Victoria and Alain, two repeat founders whose most recent venture was bought by Google, started Prisma with the mission to prepare kids to thrive in our rapidly changing world. For that purpose they have designed a new category in K-12 education, the Connected Learning Network, which is built from the ground up to not only prepare kids in the core competencies they’ll need for the 21st century but to instill in them a desire to make a large, positive impact on the world.

The solution

We started the project first by doing a lot of listening and understanding. The most critical aspect was creating a product that was intuitive and fun for the kids, in order to achieve the engagement needed to learn and collaborate together virtually. With that in mind, we then moved to a research phase to determine the state of the art in terms of video transmission, to ensure we were able to create a platform that was geared towards kids but at the same time robust and performant enough to handle a virtual classroom full of students. In just a few months we were able to launch the product for the first cohort of kids.

We assembled a team that was able to move fast with the requirements, knowledgeable in the technologies to provide proper guidance on what was possible to do, and with great attention to detail so that they could jell seamlessly with product managers and designers to achieve the beautiful and high quality product we see today.

Several were the technical challenges that we faced, like having breakout rooms or concurrent live editing for the lessons as the most notorious ones. Being able to sort them out one after the other helped gain confidence in what the team is capable of, paving the way to build the foundation for a strong partnership that will hopefully last for years to come.

The results

We've been able to launch the first prototype of Prisma Live to the first cohort of students, and feel ecstatic about it. That was achieved thanks to creating the kind of engineering culture and processes that allows the team to move fast, be nimble and deliver high quality results. After seeing the response of both kids and teachers we know the right choices were made along the way.

As we continue our partnership, we are now in the journey of building a suite of world-class EdTech products that are tightly integrated with their curriculum, learners, educators, and community.