Boulder-based edtech startup Indigo Education Company announced a new product today that uses AI to reveal special student insights.
The product, Sherlock, is an assessment-based dashboard that reveals a student’s strengths, motivators, skills and behavioral styles to assist educators in connecting with students.
Indigo, which launched in 2013, is primarily focused on self-awareness and has developed a series of assessments to create recommendations for each student.
Sherlock builds on Indigo’s prior work, using AI to answer specific questions from teachers about their students.
"We find a myriad of ways that Sherlock is powerful within our community -- from creating small learning teams, to differentiating classroom assignments, to identifying groups of students who might benefit from further socio-emotional support,” Clara Quinlan, assistant principal of Lafayette's Peak to Peak High School, said in a statement. “Our staff references Sherlock on a weekly basis to meet each individual student where they are and empower them to maximize their strengths, motivations and skill sets."
With Sherlock, data gathered through the assessment is encrypted and accessed through a secure, web-based application that enables suggestions right in the classroom.
Educators can form teams based on shared characteristics, strengths and needs, find the best techniques to engage each student and identify students with high entrepreneurial potential.
Counselors can also use Indigo to identify at-risk students with social-emotional needs.
Indigo has 12 employees based in Boulder and has been used by over 100 high schools and colleges in 17 states, totaling nearly 100,000 students and teachers.
In conjunction with launching Sherlock, Indigo has also launched IndigoActivate, an online self-awareness and career readiness course.
Students receive step-by-step guidance to create their own personalized MAP (Master Activation Plan), which helps them plan for life, major and careers after school.
