the dyslexic community

-Anyone interested in allowing neurodiverse children to have the same education opportunities 

Use of AI:

We plan to use machine learning at scale to tailor the education experience of a student to his neurological profile.

The idea is to implement a classifier which determines the neurological profile of a student. 

We will build a training data set thanks to students who chose to provide us with information about their neurological profile: ADHD, Dyslexia, Asperger’s. 

The input data to our classifier is the following:

⁃The student’s gaze, and general activity (movements, interactions with the environment etc…).

⁃The transcribed conversations that occurred during the class.

⁃Precise feedback in multiple areas (vocabulary acquisition, intra/extraversion….) provided by the teachers.

⁃Text written on the virtual whiteboard.

Once a neurological profile for a student is determined, we are able to precisely tune their experience on our platform.

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Example:

Dr Brock Eide, neuroscientist expert of dyslexia has conducted research showing that dyslexic students require additional reinforcement learning.

If it takes 3 repetitions for a neurotypical student to learn a concept, it will take 3*3 = 9 repetitions for a dyslexic student to master that concept.

Therefore, with our solution, if a new dyslexic student signs up, our product will ensure that concepts are repeated enough times to guarantee that the concept is mastered. Afterwards, we will assess if it is indeed mastered and feed this input back to our Machine Learning model to improve it.

50% of teenagers in drug and alcohol rehab today are dyslexic.

If we get the honor to win the GM Prize, we will use that award to fund a scientific study assessing improvement of learning outcomes for dyslexic children who use our education method.

We focus today on teaching foreign languages because we have to be laser focus to execute, the next topics will be STEM and coding. Where can you learn about gravity better than on the moon? How to learn chemistry in a safer way than in a virtual lab?

With the GM award, we hope to finally provide to dyslexic children the education method they deserve, tailored to their strengths.

Not applying. Good luck to the Solvers!!

Not applying. Good luck to the Solvers!!

Use of AI:

We plan to use machine learning at scale to tailor the education experience of a student to his neurological profile.

The idea is to implement a classifier which determines the neurological profile of a student. 

We will build a training data set thanks to students who chose to provide us with information about their neurological profile: ADHD, Dyslexia, Asperger’s. 

The input data to our classifier is the following:

⁃The student’s gaze, and general activity (movements, interactions with the environment etc…).

⁃The transcribed conversations that occurred during the class.

⁃Precise feedback in multiple areas (vocabulary acquisition, intra/extraversion….) provided by the teachers.

⁃Text written on the virtual whiteboard.

Once a neurological profile for a student is determined, we are able to precisely tune their experience on our platform.

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Ethical and responsible use of data:

This data is extremely private and will only be used anonymously. The data will never be sold, never be shared with anyone without the explicit request of the family. 

The sole and only purpose of the data we collect on a student is to help him learn more efficiently, in a way tailored to his neurological strengths.

We're disrupting Special Education, an industry mostly neglected by technology today.

But for our solution to be acknowledged and made available to all children with learning disabilities, we need a credible, impartial entity to do a scientific study.

The $436 in our bank accounts today do not allow us to fund such a study even though we see countless testimonies from parents saying how much our method is helping their kid learn better. Such as this one:

We think the Morgridge Family Foundation can help us tremendously in 2 ways:

1. Open the door to the universities and laboratories that could conduct this study.

2. Unlock directly or indirectly some funding to allow us to conduct this study.

Not applying. Good luck to the Solvers!!