Advancing Equitable STEM: Math Education Revolution with Anurupa Ganguly of Prisms

and CEO of Prisms. She founded prisms to scale a new world teaching model where students learn core math and science concepts spatially physically and steeped in important real world contexts. Prisms targets bottleneck topics that are often memorized in lieu of deeply understood leading to huge gaps and drop offs over time in STEM subjects. Anurupa and her team are transforming math education in the US by deploying the next generation of spatial computing devices across us k 12.

Districts, training teachers to integrate problem driven learning with VR into core curriculum and working with district leadership to rapidly improve joy, confidence and proficiencies in the modern math and science classrooms. Anurupa began her career as a math and physics teacher later served in leadership roles across the Boston Public Schools, New York City Department of Education and

the success academies. She holds degrees in EECS from MIT, and a master's in education from bu her life's mission is to empower an equitable workforce in STEM, Anurupa Ganguly Welcome to EdTech insiders.

critic and there's like lifelong inquiry into how do we create really strong constructivist identities and mathematical sciences where we have generations of people who aren't just busy learning what other people have created, but know how to use the frameworks of math to create and contribute and build themselves. And so that's what kind of led me to become a teacher. And I taught high school, math and physics and the Boston Public Schools.

Boston, as you might know, is a more more immediate, medium sized district, about 50,000 students went out the classroom to become the director of math there. So I moved from moving learning outcomes for my kids to really thinking about what do teachers need the tools that they need in their hands and the training that is required to scale high quality teaching methodologies across teachers, no matter what school you're in, no matter what city you're in.

And that's what took me to New York City where I went from 50,000 kids about 1.2 million kids. And as I grew in my in the number of kids that I supported, I became more and more stubbornly convicted, that we don't have the tools. And I say that with a lot of gumption.

Because of what I learned, I learned that the top indicators of success in post secondary is damage your ability to think spatially, it's the number one indicator, and your ability, and then the second indicator, or second or third, based on how you want to see the research is your ability to experience and go through human everyday happenings, and build up to mathematical models. So abstraction can be kind of just defined as Isaac Newton's

experiences, right? He was sitting under a tree and fell and he knew or rather, he was able to inquire and figure out how do I go from this physical experience and ascribe language notation and build mathematical

models of the situation? So that's where prism was born, is how do we scale these pedagogies of spatial learning and abstracting up from experiences that are meaningful to our students and really giving them applications to the subject matter in the real world so they can start making better decisions and more exposed decisions about what they wanted? Without the age old question of what do you want to do when you grow up? Well, I don't ask that said I say what problems do you want to solve?

So prizms targets, as you have sort of mentioned bottleneck topics, it's really you know, teachers don't have the tools because students get caught in certain topics, certain topics in algebra, certain topics in high school math, or K six math, and then just fall behind and never really get caught back up with math. And you're really trying to foster genuine comprehension rather than memorization of formula. So tell us a little bit about these

bottleneck topics. Where do you focus your VR experiences to get the most bang for your buck?

kids memorize. And so they don't know what y is equal to mx plus b is they have no physical understanding of that. So what we do is they memorize it, and they move it around, and they manipulate it, and they get A's on tests, but they don't physically know what that is. So what we've done is we've taken all the key abstractions in grade seven math, so ratios, the division, division of fractions algorithm, you know, things like you memorize, just flip the

inequality. And when you have a negative coefficient, like, they don't know why that so taking all those all those moments in middle school math, high school math, in middle of high school science that you just memorize, because you have no good reason why, because you don't have the tools to look under the hood, we crop those moments. And so for example, rate of change, it's, you know, the foundation of calculus, kids first learn it in

grade six. And it because it's such a weak foundation, we teach it year, on year, on year on year. And when you're telling a kid that you have to relearn this every year, what are you saying you're saying you're not very good at this, right? That's kind of like the inherent message in there.

linear functions. You click on linear functions, to see what how a glaciologist is supporting the city of Miami to make predictions about when there might be a flood risk that we'll have the businesses on the shoreline for pandemic, you're stepping into the role of an epidemiologist on a task force where you're trying to figure out well, what are my hospitals going to need more PPE and need more resources for our circles module in geometry, you're stepping into the role of a

rural architect, and you are building low cost units, which are circular dwelling. So in every module, you're stepping into the role of a vocation, like when I was a teacher and a leader in Boston, in New York, I would ask kids, again, like what do you want to do is to help them with the college process and college applications. And I would ask them do you want to do and they'd say, Dr. Athlete, lawyer, musician, they can name like five vocations in our

economy. And, you know, there's such a dearth of access to just knowledge of the different types of applications that exist, the types of jobs you can have, and the types of jobs that you can do with core math and science, just you don't need to go and learn a lot more. And as you do, you'll kind of learn to and acquire the skills along the

way. So that's the first thing that we've really put a concerted effort into, is building those identities from a very, very young age of what it means to do math to do science in the context of important jobs that are high paying, and really will support social mobility. The second kind of reaction is yes to like taking this to all the communities that may not be the first to opt in because they

don't have that exposure. So we mainly serve large Title One districts, lots of rural America, these are, you know, we're in rural parts of Ohio and West Virginia, there's been tremendous devastation with the loss of various industries. And there's no plan for those communities to stay there and continue to build those communities and build new industries with new ideas and

innovation. So really, making sure that this type of thinking and promise learning is permeating not just our most affluent neighborhoods, which is it's funny, they're the ones that are reaching out to me. And I'm like, No, I gotta, I gotta go get this. So like all kids, like your kids already. Okay. But you know, it was built for everyone. So inherently, there's

a joke, really. But yeah, I think that there needs to be a concerted effort to make sure that this is getting to the communities where people and the students are not building those identities early on for a couple reasons. One is continuous failure, and bottleneck courses like algebra one Bob Moses, often used to say that algebra one is a civil rights issue of our time, as it's one of the main predictors of future life wages and an access to lucrative

jobs. And if we cannot close the gap In algebra one and these middle school math subject areas that feed into algebra one, we're going to continue to have the major like inequities to the job market that we currently have. And so we do a lot of work to make sure that we're getting our solution. And part of getting our solutions not just getting our product there. It's the investment of the teachers

and the systems over time. So it's not about you know, okay, we gave you the demo, here's some headsets, I'll get here, some zoom sessions, goodbye. That's not how we operate, we hold the hands of our communities, and the teachers, we're in classrooms, we coach we model, and we really like show them what this looks like, so that they can take that risk, that psychological risk to try something new.

exciting about them. And I think there's something really, really smart about using sort of teaching to the top of the intelligence, like, let's really get into something real and interesting and exciting, and not dumb it down or make it about pizzas. And you know, the kind of like super silly metaphors that we often use in math class, it's the opposite goes way up. So you mentioned working in rural areas. And I wanted to dive into two that have been in the news recently.

So I know that you've partnered with T Mobile, and some amazing, you know, STEM education through VR, high quality VR to Michigan, Lenawee. County, and you've been working with West Ed, the evaluation firm to see what what happened with the implementation in Ohio. There's all sorts of things happening in progressives, you are all over

the country. Tell us a little bit about some success stories and case studies you've had where you've actually seen exactly that kind of high touch impact that you're looking for. Yeah,

educators. And we have educators and tears at the end of it, who have been teaching for 20 to 30 years saying that we have been looking for something that's been pedagogically technology that's reflected the pedagogies that we've known, we've always wanted to teach through rich problems through movement through tactile manipulatives. But we didn't have that. And what we had were textbooks. So we wrapped our arms around that because we have to deliver I mean, assessments are still tied

to future opportunity. And so teachers do feel the need to try to make sure that we are not the obstacle. So it was almost like, we gave them the assessment model we did, we gave them textbooks. And then we got really mad at them for only teaching with textbooks. But it's like, well, that's what you gave them. So I think that now what's happening is with these new tools, teachers are becoming really emotional, because they're having that feeling of this is why I got into this

field. And for the first time, I now have tools that are kind of resonant with my ideals. And it's making the teaching profession idealist again. Whereas there was one teacher I'll never forget in Dayton, Ohio. And she was in tears in the presentation. And she says, I wish I would have met you 20 years ago, because I left my blood on the battlefield. And I remember like when to like wrap my arms around her afterwards, like, but we still have 10 more

years. And she's not in but I just got jaded and beat down and beat down and beat down. So I think that there's just been a lot of impact that we're seeing on the teacher sentiment, teacher satisfaction, teacher retention, and a renewed energy to want to teach in this really radically new way. It's not about the tech, it's about the methodology. In terms of kids, oh my gosh, we just have so many stories. The one that I love to always share is in a district outside Sacramento, Roseville,

California. And I remember I was doing a an observation one time and this young girl, she yelled out in the middle of a class and she goes, this is stolen further than Chromebooks. I said, Oh my god, like why did she say that? And I went to caught her afterwards. And I just just to hear her thoughts. And she said, Well, I couldn't change tabs. I couldn't look at my phone. And I'm not very good at math. And I felt so safe in there. I felt

like I could keep going. I felt like I kept making mistakes. Nobody was gonna make fun of me there was there was nothing that stopped me from continue to make mistakes. And so what I what we really began to find was just the focus, and the ownership and agency that our children are feeling in a VR environment where they're shut off from their social media and their devices and YouTube rabbit holes and eight different tabs open which is completely distracting

them from the task at hand. I wanted to start with that because it obviously just a lot of like traditional outcomes we're seeing West Ed ran our first RCT based on increase of an 11% on standards aligned assessments between control and treatment, which is pretty rare for a brand new innovative technology where typically control groups outdo treatment groups for the first few years because they know how to use it.

So that was a really positive potential for us to now put in larger RCTs to keep setting it in a longitudinal scale. And the last thing that I'll say was a lot of the data that came out of both the feasibility study and the RCT study were hovered around two things that we continue to hear. One is teacher saying and maths, this topic takes me three to four weeks to teach it, my kids got it in one. And it wasn't one because they got some trick, or they made it easier, it's because they were

able to see it. And when you can see it and experience it and touch it and then connect that structure that you experienced to words and notation. It's much more there's enduring understanding and proficiency. And the second thing that we heard was connected to what the young students told me in California, around, kids are just persevering. They're not stopping, they're continuing. And guess what happens when you don't stop? You're successful

over time, right? Half the battle is helping our kids not wanting to give up mid story and helping them get to the end of their story in their chapter.

really, really exciting. And it's interesting to hear how much you focus on the educators between your last two answers, you know, you you immediately start with Okay, studies, I'm going to tell you about some educators who just, you know, found this to be the most

incredible thing. And that's such a interesting and sensible way to get a new technology like this into the world is really don't just a couple of zoom webinars really hold the hands of the educators implemented in a very high touch partnership style way, I'd love to ask something kind of logistical, you know, the use of spatial computing and VR in education is

still relatively new. And we talked many months ago to Monica Arez from Mehta, who said that one of the hardest things is just getting headsets into the classrooms at scale. And I know you've been working on this a lot, because it's obviously a big part of your business. How have you been thinking about literally getting people the tech and training? I know you've been doing a lot to do it. So I

take in tons of Chromebooks. And so iPads, you know, put an MDM on them, manage them, set them up, tag them, like those systems have been in districts for decades. That's not the limiting reagent, the limiting reagent was the value prop. And the reason why you weren't getting devices into schools were because you were going in there and saying, Look at this cell, you can go to Egypt. And guess what, though, it's nice, I

really value. You know, it's it's nice to look at cell that's not the biggest issues that people are struggling with in public education. And so what I focused on is like, what is the pain point of our teachers, our district leaders, our superintendent, our kids today, and it harkens back to what you said at the beginning the conversation around pain points and bottleneck topics.

it's great. And you know, by the way, you're going to of course, these headsets are necessary because it's all about spatial understanding and constructivist thinking. It's a really interesting way to do it. And, you know, prisms, VR is compatible with the quest with a meta Oculus quest to and Pico headsets. And I've heard you are working to make it onto the apple, the new Apple headset, which is really, really a new technology. Tell us a little bit about, you know, all of those partnerships.

to be exposing our kids to. And that's the role of VR to take them there experience sit there and be focused in this multimodal environment. But then there's all these other learning objectives of be able to then come back and work with text and do more complex and rigorous algebraic manipulations and computations, which is not VR is not the right modality for that. And so Apple, you know, there's no one that does text better

than Apple. And so, really kind of utilizing their integrations of just the user interfaces that have become part and parcel of

our everyday lives. and making connections to a spatialized environment where you then go from this VR model where you kind of derived a mathematical construct to then go into Mr. AR spaces where you can use different spatial modalities around text, you're still using some multimodal tools, you have like different ways of interacting and manipulating with notation equations and

words. And then web, right, we're not saying that like, this is like the end of our web based apps, there are many things that are still very valuable. And then like I mentioned, I think we were to this we're talking prior to the podcast, but there's paper, right paper is still the most the fastest way to do a really strong calculation that's like 10 Steps long, it's still a little bit clunky on web, it's definitely

clunky in VR. So what prisms is defining is, given different learning objectives, and different collaboration methods. What is the right modality and the apple headset is gonna be the ultimate testament to your ability to kind of go in and out of different modes of engagement based on what you're trying to do in that moment,

reality. I don't know if that's exactly what you're picturing. But it's a really cool idea to be able to put together the manual, you know, real world pieces of math, which are often writing on paper, and the tactile enhanced, incredibly immersive and spatial parts of education, which can happen in a

VR environment. When you first mentioned text as a modality I was envisioning texting, you know, when you say Apple is really great at text, Apple and Google for Android have created a world where every young person is texting somebody all the time. And I wonder if that you know, that modality probably could also be part of this amazing experience that you can be writing, you can be putting them, you know, texting and

asking questions. It's fascinating to imagine a fluid interchange between all of these different types of communication.

annotate and work with text. But I will say, having said all of that, we have a lot of text in our VR environment, because there are all problems that kids are working on. They're submitting answers. There's text references, and we're not seeing that being anyway an impediment to all the other values. So can the text be a bit better? Yes.

But what supersedes all of it is that immersion that storytelling, the looking around the movement, that kids have really been missing in the classroom, as we've made them sedentary beings, like see, staring in one direction, staring down and if you don't interact with the world in that way, you get stuck with an IEP, that tells you you have a handicap you have kids aren't growing up for years and years and years thinking they have any

a handicap. And I'm going no, Einstein needed to get up to i incent you to move around as well, like you don't have a handicap. And I think now find the materials are going to tell our kids a different message. That's

ins that they all have. They're obviously immersive and spatial. But I think for listeners, they're probably still curious about, you know, what is the experience? How long does it take? How does it fit into the school day? Are they doing it every day or once in a while? And I know you've thought very deeply about all of these things. And then once a student is in what type of experience do they have? Are they alone or

with someone else? Are they I don't know, maybe just give us a walkthrough of the actual student experience in prisons? Yeah,

rates. And so with your body, you get to actually start to catch the water droplets. So for Thwaites, your hands moving really really quickly and you're seeing the thickness of the glacier go up really fast diminish, whereas the smaller glaciers, your hands aren't moving as quickly to move them. So you're building this multimodal association of rate of change, you then accept a

mission. When is mine you can have a flood risks that could be severe enough to impact the businesses on their shoreline. So that question, they then use a simulation tool that of the glacier that they were just immersed with. And they're looking from year to year to year, how much is the thickness going down, and with their hands, they are plotting. So this one starts at 2500. And with your left hand or right hand, you are moving it down

four meters each time. So the definition of a linear function, we haven't said anything yet, but the kid is perceptually picked up that I had a starting value, and I pushed it down, my hand went down the same amount, that's all a linear function is it's a starting value, minus the same value over and over again, or adding the same value over and over again, from there, they put all their data into a table from the table, they then convert it to expressions where they say, Oh, this was 2500

Minus forfeits. And they get to use that repeated reasoning that they just did with their hands going down for 50. It's time to then see, well, what's the variable with the variables, this little guy here is the number of forfeits naturally 2500 minus four fifths MC falls out, they didn't memorize slope intercept form, they didn't memorize anything, it was just from that series of physical movements. So it typically takes about two instructional days.

One, day two, you're only in VR for about 25 minutes each day, because there's a conversation a big part of what we train teachers to do is not put kids into headsets and call it a day.

What do you for? How are you helping them because teachers have a web based dashboard that they're using to provide just in time feedback, they know where every kid is there like strategically supporting their most vulnerable kids, and then ask the kids to put the headset down those last 12 minutes, they are leading a conversation, where they connect what students experienced to the vocab, the conventions, the notation, the procedures, so everything is derivative from theirs on paper

pencil, they can then take that into the rest of their unit of study. So that's like the model, it's about two to three days of an instructional unit, though, we've gotten so much demand to build more content build more, so stay tuned, we're gonna build more.

many phases. It's amazing to me that you, you know, you predicated that with, there's the simplest one, it's a simple ones, because it sounds like there's many parts and many pieces. And it's a tool that asks students to really meet it, which I think is really powerful, even though it's immersive, it's complex in an in a really good way. It's not just like, you know, do this simple thing, and you're gonna get it it's like it respect students

intelligence. And I think that that is something that seems to tie really closely into your vision of of equity. I'm curious if you see in all your travels, seeing this be implemented in all different kinds of schools? Do you see any, you know, differences or similarities or sort of super amazing success stories with students like maybe who were diagnosed with a learning disorder or math anxiety or come from underrepresented groups sort of having these aha moments about,

oh, this is a real job. And this is how I learned it. And this is I'm curious if you've seen that in action.

care about. And so when they got to see these connections, and in a pandemic, it's a black female epidemiologist, I had never seen what she sounds like and what that looks like, and their eyes lit up, because they begin to have models for like, what they could be and who they could be and what they could contribute. So I think I just saw a huge impact on just belief in oneself, and seeing what you're capable of. In terms of students

with IPS and disabilities. I'll never forget, like Dr. Catherine head. She's a math director in Cherokee County, Georgia, it's about a 40,000 student district in the state. And she was just like, on Aruba. In my decades of doing this, I've never seen my students with disabilities

engaging and talking. And when the headsets came down, going toe to toe with their Gen Ed peers, because there's always a little bit of deference to the formula kid or the person that knows how to do it more quickly to their excuses, IPS, I used to always have to like get them to talk and be a part because there was always this feeling of less than with with many of them. And we had done that to them. That wasn't something that was inherent to their own beliefs

about who they are. And she was just like, just there the participation and the equity that we're now seeing, because they got to make sense of it on their own terms with tools that made sense to them. So they got it, they understood it. So guess what, when headsets come down, they were equally wanted to share their perspectives. So that's been like the biggest I mean, obviously, we're seeing test scores go up like that. That's kind of an obvious one.

But you know, really, Alex, I didn't get into it just for the test scores. I got into it for all these other reasons why are edgy Asian system has been failing our children. So I will deliver the test scores because that's my moral responsibility because of test scores connection to future opportunity. But I think the reason why I share like all these other things first about the teacher identity and, and and our students like building towards their futures because that's what's been missing in

our system thus far. That's

prisms was founded. And in that time, virtual reality has gone up and down and up and down in the public consciousness. Sometimes it's everybody's like, it's coming for sure. And other times people are like, well, we don't know anymore, and then it goes back up. I am so curious about just your prediction about yes, there's little hype cycles now. And then, but where do you think this VR education is going? What's the sort of 510 20 year vision of how VR can truly impact education,

it. But I think for mass adoption, there was a certain level of comfort and psychological safety and reliability of the system that people are looking for, in addition to the fact that when mobile VR in 2018, with the quest one, we no longer had that bulky umbilical cord to have the bulky hardware that was also a game changer, right? Just giving that sense of comfort and like

the true value of VR. So I think as hardware and software techniques over the past, like five to 10 years have done miracles on the just the comfort side. As developers, we were then unleashed to start thinking about the design, and really think about like, how do you modulate the affordances. So that people are learning, if you look at a lot of the early VR, so Dr. Richard Mayer was it was a huge inspiration of mine. And he's been studying the impact of

yarn cognition for decades. And one things he had found was that it's actually a very distracting medium. And like he ran studies where he found that you could teach certain concepts in biology better with PowerPoint, than with a VR headset. And that has nothing to do with the medium and everything to do with

the design. So you asked about like the future of the meeting, like I think all of us are now heads down, really thinking about how do you construct very valuable experiences that are 10x better than the counterparts and that's what's going to create the desire in need for the medium versus the nice to have. Because so far, it's just right now, it's like, it's nice tech, it's so cool to be in there. It's so fun to be in

there. But nobody is saying that without this our math scores or a science scores, they are devastated. And this program came in this modality came in and fundamentally changed what we're able to deliver for our

students. Right. So I'm talking within the within the context of education, I know that there's very similar work being done in the healthcare space and mental health space, we have great founders who see the affordances and know that if you modulate them, well, you're gonna get an incredible movement in that field. And I think like going back to the Apple headset, I think that one of the things that it has been a struggle is it can't be VR or bust. Right?

It's VR for certain things. And then we have to also like everybody has their laptop and their phones, those aren't going away anytime soon. And nor should they. And as we really kind of get the interplay between the modes, right, I think that's the future. And we're about like four or five years away from that one to one device that's going to get that right. And then it's game over.

outside of the VR. It reminds me a little of dreamscape learn another VR XR, you know, VR company that sort of also realized that it's not about trying to convince people to always be in VR, because that is feels semi dystopian, overwhelming, freaky in lots of ways. It's about using it for these like key moments. These things that just like explode the comprehension. Tell me more about that. Yeah,

embody situations. So I really looked at it as a tool that you use, and you pull out a key moments, and you're very clear about what the objective is, and then they go back, and you're back in your real world doing what you need to do. So that's one of the reasons why school districts I think, have really welcomed us in, because it's not this, like hyperbolic like, you know, long ranging vision, it's, we're going to help you do problem based learning with this

tool. And it's something that teachers understand something that kids love, some of the tenants love, and I think scoping technology is half the battle. Because on scoped you throw an iPad in, and everyone's like, well, you know, are we just going to be watching this for eight hours? No, that's a terrible idea. You know, just like get on for 30 to 45 minutes, do the thing, what you need to do, and then put them away. So that's what we're doing is really building that

moderation. And it's something that like a lot of school systems are talking about, they're very inundated and overwhelmed with the amount of screen time and the amount of tech that kids are utilizing. So I think it's been a very refreshing narrative of, they're only in there for 20 minutes in the day. I'm like, yeah, and then please put them away. For the rest of the day. Yeah.

So amazing conversation, there's so much more to unpack here. I always end the interview with two questions. One is about what is one exciting trend you see in the ad tech landscape, from your perspective as the CEO of prisons VR, that our listeners should keep an eye on?

for some time. This is the first time where the industry across from school district leaders to founders are focused on this, the scaling of real pedagogy versus scaling of traditional methods, and just digitizing it, that's what we've done for the end. That's, that's here nor there. Like, I think that that had a lot of value. I think it got us to where we are today, right? So I don't want to in any way diminish all the work that

was done. But we're in a special and unique time now, where it's all about automating new ways of learning. And that's possible because the technology is so much more advanced. And for me, it I'll close with, I believe spatial computing is going to fundamentally change how people interact and natural interfaces will allow us to we have not evolved out of learning and

being with our bodies. And our education system did not allow the whole body into the classroom, because it was so cerebral, and it was so intellectual. And so my dancers and my creative and all these generations of people who thought they weren't good at math, we're finally in a place where they're going to be good at math and the World Watch out.

Once you have, you know, a very large demographic of people who have not been contributing to stem, and then technology, just see the types of things that will now start getting built. I

especially mixed reality. Wow. I mean, I never envisioned the idea of looking at paper and doing math and also having being immersed in a in a virtual world all at the same time. That is a new thought. For me, I imagined it's new for many of our listeners. Ungroup Ganguly prisms VR shaping the future of virtual reality mixed reality augmented reality in education, especially math education, at least for now. Thanks so much for being with us here on edtech insiders.