It can be hard for struggling students to recognize they have a problem, let alone communicate those problems with teachers.
Happy, a new edtech startup born out of the Startup Weekend EDU hackathon in Denver, uses easy-to-read dashboards and artificial intelligence to make it easy for teachers to spot students who may need a little extra help.
Co-founder Ron Itelman said the idea behind Happy came about after learning that emotional intelligence, which includes a person’s social awareness and relationship skills, is vital to an individual’s future outlook.
“Kids are acting up," Itelman said. "Instead of being reactive and giving them demerits and getting them in trouble, what we're focused on is being proactive, helping kids before they get into that disruptive state. The entire classroom benefits because teachers aren't being disciplinarians and teachers are actually focused on teaching.”
Happy won the audience choice award at the hackathon earlier this month, where Itelman and co-founder Alex Silverman showed off a prototype dashboard teachers can use to track their classes.
While the company isn’t ready to show off the dashboard publicly, Itelman said it gives teachers and school administrators real-time feedback on students’ emotional intelligence.
The dashboard is created with data from a number of sources, including directly from the students themselves. But the real power behind Happy comes from parsing that data and making it easy to spot students who are struggling to keep up. The company is even exploring how artificial intelligence can improve predictions.
And this isn’t Itelman’s first startup; he also founded the now-defunct JAMR, which let users create audiovisual mashups. However, Itelman said he gets more satisfaction out of Happy.
“Happy feels so much more important,” he said. “It's so rewarding to work on. It feels like I'm doing good for society.”
Happy is still in the early stages of development. Itelman is leading the technical side, while Silverman is working on building relationships with educators. However, Itelman is already looking for a node.js/express.js trainer to help get the bootstrapped team up to speed for a minimum viable product run in October. After testing the dashboard, Itelman plans to raise money to fully build out the project.
Images via Shutterstock/featured company.
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