SchoolJoy, a Fremont-based edtech company, doesn’t think students should be defined by their high school transcripts. The company’s artificial intelligence-powered platform helps school systems gain a deeper understanding of their students and advises how to best engage them in the classroom.
At its core, SchoolJoy works to measure students’ strong suits and skills both inside and outside of the classroom by combining quantitative data, like grades, with qualitative data such as a student’s resume. SchoolJoy’s goal is to help school systems manage this complex data, provide educators with a comprehensive view of who their students are and offer them insights as to how they can improve that student’s future.
For instance, institutions can reference data from student information systems and learning management systems to get a sense of a student’s academic performance. That data can be combined with notes from school counselors that help build a clearer picture of the student’s motivations. SchoolJoy wants to aggregate all of this data for parents and educators.
Ian Zhu, the company’s co-founding CEO, was inspired to create SchoolJoy after reflecting on his own high school experience. Zhu’s family moved to the U.S. from China when he was 11 years old, and Zhu entered the English as a second language, or ESL, program in school. Despite working hard to earn good grades and exit the ESL program, Zhu ultimately felt unseen by the adults around him because his skills and passions outside of the classroom were not considered.
On SchoolJoy’s student engagement platform, students can do things like sign up for clubs, take interest inventory assessments and learning style assessments as well as log information like community service hours or internships. From there, SchoolJoy uses AI to parse that data, combine it with the school system’s data and make it useful for educators and parents.
Parents use SchoolJoy to access an AI-powered chat interface where they can ask the bot questions about their child in any language. SchoolJoy can help them answer questions like how their child is doing in school and what kinds of colleges and scholarships they should consider.
SchoolJoy also equips teachers with AI-powered learning resources. The platform features document templates based on common core teaching standards, allowing teachers to quickly generate lesson plans and worksheets based on a student’s profile. It aims to help educators spend more time in the classroom and less time on administrative tasks.
“Our view is that we don’t need so many AI applications to teach kids—we have teachers for that,” Zhu told Built In. “What we can do is increase the student’s interest and capacity for learning, meaning: make the material relevant for the kids.”
The platform combines a student’s interests with their learning standards, enabling educators to generate learning resources contextualized on a particular student’s existing passions, Zhu said. If a student is a fan of sports, art or music, for example, SchoolJoy can create experiences that only use analogies of those things as foundations for teaching subjects ranging from everyday physics and math to thermodynamics and calculus.
“AI is able to write beautiful language to connect those very complex and foreign concepts to something that we love and are familiar with,” Zhu said.
Since its launch in 2021, SchoolJoy has accumulated 100,000 total users, including students, parents and teachers. The company began developing its AI features in April and plans to launch pilot programs of them at the start of the upcoming school year, Zhu said.
“What we hope to do is to prove that there are a number of use cases [for AI in education],” Zhu said. “And AI does not need to be between the teachers and students — it should be able to bring them closer together.”
