Toronto Startup: Spongelab Is All About Science And Education INTERVIEW

What problem does Spongelab solve?

Spongelab approaches three big problems in education. First, tight classroom budgets for modern learning tools are a constant roadblock for teachers wanting to help their students to learn more efficiently through technology. Spongelab’s solution is to provide state-of-the-art science education technology at no cost whatsoever, freely accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Second, teachers and students are challenged by the quality, accessibility and distribution of multimedia learning content, much of which has no central source in school environments. Spongelab provides thousands of carefully curated science education resources in a single location, all hosted online but rapidly and reliably accessible from any location and on a variety of platforms.

Third, educational content resources are often divorced from methods of distribution and tools for examining data about classroom engagement. Spongelab solves this by stitching together content with virtual classroom deployment and a detailed student evaluation feedback system.

How did you come up with the idea?

Prior to developing our online education platform, Spongelab specialized in creating fun and intelligent science learning games. For many of these games we tried integrating different teaching-based elements – such as quizzes and classroom analytic reports for how students were performing. We realized that the ideal way to implement our games in a classroom environment was to build a system that allowed teachers to pick and choose what content they preferred to teach with, and tie all of this together in a system that allowed them to present information to their students and to evaluate their success – while also allowing for students to explore and play with games on their own time

Educational technology is crucial to the development of new minds in science, and we think that what we’re doing for education at Spongelab is special – many companies make educational games, while others have created learning management systems and methods of tracking educational performance through metric data. Spongelab brings all of these features together in a system that works for science learning.

What’s your secret sauce?

Our “secret sauce” isn’t really such a secret – it’s the power of our completely web-based education platform. What a lot of users don’t see is our back-end administration system that we designed completely in-house, which allows for all of the complicated parts of Spongelab to fit together so smoothly online.

If there’s one thing that really makes Spongelab work, it’s the people who have come together to create our platform. Spongelab’s team is composed of researchers, educators, game designers, web developers, artists, animators and many more talented individuals. But that’s just our small team: it’s our users who help to make our global science community what it is. We’ve got thousands and thousands of educators and students across the world who help to build our platform by contributing multimedia content, spreading the word about Spongelab and beta-testing our games.

What’s one challenge you overcame in the startup process?

Spongelab’s site makes use of gamification, which in our case means that we have applied game-like elements to the navigation of our website in order to reward users for using more of our educational features and content. Originally, these credits could go towards unlocking premium content such as our educational games. However, we noticed that this became a barrier to some users – especially because the idea of spending credits on free games confused some users. We resolved this by making all of our content unlocked and free from the start – and have seen a huge pickup in users since then!

What’s next for Spongelab?

We’re really focusing on improving the way that our users interact with our platform. One of the most important features that is just around the corner is our website’s social networking layer. This will allow users to “follow” one another, share lesson structures, compete for high scores in games, customize their profile, and see what content other people have contributed to the site. We’re making Spongelab into a truly global community full of eager learners and science enthusiasts.