Chad interviews Co-Founder and CEO, Victoria Ranson of Prisma. Prisma is a stealth-mode education startup on a mission to reimagine the way children are educated. Their mission is to create a generation capable of solving the world's biggest problems by creating and running a comprehensive virtual learning program for kids in grades 4-8 that is very unlike any other traditional homeschooling program you've ever heard of.
Prisma's Website (https://joinprisma.com)
Follow Prisma on Twitter (https://twitter.com/JoinPrisma) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma)
Follow Victoria on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom/)
Follow Co-Founder, President, and Victoria's husband Alan Chuard on Twitter (https://twitter.com/AlainChuard)
For more info, email info@joinprisma.com
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Transcript:
CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Victoria Ransom, founder, and CEO of Prisma. Victoria, thanks for joining me on the show.
VICTORIA: Hi, thanks for having me.
CHAD: So, Victoria, before we jump into this great product that you have, why don't you tell people what Prisma really is.
VICTORIA: Sure. Prisma is a very comprehensive educational program for kids who are learning from home or from anywhere in the world. It is not at all like traditional homeschooling because we provide kids with a very social experience. Kids are part of a cohort where they're meeting live with other kids every single day and collaborating with them on projects, and learning from each other, and discussing. And we provide coaches who are there every step of the way with the kids, providing them with rich feedback, helping to bring out the best in them, providing really engaging, live learning experiences.
So it’s not traditional homeschooling, although it has a lot of the really great benefits of that with the flexibility and the ability to learn from wherever you are. But we're equally not like typical online schooling, which I would say has tended to be more of an approach of taking traditional school and bringing it online. So there's still a concept of lectures, and grades, and textbooks. They may be electronic in nature, but they still resemble textbooks.
The Prisma curriculum is very different. It's rooted in learning through doing and project-based learning, and applying learning to the real world, and allowing kids a lot of choice. So they're ideally always learning through the lens of something that interests them and allowing them to go at their own pace. So a lot of the best practices from some of the most innovative bricks and mortar schools we're bringing to an online environment. And then, of course, we're very different from bricks and mortar schools because it is a virtual program where kids can learn from anywhere.
So we think it's a new approach to education that is really uniquely flexible, really prepares kids. We're very focused on preparing kids for the kind of world they're going to live in. The world is always changing rapidly. But I think this generation of kids is going to experience a future that's unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of the level of shift and change, AI being one of the reasons.
If you look at studies that look at the future of work, I think some studies we've read say 65% of today's elementary school kids will work in jobs that are yet to be invented. So, how do you prepare kids for that kind of future? And so, we're very focused on giving kids the holistic skills and the mindset that they will need to thrive in that kind of world. So yeah, that is Prisma in a very long nutshell.
CHAD: [chuckles] Obviously, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the context of where we're in, which is kids just went through a year or more where a lot of kids were remote for school. And