Founder Sahitya Senapathy, 17, of Dallas Texas
Sahitya Senapathy, 17, of Dallas Texas, is one of this year’s competitors in the i.Invest National Youth Business Competition. His company, Studiously, is an EdTech studying platform that promotes learning over memorization through artificial intelligence and collaboration.
Tell us about your business.
Studiously is a collaborative learning platform harnessing cutting-edge artificial intelligence to enable students to understand rather than memorize. Studiously thereby boosts learners’ subject matter mastery, critical thinking, problem solving, and interpersonal skills. Through Studiously’s proprietary and versatile machine learning technology, students can access novel AI-generated questions on any topic. Such use of computational intelligence is unprecedented in the EdTech world and will revolutionize learning.
What inspired the creation of Studiously?
Entering junior year after an academically successful year using Quizlet (a web-based/mobile study and learning app) for every assignment I received sophomore year, I was surprised to find that school education had transitioned to concepts that would require me to exercise understanding rather than memorization. My fellow classmates were also caught unaware, just like thousands of students across the country, because we fell prey to believing that receiving good grades meant we understood the material. When I had to take a vocabulary quiz that no longer required me to mindlessly list the definition of words but to eloquently weld sentences to demonstrate my linguistic competency, I realized that the world rewards skills like critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration.
Deciding to research the issue, I found widespread and well-documented statistics about today’s students’ unpreparedness for the workforce. Studies from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and Achieve, have found that: 1 in 6 students cannot solve problems requiring critical thinking or in unfamiliar scenarios; less than 1 in 5 students from low-income families use abstract thinking in problem-solving; and, 4 in 5 employers say that recent high school graduates aren’t as prepared for careers as is expected. These facts are not only alarming, but also a wake-up call about the necessity for deeper learning among students globally.
How will Studiously impact the world?
Studiously will shift education away from rote-memorization and instead promote collaboration and understanding among the country’s future workforce. Thus, Studiously prepares students to lead, innovate, and discover. Studiously focuses on the power of collaboration by advancing studying as a collective success, leading to more engaged and community-minded members of society.
Not only will Studiously prepare today’s students to tackle the challenges of tomorrow, it will democratize studying materials to redress educational inequity by providing easy access to quality learning for all.
Studiously also provides teachers and schools with a centralized classroom management tool—enabling homework assignment, classroom discussion, and teacher-student communication—thus promising a better educational experience for all involved in the learning process.
What are the next steps for Studiously?
Studiously will commercialize after conducting beta-testing with partner schools. Studiously is seeking to raise $70,000 for beta testing and to garner advanced artificial intelligence data and capabilities. To learn more about Studiously, check out: http://www.studiously.io.
To stay up to date with Studiously and their progress in the i.Invest Competition, sign up for our newsletter at www.i-investcompetition.com. To provide support as a mentor or investor, email info@i-investcompetition.com.
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