#needfinding

Propuesta de Rediseño del Servicio de Préstamo de Bicicletas Públicas BikeSantiago

This past week, we visited AltSchool, a startup school in SF where SEL is definitely a priority. Notes from our visit can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xHKDgUju7Vv5lNtRTGM3IQbIW-N_FqLPsPhh2HJ9xhY/edit

Here are some key takeaways: 

Emotionally intelligent teachers can expedite learning a lot. We’ve talked a lot about this with our earlier visits, but we really saw the effects of this in AltSchool. AltSchool has the culture (such as supervised group conversation with teachers in which students can express their feelings, and teachers open and honest about their emotions) where students are openly encouraged and do  express their feelings. This offloading of emotions allows students to focus on learning emotions, rather than trying to offload emotions. Therefore, AltSchool is very effective at what it does. 

The students we met were super adept with technology. This surprised us (although not really, given Zuck’s investment in AltSchool), and we were surprised at how much technology was integrated into everyday learning (although not with SEL)  

AltSchool’s model of teaching mostly fixated around using patterns that allowed students to express their feelings, such as “I feel X because Y and I need Z.” These patterns were really useful, and the fact that teachers were using them made them even more effective! 

Team Emoti went into Alpha Charter Schools today to gain a better understanding of the school system there and how we can work with the students there. We started off by speaking with Greg Callaham, who’s the director of SEL, then we spoke with Jonathan, one of the SEL teachers at Alpha, and then we observed the PLT Field and Lab classes (field classes are where kids apply their SEL skills in action via physical activities, while lab classes are where kids learn about emotions and emotional learning). It was an eye-opening experience, and we definitely learned a lot, and here’s the notes that we took here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yzbIANAtyuKxUAW6I5ld0aoqs71fzKaxq0Z1A_vGQ7M/edit

Some key insights: 

Alpha is a unique school for us to work with, given the demographics of the students (Alpha is mostly Hispanic/Latino and low-income/first-gen). It’s also interesting given that race and gender tends to be an issue, given that most instructors tend to White/East Asian which isn’t representative of the student population, and Mr. Callaham also talked about how effectiveness of SEL can be hindered by the gender of the person doing the instruction. 

We have to be really careful about what we end up building, given that a lot of the students are dealing with issues like single-parents, drugs, etc. and are trauma-prone. In fact, Mr. Callaham told us to focus on stress specifically as a good first step. 

Effectiveness of SEL definitely depends on the relationships that teachers have with their students, and teachers often don’t have the bandwidth to give personalized attention given the large classroom size. We saw this from teachers and saw it in practice when we saw teachers in action. We saw some classrooms where students were acting up, and others in which students were extremely calm and attentive/engaged. 

 Across administrators and teachers, we noticed that they all struggled to integrate SEL within existing curriculum, or to make it more real-world applicable (and less abstract). They also struggled to provide students space to practice these skills, and we think Emoti can definitely bridge this pain point. Regardless of this, when we talked to students, we were definitely impressed by how mature students were, and how they had no trouble talking to adults.

We also found that students were excited by technology, and want more of it. So does Emoti :)

Finally, instruction at Alpha was very focused on practical skills rather than actual emotional learning, and therefore we think Emoti can definitely fill a gap here as well. 

Team Emoti is back with some fresh off the press updates. Here we go! (pictures from visits upcoming) 

We visited the Bay Area Children’s Association (BACA) today and spoke with their director, Dr. Tom Tarshis, who’s a trained psychiatrist. BACA is essentially a clinic for children with behavioral issues/mental disorders to come in and get treatment. One of the programs they use is called the “Minecraft social skills group” in which the computer game Minecraft is used to teach social skills to kids. Very relevant to our project, so we went and visited them! Here are some of the major insights we gathered: (notes from our visit can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ku1Fa3o6mYQxDWBO0P-uZVJBColp_-RMnpdeuCahi4w/edit)  

Group work is key, and whatever we do is definitely going to require a multiplayer aspect. 1-on-1 coaching only works to a certain extent, and to have a true impact, we need to include the multiplayer aspect

We really need to think of how we’re going to measure whether our product is effective in teaching emotion. Dr. Tarshis recommended some industry practices, but clearly we need to think more about this. 

Dr. Tarshis also gave us some recommendation regarding our ML classifier, and how we can make our classifier super generic to get high accuracy. He also gave us some suggestions on how we can better frame our rapid prototyping next. 

We can cross apply some results from college students in regards to our product to kids

We really need the software to be instructional. At BACA they have trained therapists/psychiatrist go and teach kids social skills and techniques, but in schools it’s a complete wildgame. Therefore, our software definitely needs to think through and take this into account. 

We also went into the Synapse School this morning and did some shadowing. We met with one of the SEL teachers, who showed us around and let us observe his classroom. We are planning a followup conversation with him to go over some stuff we had observed, but notes from our observations can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/157lSyFwn_LPUDcd-7vdURlyaGT-Z0lYA65KtoiE-V04/edit 

Some high level points: 

Not sure if Emoti is really applicable for use with children. We still need to define the exact USE of our product, rather than focus on its technology. Why would kids want to use our product? Right now the use case still seems very unclear. To add on: it seems that Emoti doesn't fill an immediate need at Synapse - it may not be the right tool for an audience that already has years of SEL training under their belt. I think the bigger takeaway is that we need to observe a school that isn't SEL centric to get a better idea of how Emoti might help. Also, the shadowing really helped us understand how we can integrate the teacher-aspect to Emoti

We see why Robin emphasized empathy so much. Much of SEL curriculum seemed to revolve around the kids' ability to envision others' circumstances

Overall super impressed with the students - seemed very mature and 'self-aware' for their age. they had some awesome discussions that made us go 'awww'.

Emoti has been extremely busy this week! Here are some high level updates from us: 

We are hard at work doing needfinding! We’ve scheduled visits with 4 schools already, the Bay Area Children’s Association, and are also in talks with a couple other schools/nailing down dates to visit. More schools have also started reaching out to us, and we’re excited to see where things go with them, find our updated tracker here. Things are finally moving along and Emoti is loving it! 

We got Asana- yay! We’re hoping it will make us more productive and help us better visualize our progress. 

We also went through and created an engineering roadmap for the rest of the quarter (tasks have been assigned on Asana). Essentially, Matt and Vinamrata are handling the machine learning classifier, and Stephen and Steve are taking ownership of creating the VR experience for the demo, as well as creating the UE4 plugin to connect the wearable piece with the VR demo piece. 

re: ML classifier, Vinamrata and Matt finished hand labeling the data (which you can find here) and have also done some reachouts to professors who’ve done research in this area to see if there’s any insights they can give us. Additionally, they’ve also started building a preliminary version of the classifier. Expect some more updates soon! 

re: VR demo, Stephen and Steve sat down, brainstormed, and finalized on an idea for the demo. You can find the description here, and we’ve reached out to one of our liaisons to see if they can help us find the content for this demo (which would unblock us and help us start storyboarding and building the demo)

re: Pink Bagel assignment, we sat down and came up with our Pink Bagel experiment. Essentially, we’ll be asking the question of which emotions we should build first, and use different text copy on the ad to get people to click on our landing page. We’ll be measuring lead gen (i.e. how many people actually clicked on the ad) as well as customer conversion (email addresses left by folks). We’ll also be targeting teachers and educators, and using FB ads. Here’s the sample landing page that we’ve created so far: http://emoti.squarespace.com/

We’re also working with Empatica on getting an additional discount on our wearable, and also attended the SF VR conference this weekend! It was great team bonding, we got to try out more VR demos built by others, and met some other startups (especially BinaryVR) that are doing work with emotions and VR, and exchanged contact info. Great networking :)