Education is a sensitive topic, especially in Canada. There is a clear lack of educators for a growing population, and sometimes this can take a toll on the mental health of teachers. Adding to that, the excessive amount of time it takes for teachers to plan their daily lessons, and we have a time ticking bomb.
Enter Scintillant Ventures. They wanted to solve a problem of teachers being burnt out in the system. They collaborate with teachers directly to develop tools, design apps to manage and automate lesson planning and improve collaboration to lighten the workload. They equip teachers to create and deliver engaging lessons for students and create platforms to build their own educational content and games by leveraging interactive technologies. Bottomline, they are making teacher’s and student’s lives simpler alike.
The team is spread out through British Columbia and Ontario. We sat down with Mark Chan, Product Development Lead at Scintillant. He’s been a fundamental piece in the development of the platform.
“ … we wanted to provide a way for them (teachers) to reduce their time in lesson planning. Right now, our main product is called Classroom Studio, and Classroom Studio is a lesson planning tool that reduces the time it takes to plan lessons for teachers.”
Personal experiences and really feeling the pain is what enables for great product development. Mark used to work as a teacher in Ontario and was slowly feeling burnt out: “ I found when I was a teacher in the last six years, sometimes, you’re afraid to ask for help.” So why not just create a solution that isn’t available in the market, well, that’s exactly what Scintillant achieved.
The road to success also includes complying with Government regulations: “ … we want better educational outcomes that comply with ministry standards.” This is just one of the many key factors successful startups have to take into account when scaling up.
As part of the most recent cohort of the NEA Program at Global Startups, they are taking advantage of all the tools provided. Mark reflects on it:
“ A lot of the key learnings and pivots we’ve had as a team have come from, you know, short lunch sessions where like a speaker that they brought in will unlock the key insights that we’ve never thought about and we’ve applied.”
While Scintillant Ventures is keeping it local as of now, their plans of expansion don’t end here. “ It’s our contribution to the educational space, and we would like to, you know, build a better outcome for students and teachers across Canada with our product.”
