 Good afternoon and thanks for joining us here again on Lakeable Science, you're on Think Tech Hawaii. It's a lovely Friday afternoon here in Honolulu and Ethan Allen, your host. With me today in Think Tech Studios is Dan Nash. Dan Nash is a co-founder of a very interesting group called Compendio. And he's a former high school math teacher, a published STEM researcher, a TEDx speaker, a man of many talents obviously. He's on tech accelerator programs, so he's done a lot of things, learned a lot of stuff and in his latest venture we're going to be talking about is this Compendio, which is sort of what, cutting edge ed tech, right? Yeah, and more. Well first of all, thank you for having me here today and I do appreciate the man of many talents comment but I would say that I still have a lot of things to learn and being able to speak with individuals like yourself or in the science field, it's always great just being able to have a conversation like this. So thanks again for having me on here. As long as we're all learning. Yeah, so I know there's a lot of different things we can talk about, where are you kind of thinking that we want to start this off? Well, maybe give us a little quick sense of the origin of how Compendio cannot, because you and your co-founder, Sean, were both sort of math teachers, and just sort of cranking away and sort of realizing that something wasn't quite right about your math teaching, right? Yeah, so our backstory, my co-founder and I, Sean O'Connor-Brill, we were both high school math teachers here and while we were teaching, math is definitely not everybody's favorite subject, especially in high school. A lot of the challenges we'd run into is we had students who were at grade level or years below grade level and traditional instruction methods just weren't really working. We couldn't meet those students where they were in classes of 25 to 30. So we kind of threw this challenge out there to ourselves back in 2010, 2011, and we wondered would it be possible to teach our students how to teach themselves? So using math as the practice vehicle, but we're focusing on teaching them the learning process. So we started playing around with some ideas back in 2010, trying out some strategies for the test prep program and had a little bit of success with it. So we took a summer in 2011 and put together some curriculum to try out where, you know, we'd get away from the front of the classroom and be more of a facilitator, a coach for our students. And, you know, we tried a lot of things that didn't work, but we had a little bit of success with it. We were able to move Sean's repeating algebra passing rate, which historically was 12%. So these are 16, 17-year-old students. They're on their way to high school and that isn't really the thing. He moved his passing rate from 12% up to 71%. And I was able to take my freshman algebra passing rate from a historical about 55% pass rate up to 87%. So, you know, these are just, you know, our classroom experiences. Yeah, but that's impressive. We were fortunate enough that the Hawaii State Teachers Association asked us to build some professional development around this concept for other teachers. So from 2012 to 2015, we were working with a little over 500 teachers and helping them build out some of these tools and, you know, getting a lot of feedback on what worked for them, what didn't work for them. So we had the joy of working with a lot of, like, K through 12 math, science, English, social studies for language teachers. And that helped us make the process even better. And through that, that's kind of where the idea of building software came was, you know, if we could automate some of these pieces that were a little more challenging or difficult to adopt for a teacher, you know, we could really scale this out to increase the impact that it could have. So, you know, it's a lot of different facets to the concept. And one of our biggest challenges, I think, over the past few years is explaining exactly what it is. Right, but it seems it's got two, at least my very brief acquaintance that I don't really own right into this maybe a week or so ago. But it seems it has sort of elements of concept mapping and metacognition, you know. So getting the concepts and also thinking about what you think about those concepts and how the one concept is related to the other concept. Yeah, there's a lot of that in there. Actually, I brought some slides with me to kind of give an example of what this looks like and, you know, kind of how it launched a bit of the building of the software. So, yeah, if we could go, I think, yeah, this is the second slide. So, let's say, actually, can we go back one slide just to make sure? Okay, cool. So, let's say, for example, before we jump into the slide that you saw with the KVAA and other examples, you know, you want to just learn about something. So, in this case, if we, you know, go on to the KVAA slide, you know, a teacher might give you a subject like, you know, hey, I want all 30 of my students to go out do some independent research, write a two-page paper, come back. You know, if I were to ask you to do a research paper, what would be the first thing you would do if you wanted to go learn about the whole KVAA or what a KVAA is? I'd probably go to Wikipedia. Wikipedia, you'd Google it. You know, 20, 30 years ago, you might go to a library or just find somebody to talk a story with them. So, the whole point of this first part of the example is, you know, formal education, you know, the brick and mortar classrooms and typically what this city in your seat listening to somebody looks like. Unfortunately, it doesn't really mirror or embody the natural learning process. Oh, exactly. So, you know, kind of what you said, most people would go out and do some research. So, if we go to the next slide, kind of see here, I don't have all my fancy animations here, but this works. So, as we talked about before, you're going to do a little bit of research, maybe Google, talk story, go to the library. And the whole thing you're doing here is just making observations. You're looking at something, you're thinking about it, reflecting on it, and then, you know, you're kind of going down that path. If you think about anything you learn, whether it's math in the classroom, how to ride a bike, how to cook, the whole time, all that you're doing is research. You're putting yourself in front of something to observe. You're making observations, and then you're using that as a foundation to make more and more and kind of adjust them. Linking content to pre-existing knowledge. Yeah, exactly. In a systematic way. And so the reason that we frame it this way when we work with teachers is to get people to step away from all of the jargon, all of the... I mean, there's lots of great research out there that goes into, like, what the learning process is. But if you just really simplify it, you're putting yourself in front of things to observe, and you're making observations. Now, the challenge with that is, you know, everybody kind of has their own internal systems that help them navigate that process. And what we found was our high-performing students had high literacy, they had very extensive vocabularies, and more importantly, when we asked them to draw their own concept map, their concept maps were actually very similar to ours. Our lower-performing students, down the sliding scale of the spectrum, less and less connections down to almost nothing at all. So the last little bit of that example will kind of go through these slides rather quickly. So as you're going through and learning about this, you're making those observations, and then another example we'd like to give if you want to move on to the next slide. So, you know, if the whole point of learning is you're putting yourself in front of things to make observations about, and we want to help our students learn how to teach themselves, our thing was we have to give them feedback on their thinking, not on if you get the problem right or wrong or not if you're copying notes down. So where do we see their thinking? In their notes. The challenge is, as a high school teacher, when you have 200 students and they're taking notes every day, you can see from the examples up here, how am I supposed to decipher those notes, understand them and give feedback, and then, you know, still do other things with my day. So this is kind of the challenge we're on into. So we looked into some other solutions. If you go to the next slide, on the left-hand side there's Cornell notes. Those have been around since like the 60s or 70s, I believe. Those are a step in the right direction. Lots of programs use those. Sort of a system optimization. Here for the teacher, the problem is, a lot of it's still copying notes down. The technology we have today, copying anything down is a waste of time unless it's rote memorization. So, you know, there's definitely some benefits. The students can write questions on the side, a summary on the bottom, but you can't really dig into too much of like, what are you thinking about this? And then there's some more, you know, kind of fun ones like nifty notes on the side, but neither of these were really cutting it for us. So we wondered, you know, how, what else is out there that we can use to help us organize student thinking? That's where the concept map came in. So what if we use a concept map for ticking notes? So this example you can see up here, there's ten steps on how to ride a bicycle from Wikipedia. You know, and a lot of things that I'm sure you've seen in your science education background is there's a lot of processes that they teach to people and typically they remember them, but then the challenge is, if it's an assessment question or a real world application, it's not going to be that nice process that you get to follow. You're going to have to understand the concepts to, you know, modify them. So if I were to ask you, I know it's kind of faint, sorry, what are some of the key words that stick out in those, those instructions to you? There's no right or wrong. We do this exercise with everybody. I can hardly read them here, but, but yeah, bicycle breaks, pedals I think. Yeah, so there's definitely some key language. So if I were to ask a few other imaginary people at this table, do you think they would pick out the same words? No. No, of course not. And that's one of the challenges of teaching, is if I'm giving you this knowledge and I don't know what you're pulling out of it, how am I supposed to give you feedback on it? So the next part, obviously, is you give people key vocabulary. Those are those anchor points in the brain that you're attaching meaning experiences to. But then taking it a step further, what we found is there's lots of cognitive science research from the 70s and 80s, that kind of shares, if you give somebody a graphic organizer, so instead of just a list of words, but you show them a concept map, for example, this is how I see them relating, you greatly reduce the cognitive load that's on that learner while they're, you know, looking at a concept, thinking about where it fits into the big picture. So this is kind of the reason why we think that a concept map in conjunction with the actual processes really helps accelerate that knowledge acquisition. So just to quickly run through this last part, remember the Kava'a words that were up there? I don't remember them. I want all 30 on the list now. So if we go to the next slide, you know, as a first-time learner, instead of having to just Google all those words, figure out what they mean, this was shared with us by one of our mentors, really amazing individuals who's helped us a lot since we started this, he is a very knowledgeable person in this field. If you look at the word sale and look at the word fish trap, if they're just in a list, you wouldn't really have too much of a sense of how they relate, but if you look at them through here, you can see that sale relates to the sheet, which is part of the Hall of Mat, which uses the same weaving as the fish trap. You've done no research, and yet you already have a lot more context to start, you know, really digesting these things. So this is kind of the little presentation that we give for the reason why concept maps are such a powerful thing for teaching. And then the last thing here are just some examples of what that looked like in our class. So we didn't have computers in our classroom, we would just build our own maps, get to the photocopier at 5.36 in the morning, and these were the students note-taking devices. So if you go to the last slide, you can actually see some examples from some teachers we worked with. So that's ninth grade algebra on the left, on the right, I think that's second or third grade. You can see the teachers provide a little more structure with the sticky notes and the cutouts. But that's the major shift that we did was don't copy notes off the board, I'm going to give you a structure, you just put your thinking down. And then I'm going to walk around and give you feedback on that thinking as opposed to saying this is right or wrong. I'd say that you're maybe kind of missing something there. Go back to this video or this example and make another observation. What would happen if you put this over here? Yeah, and so then we're giving them feedback on their thinking as opposed to giving them feedback on their math competency. And naturally, if you make somebody a more self-directed thinker, they're going to be able to tackle any type of content. You're raising their awareness of their own thinking process. Exactly. Making them more metacognitive then. And then you will then tend to learn to turn inward and think about how they're thinking and what they're thinking and why they're just thinking work here. But it didn't work here and why they then have to step to the side and take a different approach. You know, minus a few like actual learning disabilities that some individuals unfortunately are born with, most people are capable of developing this internal skill set. The problem is the way our school system is set up generally. It does not create a structure for somebody to practice these things, get feedback on these things. And so the whole software idea came from we would train teachers with this but as you could see, building those concept maps takes time. Right. And they would implement for the PD course. Right. But then the challenge was because it was such a behavior change, they would go right back to it. So we built the software to automate some of those. You mentioned time. We're at that time. We have to take a very short break. Okay. One minute break. You're here with us on likeable science. Dan Nash, the co-founder of Comprendio is with me here and we're having this fascinating conversation about his new educational technology to teach STEM. And we will be back in a minute. Hello, ladies and ladies. This is Angus McDuck here on Think Tech Hawaii. And I have my favorite show, Hibachi Talk with my good old buddies, Gordo, the Tengsara and Andrew, the security guy. Please join us every Monday. No, it's Friday, every Friday from 1 p.m. to 1.30 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii and you can also find us on YouTube. Hibachi Talk. Hello. Thank you for watching Think Tech Hawaii, Asia in Review. My name is Johnson Choi. My next show next month is on October 13th, 11 a.m. See you then. Bye-bye. And we're back here on likeable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host, Ethan Allen. With me today is Dan Nash, co-founder of Comprendio and we're having a great conversation about how Comprendio works and some of the sort of break-throughs that Dan and his co-founder, Sean, had figured out seeing sort of the inefficiencies of some of the traditional teaching methods helped kids become more self-directed learners, focusing more on sort of the processes of learning, helping the kids learn to think as well as think to learn and rather than just teaching them math, you know, and this was using sort of a concept-based general idea and giving the kids to pay more attention to what they were doing. So you had us up there where you were just starting to get the software going. Yeah. So as I was sharing before, we were working with teachers. I mean, we were very fortunate. People gave us an opportunity to put together some state-accredited PD courses here and do some work in Singapore and China. And what we found was, you know, when teachers were taking a course for credits, so they had to put together the curriculum, the portfolio, gather student evidence of implementation, they would see these impacts in the classroom, but the challenge was there's a lot of upfront work that goes into utilizing this method. There's a lot of behavior change if you're going to be walking around the classroom all day as opposed to being the sage on the stage. And those are really tough asks of somebody who already has very little time, which teachers do. So what we thought was back in 2014, what if we build web-based software, A, because the software company is more scalable than a consulting company, but B, that it automates those pieces that cause behavior change for teachers. So, you know, you could quickly embed content into a map with questions as opposed to having to do printouts every day in the morning. You know, one of the biggest challenges was a teacher walking around giving feedback on student thinking day in, day out gets a little exhausting. So what if we built text analysis into the platform so that you could use some basic AI and text analysis components to read the students' notes for you and report back to you. So, you know, kind of imagine you're teaching 30 students in the classroom and they all have this TA called comprendio. And that teaching assistant is, you know, kind of guiding them. It's giving them feedback based on the notes they're typing, based on the responses they have. And then all those TAs report back to you in a nice little dashboard. So, I mean, that's kind of the easiest way to describe it is we're redefining student note-taking into a true two-way communication so that, you know, a teacher doesn't have to wait weeks or a month to know which students get it, which ones don't. The more important the student, it doesn't have to wait weeks or months to get that feedback because they've forgotten long since whatever it was they did wrong or right. Exactly. I'm like, hey, I got the A or I got the F, you know. Yeah, we liken it almost to, you know, if you think about communication now, we all have, well, my cell phone's not in my pocket right now. But, you know, if you think about that path from, you know, the written language to written letters, you know, then like the Pony Express and other mail system shows up, and then eventually you get some Morris Code, telecommunication lines go down, and then eventually we move into satellites and cell phones. Unfortunately, I feel like the communication systems in education are still kind of back in the Pony Express days. Maybe landlines, when you look at some of the student reporting services like Edmodo, for example, you know, teachers can comment on grades on assignments or, like, overall behavior and that kind of stuff. But there's no real, like, instant communication about you're getting this or you're missing this or you need that help. It's not like text messages, you know? Yeah, no. There's some components of that in there, but we kind of see our platform helping bring this real instant two-way communication to the learning process. For example, I would use a biologist, a neuroscience guy, is it would make no sense, you know, your nervous system reacts fairly quickly, and you lay your hand down on a hot stove and you yank it back pretty quick because you feel that pain. And if instead, you know, the person would travel up like this and your fingers would be smoking before you'd get that message, right? Exactly. And instead, you've got to have a fast thing to make learning effective there, you know? Yeah. So, yeah, that feedback loop is the better of that. That's a perfect example of it. I mean, I'm guessing, you know, if you have had kids in school or you have friends that have kids in school, you know, one of the things that is challenging is if you were to call up your teacher right now and go, hey, what's my student getting? What are they not getting? It's borderline impossible for a teacher to tell you that. And it's not their fault. They just don't have the tools and the resources and structure at their disposal to quickly go, oh, they need help on this concept, this concept. They're doing well here, here, here outside of, hey, they're turning in their homework and they're doing okay on tests. Yeah, they're reading well and not doing so good in math. Yeah. And then what do you do with that? I mean, it's not very prescriptive. Right. So, this sounds, it's almost a surgical precision strike into the thought process. Yeah, fascinating, fascinating stuff. And so, you've got this now, software up running. I've seen you have a website there. I actually went on, was trying to sign up. Yeah, you signed up for an account. Yeah, thanks for checking it out. And, but so basically our teacher is more or less now, is more or less open to people. Do any teachers come on and just start playing with it and using it or do you train them first or what? It's pretty open. What we did last year initially, one of our big challenges was because we were first time entrepreneurs and I mean, my background is math and science research. I know a little bit about computer programming, but we didn't have any real like hardcore software development skills. So, we were contracting out from 2014 to 2015, our development with some close friends who run a web app development company here. And the first year was just like, how do we take this and put it onto a computer because there's so many different facets that were like, do we include that? Do we not? And we were, we were really fortunate that those professional development courses we were running, we were able to get feedback from teachers every single weekend on, this part's good, this is a barrier, I don't like this, my students don't like this. So, last year we had an open beta, you know, a few hundred teachers tried it but the uses were all over the place, like some once a week, some once a month, some very sporadically. So, that helped us kind of pin down the main value proposition that teachers were centering around, which was this real-time communication feedback and personalized feedback for the students. And then this year we've transitioned into doing more controlled pilots. So, instead of just allowing teachers to use it how they want, we're getting groups of about five to ten teachers and running them through about a six-week cycle where we help them build some initial starter kits, they implement, we talk with them and their students once a week, and then we take that feedback on what's working and what's not, and we put together a development scope for our software developers. And then do a little bit of A-B testing. So, we're kind of in the middle of that. Teachers can go on and sign up. So, these groups of teachers are then, they sort of, then they're cohorts or they all sort of talk to each other and learn together or they just sort of happen to be six teachers or randomly around who happen to just be giving you data more or less at the same time. Definitely more of the latter. We have teachers from, you know, the East Coast, California, as well as here that are using it. Ones that do work together in a cohort, we do kind of encourage that conversation because it helps build that... I would think that social learning aspect could be a very powerful... So, we're working on trying to build a community around the product and not just like, oh, hey, I'm a teacher who uses this, but finding ways to connect teachers because then it's a lot more powerful. So, there's a little bit of a mix and match. Some teachers are, you know, kind of flying solo at their school piloting it for us. Others have, you know, one or two other teachers they're working with. So, yeah, I mean, our main thing is we really just want to make sure that the tool is delivering the value that it needs in the classroom because the worst thing is if you go to sell to a school and you have this tool that's supposed to be great for teachers, a lot of ed tech that's built, unfortunately, was built by people who are never in the classroom. They're looking at it from the learner perspective and not the teacher perspective. And teachers have no time to implement new things unless you're going to take something off their plate. So, that's what we're using these pilots this year is to really make sure we have a tool that's going to be, you know, a rock star in the classroom. So, then, you know, if we do go to sell to schools and districts in the future, there's not this typical process which is happening at ed tech a lot. They get aggressive with sales. And then two or three years later, the principal's like, wait, why am I paying all this money for something none of my teachers are using? And it's done. In education, you get one red X. So, we're just going slow to eventually go fast down the road. Now, interesting, interesting, because you could see this being used by a principal and their teachers as a learning tool to help the whole school learn from professional players, whatever it is they need to learn. And then it really becomes embedded in the teacher's mind. So, hey, this is a tool I'm using to improve my own learning. So, let's use it with the kids, too. Yeah, there's actually a principal that we're working with right now to help him use the tool for alignment for his leadership teams at the school. So, sharing with you before, we were fortunate that through a partnered consulting firm, the energy industry, we had a Fortune 500 company try it out last year. So, that's a great proof point, but a lot of feedback from our mentors is, education is your sweet spot right now. Have that as a beachhead. And we're really trying to just do some of that exploratory work while refining the platform to find out what are those channels outside of the typical classroom that we're going to be able to help impact as well. Yeah, yeah. Because it seems like, again, you could apply this to sort of the soft skills just as well as academic content, and that's critical stuff for a kid's success. I mean, kids can be doing as well in school as they want, but if they don't know how to sort of work in a group and talk to each other and listen to one another and be... Exactly. You know, get along with their peers. They're not going to do very well in the workplace, ultimately. Yeah, you can have amazing ideas. If you can't communicate them, what's the point? Hey, well, this conversation clearly could go on and on for the next hour or an hour or an hour, but we have only one minute left, so... Okay. Do you have any last parting thoughts you want to share with our viewers? I think the main thing that, you know, I, myself and my co-founder are really passionate about is, you know, there's a lot of challenges education, especially with students who come from, you know, socioeconomic disadvantaged backgrounds. And, you know, a lot of educational technology is looking to leave the teacher out of the picture, where what we see is when you ask somebody what made the biggest difference in your education, they're going to tell you the name of a teacher. Not of a piece of software, not of some amazing, like, you know, field trips are great, but it's a teacher. It's the person who makes the difference. So we're just really passionate about making sure that we build tools that help turn every teacher a student has into that great teacher that we all kind of remember growing up. So... That's kind of our mission, and, you know, there's a lot of long ways to go, but we feel positive we're going to get there. You see, Mike, you're on the right track. Hey, that's fascinating. I look forward to many more conversations to hear about it. Thank you so much for coming on Likeable Science and sharing your Likeable Science learning here. Thank you so much for the time. It was a great experience. Aloha. Thanks. And I hope you'll join us again next week. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science. We'll be right afternoon at 2.