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Alight Learning

Page history last edited by Andy Pethan 12 years, 11 months ago

Alight Learning was an educational software startup created by the students in our house on our leave of absence during the 2008-2009 school year.  As a product and business, we didn't make it far enough to succeed.  Though we ended up making significant progress during the year, a variety of issues, including the incredible timesink of school, made it nearly impossible to continue.  However, as a learning experience in the middle of college, my time spent working on Alight was completely invaluable.  It easily shaped the rest of my college experience.  I came out of Alight with a stronger passion than ever to learn more about the educational system and learn how to develop software.  It also prepared me to one day more work on another startup.

 

Below is a brief summary of Alight in pictures and a short video.  For the marketing pitch of the product itself, check out the public website: http://www.alightlearning.com/.

 

Our 3 minute concept video, made halfway through the year.

 

 

   
The early stages of Alight Learning required a lot of ideation.  The hallways throughout our house were covered in post-it notes.

 

 

 
In order to earn money for the year, I spent the month of December working at my summer internship site near home, remotely connecting with the team each night.  By February, we had enough of a concept to create a YouTube video for a contest.  The video serves as a good overview of our guiding beliefs in creating the product behind Alight.

 

 

 
Starting in October, we visited a wide variety of schools to better understand the major problems faced by schools.  This visit to a public middle school in the Bronx gave us a closer look at how schools effectively used one-to-one laptop programs to change the learning environment.

 

 

To further define the product, we separated out the elements needed by students, teachers, parents, and administrators.  The inspiration for these diagrams came from a mix of needs/opportunities witnessed on our school visits and our own ideas for web-based solutions.

 

 

We found ourselves constantly presenting our idea at Olin, at conferences, and in front of educators.  We had no problem selling the general concept to others, but at this point, we still didn't have a real prototype to put to the test.

 

 


Things were not always happy at the house.  With a team of six people, each with different skills and passions, working together on a business without a leadership hierarchy, explosions are almost guaranteed.  Looking back at our multitude of ideas and struggle to build software, it felt like we had six people struggling to steer a car with no engine.  However, when we hit our lowest points, we all managed to talk through our differences.  We used note cards filled with each other's strengths and weaknesses, personality surveys of each other, and face to face conversations to reconcile our differences and move forward.

 

 

At the end of the school year, our application for free housing and business incubator space at both Babson and Olin allowed us to support a team of 7 to write code during the summer.  The software-heavy half of our team stayed on full-time and we recruited 4 interns from Olin to join us in the program.  Though the ramp-up was still slower than we wanted, the conversations started shifting from education ideas to SQL statements and Javascript bugs.

 

The final chapter in the story came after a semester of trying to move things forward while we were all back in school.  We had some buggy prototypes working, but we simply did not have enough gas to move the code base ahead as quickly as we could iterate ideas and test with users.  Perhaps many of the ideas incorporated in Alight will resurface in future projects, but only time will tell.

 

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