00:01.25

Dipesh Jain 

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Tech In EdTech, where we discuss technology that impacts education and makes it accessible for everyone. Today's guest is Vadim Polikov. Vadim is the CEO of Legends of Learning, a Maryland-based company focusing on game-based learning to advance American education. Vadim, welcome to the show.

00:22.69

Vadim Polikov

Thank you. It's great to be here.

00:25.09

Dipesh Jain 

Thanks, Vadim. I've heard about Legends of Learning, a lot of conferences that I go to. So it's great to be meeting you over this podcast, and would love to learn a little bit more about you. Before you get into details, can you share with the audience your background, what you do, and what Legends of Learning does?

00:41.90

Vadim Polikov

Sure. So I joined Legends of Learning. I started Legends of Learning about 10 years ago. I saw a real opportunity to leverage the power of games to engage students into learning more deeply, especially today we cover math and science. So that's something that I've always thought, wouldn't it be great if we could get kids excited about math and science? And games are just this incredible way of engaging students. So I've had a career as an entrepreneur with businesses in other industries. And I just, I grew up playing games like Civilization and SimCity, and I found myself reading history books for fun. And I kind of traced it back to those video games and decided this is a great way to teach students. Why isn't it being used more often in the classroom? And so decided to start Legends of Learning as a result.

01:49.37

Dipesh Jain 

That's great. And you are the second founder I heard today who played Civilization as the game when they were young. You know who's the other one?

01:59.55

Vadim Polikov

Is it Elon Musk?

02:03.69

Dipesh Jain 

No, you're close. It's Mark Zuckerberg.

02:05.63

Vadim Polikov

Oh, there you go.

02:05.61

Dipesh Jain 

So I was just I was listening to this podcast where they discussed his background, and as again, Civilization was mentioned there. So very interesting. So, Vadim, I have a two-year-old and a six-year-old, and one of the things that my six-year-old loves is he loves learning when it is game-based. So it's one of those things which I feel that in today's day and age, when engagement is a real challenge, like getting students engaged on digital learning, I think game-based learning is really one of the key ways to do that. It does offer a fresh approach. So when you look back you know on the perspective of role of perspective of game-based learning, how does that change? Like you know, when you started this, I think you mentioned 10 years ago, from there to now, how has the role changed? What were the problems you were tackling back then? What are the problems that you're tackling today?

03:04.23

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, I think that's right. Things have changed over time over the last 10 years. Back when I was starting Legends of Learning, there were there was a lot of excitement about game-based learning, but it wasn't really being used in the classroom. And I started looking into it for why that would be the case. And I found that there were a lot of people working on very large, impressive, expensive games that taught specific topics or specific areas of the curriculum. And so imagine a game like Civilization or a game like SimCity where Millions of dollars have been put into the development, and it teaches you world history or it teaches how to build a city.

And there's those games are amazing for getting kids excited about learning in general. But they're not ever going to be used in the classroom. And that's that was my big frustration that I thought that Legends of Learning could solve.

Because in the classroom, you need a very different kind of game. You need a game that, number one, teaches the specific standards that teachers are required to cover as part of the curriculum. And as good of a game as Civilization is, it doesn't cover specific time periods or specific parts of history, or specific information about civilization. It’s just a fun game to kind of get you excited about world-building and civilizations.

So you need to, number one, cover the curriculum that the teacher has to teach. Number two, a game has to fit within a class period or within a portion of a class period. So again, taking a great game like Civilization as an example, that game takes dozens and dozens of hours to play, and no teacher is gonna devote many, many class periods to having their kids play a single game. There's just too little class time available and too much to cover in order to do that. So, games that teach really need to be narrowly focused and be able to be play it in a 10 to 20 minute period inside of a classroom. So that's number two. Number three, games need to work on the devices that teachers actually have access to. Back when we were starting, most classrooms, maybe they had a Chromebook card or an iPad card that was available in the school.

But no matter what, the computers that were available to them were really low-end computers. And that's true still today. So, games like Civilization, I'll keep using it as an example because lots of people know it, and it clearly does not fit into education. It doesn't work on the low-end Chromebooks that we have access to. So, games have to work with the technology that's available in classrooms. And then number four, games really need to fit what the teacher’s needs in terms of integration with their learning management systems, the ability to see data, the ability to assign assignments to specific students, and to kind of manage the classroom. So that's what we set out to solve when we first started Legends of Learning.

And I think a lot of those have remained, remain true that the very large, very expensive games have fallen off by the wayside over the last 10 years. And the game-based solutions that are available today are the ones that have survived till today, are the ones that do fit into the classroom, that do cover specific areas of the curriculum and that do allow a teacher to use the computers in the class that are available to him or her and to manage the class appropriately. So, it's a lot of those early hypotheses were borne out, and now kind of the companies that have survived and thrived over the last 10 years have really taken advantage of those parts of what makes a great learning game possible in K-12.

07:06.68

Dipesh Jain 

Great. So what you're saying is it has to fit within the class schedule. I think that was a big one that I was, you know, I didn't really think about, but it makes so much sense. It has to fit within that duration. It has to be aligned to standards. And more importantly, it has to empower teaching because then teachers can look at the data and say, How is the student engaging? So it makes a lot of sense. One question that we, and one common confusion that people have, is game-based learning versus gamifying learning. So these are two separate things I know, but would love to hear from you in terms of what are the key differences are between game-based learning and gamifying learning, and what is the similarity?

07:50.69

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, this is the key differentiator that we deal with on a regular basis. And it is so important to understand both as a, when we talk to districts and when we talk to teachers, and we interact with parents and with other edtech companies, I think, when a lot of people think of gamification or game-based learning. They lump them together, and I don't blame them. It's complicated to try to separate them out, but they actually do serve two totally different roles. Gamification is adding game elements to non-game materials. So think leaderboards, badges, points, a game that has nothing to do with the type of learning that you're delivering.

08:42.27

Vadim Polikov

My favorite example is, you know, let's say you build a game where Mario's running across the screen, he jumps, jumps, jumps, and then a question pops up about ecosystems, you know, in science.

08:57.66

Vadim Polikov

And obviously, Mario has nothing to do with the ecosystem question. The question is there to review ecosystems, or it can be ecosystems, it could be fractions, or it could be any number of things, right? But it has nothing to do with the surrounding game. And in that sense, the game is there to motivate the student to perform a task that they don't really want to perform. So gamification serves the role of a kind of motivation, especially around assessment, or quick quizzes, or worksheets. And to a lot to a large extent, gamification, because it's so commonly found, that's what people think of when they think of game-based learning. And game-based learning tends to get a negative view of what it can accomplish because that's what you oftentimes see. And I'm not saying there's gamification is bad. In fact, we have gamification elements on our platform. We have parts of the platform that are gamified quizzes. So there's a real need for gamifying things that are boring or tedious. But that's not the only option available. The other option is game-based learning. And that's where you're learning through gameplay. So the gameplay is directly related to the curriculum that you're providing. My favorite example is, you know, you're managing a pizza shop and the customers need to figure out what fraction of the pizza they're ordering. And so you have to decide what fraction of the pizza to deliver to them. And so in the process of cutting up pizzas, you're learning about fractions, and the fraction part is related to the gameplay. It's related to the pizza. And if you can't figure out the fractions, you can't serve the customers in your pizza shop. So, a good game-based learning solution will both engage the player and motivate them to play because they're playing a game, and also teach something deeper and more immersive in the same way. And we, it's very, I would say it's actually pretty easy to gamify things, although it's pretty easy to gamify them poorly. But it's very hard to do game-based learning at scale, which is really what is unique about Legends of Learning is that we were able to solve the game-based learning at scale.

The reason why it's difficult to do at scale is because every single part of the curriculum needs a unique learning game design associated with it, because that pizza shop just does not work for photosynthesis. It only works for fractions. So you can't just recreate that pizza game. Whereas the Mario game doesn't really matter what question pops up. Gamification is a much lower cost to build. And so there's a very big difference both in terms of how people view gamification and game-based learning, what it's used for, and how easy it is to actually deliver.

12:19.63

Dipesh Jain 

This is super helpful. So when I look at it, I mean, I think about it, just I'll give you an example. What gamification to me seems like covering broccoli and chocolate and offering that to a kid, saying that this is chocolate and very soon they figure out it's not, versus what we are trying to do with our kid today is helping him, like take working with him to help him cook the broccoli in a manner that he wants to, so that he eventually enjoys the fruit of his labor. So again, a bad example maybe, but I think what you’re saying is rather than just making it a wrapper, infuse the element of play within learning itself.

13:00.32

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, so the chocolate-covered broccoli metaphor has been around for a while, there's definitely some truth to it. I think it comes from a place of wanting to make the very best learning game possible. And for those researchers or companies that are spending enormous amounts of time and effort to make a very finely crafted learning experience that's game-based, it's very frustrating to see somebody build a game that has nothing to do with the learning experience and be very successful at it.

And so, from a researcher perspective or from a game developer perspective, especially a game-based learning perspective, you don't really like chocolate-covered broccoli. But from our perspective, which is, you know, we have to deal with the realities of the market. And the realities of the market is that there's sometimes there's a need for gamification and sometimes there's a need for game-based learning. And, teachers are very good at their jobs, and they know the difference; they know when to do one and when to do the other.

You know, when you have five minutes left at the end of the class and you just want a gamified quiz, and you want to throw up a Kahoot or a Blukit and get your kids excited and reinforce something that you just learned.

I think that's a great example of gamification done well. But if you want to, let's say, introduce a complicated concept that is very difficult to introduce or is very boring, typically for students, you may want to choose one of the learning games on Legends of Learning and really have those students build out the ecosystem of Africa to really understand how things are all connected. And so, I think that there's a place for both. And I think teachers tend to need both gamification and game-based learning. Administrators, on the other hand, they’re don't really they're not willing to pay for gamification for good reason. It's not part of the curriculum. It's just kind of a nice way to practice. And so we sell to the school districts and what we sell to the school district is a game-based learning curriculum that is rigorous, and each game teaches a very narrow part of the curriculum through game-based learning. So, you know, you need both. You really need both, and teachers need both as well.

15:45.93

Dipesh Jain 

Yep, that absolutely makes sense. So let's dive into the game-based learning a little bit more. What are the key essentials you consider when but you're building a game-based system? Looking at the requirements of teachers, students, what are some of the key essentials you would consider when building a game-based learning system?

16:07.02

Vadim Polikov

Well, so game-based learning, I mentioned previously, the real challenge is that it's very expensive to make a high-quality game, which is why most solutions in education, most edtech, is either text-based or video-based, because games are just very expensive. So, somehow, you have to solve the problem of high-quality game-based learning at scale. The way that we solve that problem is we work with a large number of third-party game studios who are experts at building fun games. And then we work with them to make sure that they teach a narrow part of the curriculum very effectively. So on our platform. We've worked with over 500 different studios, and those different studios have built over 2000 unique games that cover the full curriculum, the full scope and sequence for K through 8 Math and Science. In fact, each standard has multiple games that cover that standard, and the games are competing with one another to be the very best. Now, the reason why this is important in terms of creating a game-based learning solution is that at any point in the curriculum, a teacher can go to the platform, find the appropriate game for that part of the curriculum, and present it, and assign it to the class. And, there's we structured it as a marketplace. And as a marketplace, there's a lot of competition between these studios. And the studios are competing to make the very best photosynthesis game or the very best ecosystems game or the very best Newton's law game or the very best fractions game, whatever it is. And very best, what that means for us is it has the highest ratings from teachers and students. So you have to serve multiple constituencies with any edtech product. In our case, in the classroom, we serve the students and the teachers, and then districts are our buyers. Sometimes parents are our buyers. And students rate each game based on how much fun it is, and teachers rate each game based on how well aligned to the standards it is and how well it covers those standards.

And so in order to be successful on our platform, you need to have a high rating on both on the teacher side and on the student side. And I think that's really important. And that's where a lot of other companies who have attempted this have had a challenge, is that they either have their curriculum folks try to make games, and what comes out is really boring games that kids hate, or they have really great game designers build gamified quizzes, and their games are super fun, but the teachers don't want to use them because they don't cover much of the curriculum, or they don't cover the actual curriculum they need to teach. So by using game studios that are really good at making fun games, but making sure that each game covers a narrow part of the curriculum and then letting teachers and students decide which games are both more fun and more educational allows us to kind of balance those priorities between student, teacher, district, and parent.

19:42.30

Dipesh Jain 

This is a very important thing that you mentioned, and I actually wanted to double-click on this particular aspect. Education, especially education in the US, is somewhat unique in the sense that you have so many stakeholders. You have students, you have teachers, parents, and admins. As a CEO or as somebody who's developing an educational product, we have a lot of listeners here who develop educational products. How do you balance their needs? You know, how do you make sure that you cater to all these personas, but at the same time, making sure that it is used, like everybody gets what they want? I'm guessing that would be a very difficult balance to maintain.

20:23.03

Vadim Polikov

It is a very difficult balance to maintain. That is true. And that is why edtech is a hard industry. As I've mentioned, I've been in a variety of different industries in my career, started companies in different places, and edtech is very difficult for precisely this reason for precisely this reason, you are not just building for one customer, you are often building for four different customers. You've got the buyer, who's the district. You got the actual user in the classroom, that's the teacher. You've got the end user who's forced to use your product, but provides a lot of feedback to the teacher, that's the student. And then if you have a consumer portion to your product, which we do, then you also have to deal with the parents. I think ultimately we took the approach of focusing on the teacher. We decided from the beginning that if the teacher wants to use this product, then they will help the administrator make a positive decision toward us.

They will bring our product to the students. And if the students love it enough, they'll bring it home to their parents. And so by focusing on the teacher, you make sure that the person who's actually using the product is happy and continues to use it. What we've seen in the past is a lot of products that are built for the administrator. I think that's a good short-term strategy, but ultimately, long-term, it's challenging because yes, if you're if you're building it for the administrator, that's ultimately the buyer. The administration will buy your product, and then they will roll it out to the school district, and then they'll force the teachers to use it. And then the teachers will try to use it or not really use it with very high fidelity or kind of push back against that usage. And so you might get that initial sale with the district, but then you won't get the renewal, and the renewal comes from teachers using it on a regular basis with fidelity and enjoying it, because when that renewal conversation happens with the district, The district is going to go and ask their teachers. So, what do you think about using this product over the course of the last year? And if the teachers say, you know, I really didn't like it. It had this problem or that problem, or didn't serve my needs. Like, yeah, I looked good from a data perspective, but the students didn't like it, I didn't like it, that's ah that's not that's not a product that's going to renew. But if the administrator goes to the teachers and says, so, what do you think about using this product for the last year? And the teachers are gushing and say, We loved it. It was so easy to use. The students loved it. We would love to continue using it over the next year. Then that makes the administrator feel great for renewing the product. So, as a long-term strategy, I think focusing on the teacher is the right one. But if you don't have the long-term, and you got to sell your product, ultimately the buyer is the district. So, a lot of times it's very difficult to be good at both serving the teacher and the district and the student and the parent.

23:52.30

Dipesh Jain 

I love that piece because in the hindsight it seems obvious, but it's so not obvious. What you're mentioning is focusing on one user persona, making them your champions because you know if eventually, I also think about it. Teachers will give you feedback if students have some feedback. So when you have teachers as your core persona, it makes it easy to kind of, the remaining decisions become sort of easy. So I really, really like it. I know I know companies who've struggled with this because they're just wanting to be everything for everyone, or just not had that, as you said, long-term view in mind and focused on, okay, let's just get the pilots going through the admin. So, thank you for sharing that. I think that's very valuable. So, I think on that piece, one last question that I would definitely ask here is, how do you measure impact? What are your metrics that you, I'm sure, when you look at it, okay, how have you impacted somebody's learnings? What are go what are the key metrics you measure, or how do you measure impact overall?

25:04.29

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, that's become the number one most important thing that districts look at. I think during COVID and during the kind of ESSER funding, there was a lot of money available to school districts to try lots of new products. And so districts kind of bought everything. Teachers were trying out everything, and actually teachers kind of got overwhelmed with all these products that the school administrators would push down on them. And then, as the tide has come out, you know, as ESSER funding has gone away and district budgets are shrinking. The way that districts are making decisions for what to let go and what to keep is about impact, about what is the learning outcome that you get from this product. How effective is this product relative to other products or not using a product at all? And there, you need to show efficacy through research studies.

26:13.00

Vadim Polikov

That's really the only way to do it. I mean, you can say that, oh, teachers love it and kids love it and admins love the data, but ultimately, does it raise test scores or does it move KPI that districts care about? For us, it's about test scores. We've done many studies with third-party evaluators showing that districts that use our platform, whether it's for math fluency, we have a product called Math Basecamp that focuses on math fluency, whether it's for extended learning and after school, which we have a product called Awakening For, or if it's for regular instruction, or intervention, that's our learning universe marketplace of games, or for talent identification, we have an Analogy’s product that does that. In all those cases, we have research studies that show using our product significantly increases test scores, oftentimes at the kind of end of year exam level, and both correlational and experimental designs. So we have a published research study with Vanderbilt and the Journal of Learning Sciences. We've worked with McREL. We've worked with West Ed. We have a large $8 million project going on right now through the Department of Education with Miami Dade Public Schools and West Ed, and Impact Florida to do a large five-year randomized control trial. So, a lot of the work that we do in parallel to product development work is showing the efficacy of our products. And that's what districts ultimately care about. That's how you show impact. You show impact through increased test scores from students who used our platform. And the the kind of the icing on the cake is that the students love it at the same time, right? It's game-based learning. So they love it. They're engaged with it, and they get higher test scores. Now, maybe they get the higher test scores as a result of the fact that they're more engaged and they love learning. But, you know, no matter what, they're getting those higher test scores, and they're enjoying their time at the same time.

28:37.26

Dipesh Jain 

That's awesome, and yes, I think over the years the question of efficacy has become more and more important. So I'm glad that that sounds like one of the cornerstone of how you think about impact, and that helping students achieve better outcomes is something that is definitely a key area of your focus. I wanted to cover this thing earlier, but I thought we'll probably get just too deep into that area. So I didn't want to, but let's cover AI over here now. So I'm sure you've heard of AI. You've heard of AI.

29:19.28

Vadim Polikov

I've never heard of it. Tell me about it.

29:22.62

Dipesh Jain 

A little thing called AI, I don't know, people keep talking about it. But on a serious note, yes, honestly, I would love to get your thoughts. I do see, I mean, I'm just forcing a lot of usage. A lot of usage of AI in helping personalizing some of the journeys on game-based learning, but would love to hear your take on how you are thinking about it? What are some exciting things, not-so-exciting things, and what is the impact of overall AI on this entire education landscape, especially on K-12?

29:56.12

Vadim Polikov

Well, I think AI is going to play a very important role in the personalization of content, like you said. I think the jury is still out around, is it going to be an effective tutor for kids, or how much of the teacher's classroom instruction is it going to replace? But what we do know is it's really good at personalizing content for different learners. And that's not necessarily just creating a kind of leveled reader that is relevant to a kid who loves Star Wars. Like, yes, it can do that. But what it can do is it can look at a large amount of data and say, according to what the student has interacted with before, what they seem to like and dislike? And the fact that they just completed topic 347 on your platform, it actually looks like the next topic that they should work on is 564. And so it is really good, you know, and so it is really good at figuring out what is the right personalized learning path is, what the right next thing to show to a student. And of course, edtech products had those personalization engines in place before, but they were hard-coded, and AI can do it much, much better.

And I think that'll be visible in a lot of edtech products, certainly within Legends of Learning and also in other products beyond Legends of Learning. So, a teacher will have the ability to put students onto a platform but then can display the very right next thing for that student. AI is also great from an edtech perspective in terms of lowering costs for companies to develop engaging and personalized content. We see that in the game studios that work on our platform. AI doesn't make games because AI is not that good yet at making high-quality interactive content. But it does help with coding and with art and with design. And so game studios are able to deliver higher quality games on our platform for the same amount of effort. And so for that, students and teachers benefit because there are all these game studios are just competing with one another to try to make the very best game. And the level of quality continues to go up over time. As we constantly publish new games on our platform and take down the lowest-rated games. So, personalization, lowering costs. And then I think another big area is, a lot of edtech products, including ours, collect a lot of information, a lot of data around, you know, student scores and what the student completed or didn't complete, playtime data, mastery data. And those all have to be put together into dashboards and analytics that then get shown to teachers and administrators. And teachers are just kind of overwhelmed with so many dashboards, so much data. And not every teacher wants to sit there and, you know, learn to be a statistician to figure out what the right piece of learning should come out of this dashboard.

But AI is really good at that, right? AI can not only present that dashboard, but can say, well, based on this data, the next thing you should do with students A, B, and C are to practice in this area that they're having trouble with. And yeah, a teacher that has lots of time or is really great at reading dashboards can figure that out on his or her own. But, for most teachers who are very, very busy, they're not gonna right away see that information may be intimidated by all the information that's in those dashboards. Well, AI can kind of say, okay, well, the very next thing that you should do, or the learning gap that you should address with your class or with this group of students is this.

And I think you can imagine kind of having a data analyst sitting next to every teacher saying, okay, based on this dashboard, here's what you should do. I think that's gonna be a big benefit of AI going forward.

34:42.15

Dipesh Jain 

And, Vadim, you know, one thing interesting that while you were saying, I was thinking about it. Obviously, when I look at it, I spent a lot of time with my six-year-old to understand what he's doing. Unfortunately, even today, I have to depend on my only source of information, or my main source of information is talking to the teacher. And a lot of times, what comes, the feedback from the teacher is not very specific. I'll give you an example, right? I would like feedback that, hey, your son does well when he multiplies, let's say, a two-digit number, for example, but then he forgets this particular piece is where he often makes mistakes. That kind of feedback doesn't come. And I think about it, that as a parent, that is an actionable data point for me. And I wouldn't name the tools that they use in the school, but I wonder what stops some of these tools from providing those data points to a parent, right? Who are so actively involved, especially younger parents, sorry, younger kids, that actionable data, not just to teachers, for sure to teachers, but also to parents, to help them improve the gaps that they see. And I see that when you mentioned this point of there is too much data, but at the same time, there is not enough data. It just that was the thing that came to my head right now.

36:01.08

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, I think just like it helps teachers, busy teachers who are trying to manage, you know, 25 kids, and at the same time, try to create a personal learning journey for each one of those kids to have to read all these dashboards. I think just like AI can help that teacher, the AI can help the parents too. I've got four kids ranging from a kindergartner to a sixth grader. And you can imagine how many emails I get from their school system, their public school. And they’re using all the tools, and I'm getting, oh my gosh, I mean, dozens and dozens of emails. And it'd be really great if AI was a little bit better at kind of focusing down that, all that feedback into actionable suggestions for parents. And again, I don't blame the school system. I actually think it's great that they're doing all this communication with the parents, but for most parents, it's an overwhelming amount of information, and we don't know what to do with it. So it would be good to kind of distill it down to, okay, one thing you can try to do is to practice, you know, how to add fractions with your child. And here's a few resources to help you with that. That's, that's kind of like to to kind of boil it down to something very specific and actionable.

37:32.82

Dipesh Jain 

Yeah, yeah, great. And I really hope that we get there very soon. But I do feel hopeful generally. Overall, I feel hopeful about AI helping to scale up, make education affordable, as you mentioned, and make it more personalized. So, thank you for sharing those insights. One thing which I found very unique about Legends of Learning, you've highlighted it a couple of times, and I want to get deeper into that, is that you mentioned you are like an ecosystem of game developers. So you know it's like a partnership model. How do other edtech, let's say there the other game studios or edtech companies want to partner with you? Like, how does that look like? You know it's a very interesting concept, by the way. Just wanted to mention that.

38:16.17

Vadim Polikov

Yeah, so we're we definitely see ourselves as a platform rather than a point solution. So like you said, on we number one, we have our marketplace of learning games where we work with game studios who are trying to build the very best learning game to target a specific, narrow part of the curriculum. So, each game teaches exactly one standard, no more, no less, but we are publishing about five new games a week to the platform, and we actually take down the same amount of games at the same time. So, the volume of games doesn't grow because we want to make sure it's a reasonable amount of choice for the teacher, not an overwhelming amount of choice. But the quality goes up as higher-quality games replace lower-quality games. To get onto our platform as a game studio, there's a pretty rigorous process that we put you through to make sure that you know how to build a consumer game. So these, this, these aren't like, you know, high school students or college students or amateurs. These are professionals who build games for their profession, and then we work with them to pick a part of the curriculum. And then also at the same time, what the game must teach. And so it's a vibrant marketplace, which keeps the content fresh, up to date, working on the most the best devices that are in the classroom, the best software. So it's just always up to date. But that's not the only set of partnerships that we have. We actually partner with other edtech products who work with the learners in the classroom. So through our open world, metagame that we, that kids kind of walk into, and they have an avatar, and they walk around our open world. And in that world, they're collecting and battling pets, and they're answering math and science questions, and they're learning through playing the games on the platform and through videos and assessment items. That open world is very attractive for other edtech platforms to send students into and a large portion of players in that world of students actually enjoy that learning environment so much that they choose to bring it home and play instead of Minecraft or Roblox, or Fortnite. And, you know, that's something that is unique that we've done to make a learning environment so rich and so engaging that kids will choose to play that over Roblox and Fortnite, and Minecraft.

And some portion of those ah folks who bring it home will become subscribers. Parents can subscribe to open up other areas of the world, and for cosmetic items, you know, the funny hat for their avatar.

And so the tiny portion of parents that subscribe support the keeping the platform um for students free for everyone else. And that's a way for us to partner with other edtech companies, because if other edtech companies extend the learning on their platforms into our world in a white labeled or co-branded environment. Then we can share in some of the revenue that comes from those parents. So it's a way to kind of knit the edtech ecosystem together into a place, kind of like a learning metaverse, where anyone can learn anything through experience and play. Whether they're coming from an assessment technology app or a math learning program or a science lab program, you know, they can all end up in inside of our, learning world that then students will actually, not only play in class, but choose to extend their learning and add on extra learning time at home. So those are partnerships that we're currently working with partners, and it's been really exciting to see the ecosystem coming together.

42:55.03

Dipesh Jain 

And it's very refreshing to also hear this because the ecosystem needs to come together. Because at the end of the day, if you think about it, it's the same classroom, there are the same teachers and students, and then you have, like, I saw some survey where like 1600 apps used by a district or something like that. So, unless the products talk to each other and not in a superficial manner, like have deep integrations, it is going to be difficult for the end users to really seek value out of this entire ecosystem. So I'm so glad that you're doing that. But this was a great conversation. We have a lightning round. But before I get to that, anything that I missed asking you that you want to talk you want to share with the audience?

43:46.44

Vadim Polikov

Well, I mean, you know, if your audience has other edtech companies with users that they'd love an additional revenue stream. Maybe they're already monetizing on the teacher side or they're selling to school districts, but they'd love another revenue stream. We'd love to work with edtech partners to make that happen and have that interoperability, knit that ecosystem together, and have a really seamless experience for the student by keeping the partner's brand in inside that world. So really excited by those partnerships. Love to get more of those, and I guess I'm super excited at the high-quality of efficacy data that's coming out of our platform through all these research studies. So, we're going to keep on, keep on pushing forward with expanding our library. We're actually adding some social studies to the platform next year. And expanding our product set to serve more of the needs of our district customers through game-based learning.

45:01.89

Dipesh Jain 

That's great. And we do have a lot of audience who are edtech product companies. So I'm glad, I'm sure that there will be some mutual synergies here. Okay, so coming to the lightning round with this, my team added a few episodes back. So I'll ask you three questions. You can answer it however you want to. But question number one, what's something you'd love to set the record straight on?

45:31.33

Vadim Polikov

We talked about this a little bit briefly in the beginning, but I think a lot of district administrators and even teachers who, when they think of game-based learning, they instantly assume that it's a gamified quiz like Kahoot or Blukit or Gimkit, which again, serve a really important role in the teacher's classroom, but not typically something that the district chooses to buy. And so they kind of write us off. And we have to do work to remind them that no, no, there's another way of using games to teach a much, a very rigorous way. And so kind of setting the record straight that we are not a gamified quiz. We are a game-based learning curriculum, and there's kind of another class of companies that we really don't like getting associated with. And that's kind of the, these sites that students kind of bypass the teacher's instructions and try to go to and play games in school, and they kind of masquerade as learning games. And so, unfortunately, people have a bad taste in their minds from those sites. They often have advertising on them. And so I just want to make sure that people know that there is high quality game based learning available to ah schools and school districts that will engage students and aren't just gamified quizzes for the classroom and aren't time wasters for some of the products that kids like to find on the web, that somehow get past the school filters.

47:20.73

Dipesh Jain 

Great. Thank you for that. Which is one resource or platform you personally find very useful and helpful for yourself?

47:30.64

Vadim Polikov

Something that I personally find useful and helpful?

47:33.88

Dipesh Jain 

Yes.

47:35.26

Vadim Polikov

Well, I'm always really interested in making sure that the teacher's user experience is easy and seamless. And I'm always a big fan of companies that make a complicated set of choices or a complicated set of activities, really simple with a simple user interface. One company that does that really well, I think, is Nearpod. So, Nearpod has a library of curriculum content, lots of videos, assessments, presentations, and it's a great library, and all those components can be put together into an assignment, and then the teacher can assign those to students. And it's just a complicated, a complicated puzzle or a task that the teacher needs to complete with all these different content types. And I think that they've done a good job of making that UX nice and intuitive for the teacher. So we've kind of had to solve a similar problem on our end. So I always find companies like who have who have made that nice and simple and easy for the teacher. Edpuzzle is another great one. You know, they've got a video library, super easy for the teacher to use. And as a result, teachers love it. So I just find it refreshing when edtech products really focus on the UX of the teacher.

49:17.50

Dipesh Jain 

It's great, yes. Both of these great companies, great platforms. So, yeah, and then the last one, where do you see the biggest K-12  edtech growth or change coming from?

49:30.73

Vadim Polikov

Well, I mean, look, to be honest, it really is AI. There's a lot of money going into it. There's a lot of attention going into it. There's some great companies that are rolling out. I think we're going to see some tasks that took teachers a really long time.

Took a lot of time out of the teacher's workday, whether it's creating a worksheet, grading papers, creating some assessments, deciding, looking at data reports, and deciding what to do next. I think a lot of that is going to be automated in a good way for teachers. You know, teachers are asked to do so many things and they're such talented people, but wouldn't it be great if you gave every teacher a data analyst and gave every teacher a visual designer to create worksheets and gave every teacher a curriculum expert to design curriculum or a lesson planning or lesson planner. And then the teacher could be kind of the executive working with all of these folks that are that are available to him or her in the classroom. And that I think that's where a lot of the growth and change is going to come from, giving teachers tools through AI to just be more productive and to focus their attention on that student that needs help. Rather than you’re trying to figure out what does this data display show me, or how do I find a worksheet that teaches this specific thing, or practices this specific thing. So, I just think it's we're going to find teachers become much, much more productive as a result of AI.

51:28.91

Dipesh Jain 

Love it. And thank you so much. I love that answer. And I really, really agree with that. I think teachers end up doing a lot of jobs. And if they are given something like that, it'll just improve. It will help them do what they do the best. So, thank you for that. I think with this, we come to an end. Before going, where can people find you? How can they reach out to you?

51:53.28

Vadim Polikov

Well, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn, and I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear from you, either your questions or partnerships, or connecting district leaders to our product. Anyway, I can be helpful. I speak with a lot of early-stage entrepreneurs who are building amazing tools within edtech. So, just hit me up on LinkedIn.

52:26.75

Dipesh Jain 

Alright. Thank you so much. Thank you for your time, and you know looking forward to seeing the continued growth. Thank you, Vadim.

52:36.18

Vadim Polikov

It's been great. Thank you so much.