ImproovLearning

Our Mission

Founded by teachers and studensts, ImproovLearning cares deeply about empowering parents and teachers to support students. We understand that adequately supporting all students is difficult and that the students who need the most help are often the hardest to help. We are working to help parents and teachers strengthen the support networks around students to promote equity and change lives.

Our Company

We are a startup out of the Project Olympus Incubator at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. We are currently in the prototyping phase, but we have already made some great achievements, including competing as finalists in the 2021 McGinnis Venture Competition at Carnegie Mellon University.

Our Product

The ImproovLearning App is a smart communication system that delivers information from schools to parents on their preferred channels — web, mobile, and email. We also uniquely enable parents to automatically forward that information to grandparents, tutors, and all of the other important people in a student's life. We already tested an initial prototype in our cofounder's classroom and had great results:

Time spent emailing parents student-specific information decreased from 120 minutes spent per week to only 2 minutes.
The number of parents directly engaging in the classroom per month increased from 7 to 30.
The number of parents inactive on student information systems decreased from 38 to 19.

That's 60x faster communication, 3x more parent engagement, and 1/2 as many parents inactive on student information systems.

Our Team

Coleman Isner

Coleman Isner is a first-year undergraduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in the Tepper School of Business.

Coleman gained experience working with schools by organizing hackathons and International Model United Nations conferences in high school. Coleman has also learned about entrepreneurship by joining Project Olympus and the Undergraduate Entrepreneurship Association. Coleman is passionate about education technology and improving school communication because of a few middle school teachers who had a huge impact on his life. They went out of their way to help him improve his education, and he works to pay it forward by tutoring underprivileged students and working on this project to make students, parents, teachers, and schools more successful.

Lloyd Brooks

Lloyd Brooks is a sixth-grade, middle-school-level science teacher. He has worked in urban and suburban school districts, serving students from diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Lloyd has consistently found that frequent and meaningful communication with parents and guardians has been one of his greatest challenges. His wide experience working with many types of families provides a strong understanding of the needs of students and parents. He also has strong relationships with teachers, parents, and administrators in his current district and a growing network of teachers across the country. Lloyd has a strong passion to increase parent engagement in urban and underachieving schools to close the achievement gap and create more equitable experiences for all students, especially those with extenuating circumstances.

Matt Smith

Matt Smith is a former high school math teacher and current software developer with Google.

As a teacher, Matt faced the challenges of reaching parents that teachers need to communicate with most. He recognizes the issues surrounding communication in education and knows teachers are passionate about their students and eager for helpful tools. With his roles in technology after teaching, he gained extensive experience in modern software deployment tools, programming processes, cloud computing, automation scripting, and more. Matt is excited about combining his experience in software and education to create a seamless tool to make the important work educators do every day easier.