In a D.C. office overlooking Union Station, the team at Legends of Learning are working on what they believe to be the next big edtech phenomenon: tablet-based video games.
"Education is a gigantic marketplace. People are doing everything from digital textbooks to finding better ways to manage school buildings," Legends of Learning co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Josh Goldberg told DC Inno.
"We said 'Hey, is there a place where we can bring something unique to the table,' and the two biggest trends that we saw were the declining price of Chromebooks and now, Internet is pervasive in schools."
Legends of Learning started in 2016 when co-founders, Goldberg, Geoff Livingston and Vadim Polikov, noted that the price of Chromebooks was declining, making them ideal for school districts to scoop up. Goldberg and his fellow co-founders saw an opportunity:
"We loved Oregon Trail," Goldberg said. "You played it in school and got really excited about it, and there's a whole generation of people like me who majored in history because of things like Oregon Trail, Sim City and Civilization."
"You look at kids today and they're all good at games."
The group started developing Legends of Learning, a tablet-based marketplace for games to teach students in the classroom. Right now, the slate of games focuses on 6th-8th grade science and is categorized by different lessons. As an added bonus for teachers, the lessons follow the guidelines set under the Next Generation Science Standards, a nationwide set of policies for K-12 science classes.
It should be noted that the slate of games are a part of a marketplace: Legends of Learning allows developers to contribute their own games (which then go under a strenuous review process) and suggest changes to existing options. So far, the marketplace includes 900 games for 90 lessons.
Teachers are able to make playlists for the games they want to be included in the day's lesson plan, and they can create individual ones for each student based on what they're struggling with and where they're excelling.
But the co-founders didn't want to just take a shot in the dark when they fully launch their product on March 27. For the past year, they've been a part of a study through Vanderbilt University's education program. Vanderbilt researchers had a group of 14 teachers test out the games on their own students. In one of the teacher's classrooms, they would use the games for about half of the time for three weeks, working through different science lessons. The other classroom didn't get any games.
"We wanted to see do people actually learn from this? And at the end Vanderbilt administered a common assessment," Goldberg said. "For us, it was a go or no-go, and the most obvious result was that kids loved the games. Teachers loved the games—the games were shorter, and they were easy to integrate into the classroom."
"The kids who had the games were substantially more engaged." (The startup couldn't go further into the rest of the findings because the study has yet to be published.)
When Legends of Learning officially launches next week, they will already have over 500 teachers using the system. School districts can buy the games in bulk, paying per student per year.
"One of the most unique things we have is actual research. A lot of edtech companies will say 'Hey, I used this in one classroom or two classrooms,' and that's nice, but it's not actual academic research," Goldberg said.
Legends of Learning hopes to double its office headcount by the end of 2017, from 14 to 30, and they're hoping to be able to expand into all grades and all subjects as they continue to grow. Hiring is a big reason why the team is in D.C., rather than in Baltimore, where Goldberg lives, or Alexandria, where Livingston lives.
"D.C. just has a ton of talent, especially on the tech side. It's also a very central location," Goldberg said. "We can pull great talents from Northern Virginia, Baltimore. It's a pretty wide area."
Images courtesy of Legends of Learning
