High Tech Ed

Dennis Ciccone didn’t need the kids from South Central to show him he had a good product on his hands. But it sure didn’t hurt two years ago when the students, from one of Los Angeles’ roughest neighborhoods, started teaching algebra to a group of math teachers huddled around laptops.

The students had spent a year learning algebra on the Cognitive Tutor, a digital learning program developed at Carnegie Mellon University and sold by Carnegie Learning, the CMU spin-off that Ciccone had taken over as CEO only a few months before.

But on this weekend in early 2005, Ciccone decided to turn the students into teachers. Carnegie Learning shuttled them in limos to a national math convention at the L.A. Convention Center where the kids strode around a mock classroom showing teachers from around the country how to use the software.

“A lot of these kids were in pretty dire straits, some were in foster homes, some had been homeless,” Ciccone says. “But they had gotten pretty turned on to math. The idea of turning them onto math, that was exciting to me.”

The showing reinforced Ciccone’s belief in the company, at a time when its prospects were dim. Sales were flat. The company hadn’t rolled out a new product in years. And talks with some big city districts had stalled.

That Was Then

Two years later, the company appears back on track, with 35 percent growth in sales that same time period. Half a million students are now using Cognitive Tutor in 1,300 school district and they have a hot-selling new product, “Bridge to Algebra.” And Los Angeles, Houston, Denver and Chicago all have agreements with the company.

The company’s Downtown headquarters, housed atop the Frick Building in Henry Clay Frick's former penthouse office, has grown to 80 employees, including several high-level managers lured from out-of-state.

Ciccone and company have ultimately built a model of how to turn Pittsburgh’s high-tech research into a cutting edge business. Other local companies, like Quantum Simulations, which makes chemistry tutor software, and Apangea Learning, which uses software and on-demand human tutors accessible by chat and phone lines, have followed suit.

“Those guys were pioneers,” said Benny Johnson, Quantum’s President and CEO. “The fact that somebody had done something similar before us, (our idea) wasn’t so completely out in left field.”

Support from the Heinz Endowments, and the Grable and R.K. Mellon foundations helped jump start the local ed-tech industry.  

Getting Unstuck

At the core of Carnegie Learning is the Cognitive Tutor, a full math curriculum that employs an intelligent tutor. It uses artificial intelligence software to mimic how a real teacher would show a student coefficients, equations, and word problems.

“The DNA of the product is very different from what you see in the marketplace,” says Ciccone, one of the company’s earliest investors and board members. “That’s why we invested in it. We can see millions of transactions of the product students are doing on a daily basis. In a textbook you just can’t do that. The guts of the product were always very attractive to me.”

The program was created by a team of Carnegie Mellon psychologists and computer scientists studying how humans learn and think. The end product is a computer program that adapts to a student’s strengths and weaknesses the way a human teacher does.

“It’s designed so that when the student is stuck it’s able to help them with just the thing they’re stuck with,” explains CMU psychologist and computer scientist Ken Koedinger, a company co-founder and board member.

Since the 1990s, the education marketplace has filled with technology products aimed at boosting achievement. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 has forced many under-performing districts to look at different methods of instruction.

Yet educators are leery of loading students down with “drill and kill” software–the electronic equivalent of a multiple choice test.  

Unlike other products, Cognitive Tutor focuses more on the student’s problem-solving process than on whether they answer a problem correctly.

“What you want to do is focus students on things they haven’t learned and not too much repetition on things they already know,” says Steve Ritter, one of Carnegie Learning’s co-founders and svp of research and development.

Proof

Oh, and did they mention it works? Ciccone, Ritter and Co. have reams of studies showing the product improves student achievement in math and problem-solving.

That sets it apart from a lot of other products, says Joel Smith, Carnegie Mellon vice provost and Chief Information Officer. “It’s not throwing a shiny bauble over the wall and saying, ‘This is somehow going to transform your classroom,” Smith says.

“I’ve watched repeated failure after failure and millions of dollars spent on educational products to buy shiny new laptops and the latest handheld device” without evidence that the products work, he adds.  

The Cognitive Tutor is one of only a handful of math curricula the Department of Education recommends in its “What Works Clearinghouse”.

In an age of iPods and MySpace, the Cognitive Tutor is relatively plain.

“It’s not a lot of song and dance,” says Marianne Srock, a math consultant for Macomb County Intermediate School District, just north of Detroit. Srock’s district used Cognitive Tutor this summer to help incoming ninth graders gear up for Michigan’s higher graduation requirements. “It’s fractions, dividing rectangles into fifths and fifteenths. It’s not a video game. I’ve seen other math programs where it’s a lot of funsy stuff, but doesn’t provide a good understanding of the material.”

In a nod to the old-fashioned gold star system, a yellow bar goes up or down depending on how the student grasps a lesson. “The kids like to see their bars going up,” Srock says.

The company’s bars have also been going up lately. Two big textbook companies came calling last year about acquiring Carnegie Learning, but the board eventually declined.

The company is expanding the Cognitive Tutor to higher education students and is exploring the elementary market as well. And growth may actually turn Carnegie Learning from a potential seller into a buyer, Ciccone says. “We’ve actually begun to look at potential acquisitions we can make. We’re pretty convinced we’re building a better mousetrap.”

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Reid R. Frazier last wrote about the BioBuds for Pop City. To read it, click here.

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Steve Ritter demonstrating some math, with Dennis Ciccone

Dennis Ciccone

Some of Carnegie Learning's products

Steve Ritter

Marketing cards

Toy bear and whiteboard

All photographs copyright © Brian Cohen
except Products, courtesy of Carnegie Learning