From the moment 12th-grade students rushed into a Pepin Academies classroom on a Friday afternoon for their financial literacy class, they knew who Marlee Strawn was.
Strawn, the co-founder and head of education at Tampa-based startup Scholar Education, is a familiar face in the classroom because the public charter school is piloting the startup’s AI technology — and they center around dogs.
Specifically, two Bernedoodles named Baxter and Bruce.
“Pretty much everybody loves dogs,” Strawn said. “It helps with that engagement level, and it takes away that potential scariness or intimidation of AI.”
BaxterBot is an AI-powered learning assistant for students. Downloaded onto each student’s district computer, it follows students as they work through content in and out of the classroom. They can ask questions, help redirect them when they get stuck and are programmed to transition students back to relevant content if their attention span is limited.
Scholar Education began testing it last year at Dayspring Academy in Pasco County. Now, the newest version is being tested in the pilot program at Pepin Academies in Tampa where students are in third through twelfth grades.
A bill from the Florida Senate, HB 1361, now allows school districts to receive grants to implement AI to support teachers and students. Strawn said a partnership with the Florida Department of Education has also helped fund the pilot program, which is in its second year.
Professor Bruce is the AI-powered teacher-assistant counterpart who helps teachers create lesson plans, monitor data analytics, and feed the lesson plan directly into the student portal. David Bern, a high school math teacher at Pepin, is one of 15 teachers who volunteered to incorporate the AI tool into his classroom.
“My background is in engineering, so I like bringing technology into my classes as often as possible,” Bern said. “It’s almost like modernizing education. The more tools I can bring into my classroom, the more it feels relevant to the students. It helps them feel like the lesson was built for them. It's not outdated; it's not boring.”
It's especially important at Pepin, where there is a 100% special education population.
“One of our core values is supporting students [with accommodations] which is often overlooked by edtech tools,” Strawn said. “There's no shortage of those tools on the market, [but ] what we discovered is about 65% of teachers say they want tools helping with accommodating students because they don't exist.”
Strawn said through the pilot, additional feedback has been gained in focus groups. She said that her background as an educator has continued the mission to use AI to help create accommodations based on each student's education plan.
Scholar Education launched in 2023. Strawn previously served as the first-ever principal at a Hillsborough high school founded by Tampa entrepreneur Kiran Patel.
“For us educators, we are constantly questioned on what data we have on student learning, [the AI tool] does that so that lesson plans can become more directly aligned with what students need,” Bern, who plans to use the AI tool fully once the pilot program has ended, said.
In David Bern’s classroom, students were not only actively using the chat box to ask BaxterBot questions and help guide them through the questions of the day but were also interested in the technology itself.
One student asked Strawn how the tool was coded. Another asked how many languages the system could hold (179, to be exact).
The startup closed a $1.5 million friends and family funding round this spring and is opening its seed round soon. According to Strawn, they are looking to close $2 million.
“We’ve identified 15 states that we are targeting. Our goal [with the pilot program] is to show what we've done in Florida and replicate it elsewhere,” Strawn said. “… At the end of the day, we want to continue funding our growth while fine-tuning our existing programs.”
