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“Like Facebook, but for learning” – eSchool News.Study English and Math Online Using Grockit.
Imagine if school was as fun as video games.
That’s what the company, Grockit, is aiming to do – and there’s something to learn for social entrepreneurs from their innovative mission to improve education.
The idea behind the test-prep startup firm Grockit is to make school more fun, so that kids will want to learn as much as they want to play their favorite video games.
Test-Prep Startup Grockit
The company has announced a partnership with the high-profile charter school network KIPP in an effort to apply social gaming principles to studying. Grockit has some high-profile backers, including Mark Pincus who is the founder of Zynga.
Like the famous Zynga game Farmville, Grockit incorporates social-gaming elements like badges, points and leaderboards, as well as live chat and rewards for social interaction to draw its users in and keep them hooked. The product of the KIPP-Grockit partnership will be a private network for SAT and ACT test prep, for use by students and teachers in three of KIPP’s largest California schools.
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The advantage provided by Grockit’s adaptive learning platform is that it allows for personalized instruction based on each user’s strengths, weaknesses and how they interact with the material.
The Business of Grockit Making Learning Fun
Grockit may be considered a startup firm, founded in 2007, but they are already a leader in the potentially huge market for learning platforms and services. Over 1 million people worldwide have already used Grockit to successfully prepare for tests, and even more have used Grockit via private network deployments at K-12 schools, online universities and virtual classrooms.
Grockit has created adaptive learning algorithms and up-front analysis that quickly identify and compensate for learning strengths and weaknesses. The founder of Grockit, Farb Nivi, is a former Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review and an academic director at Kaplan.
Key executives at Grockit previously worked at Google, Goldman Sachs, Sylvan Learning, Microsoft, IBM and distinguished academic institutions. The company has attracted lots of venture capital interest from angel investors like Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman, Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital Partners.
