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Je l'ai lit et je trouve que allons-y est pareil à Escipi pour l'échange d'idées entre français et anglais et ça se termine ma poésie merci!

Ivana, as I wrote to Lane, please don't post a review until you've read the Venture Pitch. The purpose of the elevator pitch isn't to explain the project, it's to get you to read the the Venture Pitch. Students actually NEVER communicate with each other on school subjects in social media while being monitored by their teachers, and as such this is not just "another platform". @cbrumwell, your concerns are well-founded, and these are things I will have to answer going forward if I choose to really pursue this. Getting students to use it would have to come partly from the teacher, i.e. "60% of your geography mark this term comes from the interactions I see from you on Escipi". If government partners don't buy-in, this will never happen. It rests on some state or provincial government willing to take the risk to try this, in order to achieve the promise of 21st century ed.

Sorry, you did mention Class Dojo, etc. but those are for classroom management, rather than gaming.

Hi Danielle, The main question I have, is what exactly these "pre-designed challenges and competitions" will look like. Having an avatar and a leaderboard won't do much if the games aren't fun, and you say "even 30%" like that will be easy to achieve, but there are thousands of games and other forms of online edutainment out there already to compete with, many of them free. You didn't mention competition at all. The avatar aspect reminded me of Bitstrips for schools, and that site is also open to any curriculum subject area, although making comics isn't really a game. Although having a game designer like Di Stefano on your team seems to indicate that you are capable of designing good games, I think your entire proposition rests on how good they are, and there is no mention of that here. If the games aren't fun, students will not be MotivatEd.

I think the fact that your venture goes along with a well-established product like Kurzweil makes it very feasible but I have some apprehension about the idea of teaching reading on an iPhone. I don't really enjoy trying to read on a tiny screen, so I don't think a student who struggles with reading would either. IPads are used far more in education. Is there already an app for them? I also don't see many iPhones among my students until about the 6th or 7th grade, so I don't know how effective this would be for younger learners.

Lane, you'd have to read the Venture Pitch to understand it; it is far too complex to explain in a 1-minute pitch. Danielle, if students can remember their usernames and passwords they can remember Escipi, and they could also bookmark it. As I mentioned, there are no similar systems so there is nothing to compare to. By "student retention", do you mean staying in school, or remembering information? Either way, I'm being real here and there's nothing like Escipi currently in existence, so I won't just pull facts, figures, or prices out of thin air. I mentioned in the pitch "After implementation, it must be studied for efficacy. This study would involve qualitative data drawn from teacher and student testimonials, and quantitative data in the form of comparative test scores". If students and teachers like it and their test scores improve, sending that information to other jurisdictions is the marketing strategy. Let's say P.E.I. signs on and their test scores increase, then I'd market these results to other provinces and states. That is the growth strategy. Also clearly stated is the fact that there is no team, just me and my idea, and there is no revenue model because the purpose is not to make money. The return on investment, as stated, will be "a dynamic, flexible, tech-savvy workforce" 10 to 20 years from now.

Thanks for the clarification, Lane. I thought this was geared more for English than for science. So, in other words, you might have "fibula" in one version and "leg bone" in another?

Hi Tina, I feel like I saw sheet music paper that plays notes when you write them in some sci-fi story once, maybe an old episode of Star Trek or something. Very futuristic! While I see the appeal in Nano Interactive Paper, I have a couple of concerns. Could it really be as thin as real paper or would it be more like the thickness of a plastic placemat (which is how the circuit board in your pitch seems to be)? If it's that thin, it could rip, and as we've seen with the latest incarnation of Canadian currency, that which claims to be indestructible really isn't so. My other concern is your pain point. While there is the case of your son, and some of our colleagues below have echoed your concerns, I've never noticed this problem in my 12 years of teaching. Of course, some kids have bad handwriting, but that has always been the case and I don't know if this can be blamed on digital technology. I used to teach ESL to Koreans who were always on devices, yet had beautiful printing skills. I don't teach high school, though, so I suppose if they are typing all the time in high school this could be the case, but could you back up this claim with any solid research?

Thanks Maureen, Yes, it would have both static content and dynamic interactions. I think it's a good suggestion to get a foot in the door by starting it more simply with, say, 2nd language learning. Caleb, do you work in a publicly-funded school? I came up with that pitch after visiting a 1940s sort-of theme park in Nova Scotia this summer where (as I said in the pitch), I found that the classroom really wasn't much different from any I've seen in about 40 schools where I've either supplied or taught full-time in the Toronto District School Board, the largest school board in Canada with over 200,000 students. There are starting to be mobile labs, but like the desktop computer labs, they're usually housed in the library and rarely accessed by students. I'd say 1 in 20 classes has a Smart Board or Promethean Board. The dusty computers in the corner are literally that, heavy desktops with cathode ray tube monitors refurbished over and over since the 80s or 90s. Like most public school boards, the TDSB is cash-strapped. If there's any disingenuousness in my pitch, it would be the fact that I purposely avoided fair-use images of classes that had desks together in groups, and opted instead for the desks in pairs to go with the picture of the century-old classroom, even though about 1/2 the classes I've worked in do have the more student-centred set up.

Natalie, it is a great name and I love that you have a personal connection to the product. I hadn't heard the term "social capital" before, but it makes a lot of sense that it would be tied to academic success. I liked this: "I asked myself if students (or investors) might misinterpret this app as being contributory to further alienation and stigmatization of post-secondary students with disabilities" in your reflection; I think the fact that you've specifically envisioned it for students without disabilities avoids this issue. As others have mentioned, you didn't give financial information, but in my Venture Pitch too, I found it difficult to just make up numbers (I'm not a software developer so I have no idea what one would charge or how complicated it might be to develop, and I assume that even a software developer would have a hard time giving me a quote with the probability of cost overruns when dipping into such unchartered territory) for a project that I'm actually serious about and is close to my heart. Since this is all hypothetical anyway, I'll invest any amount that you might come up with!