Phenomena, an early-stage EdTech startup founded by three MIT graduates, announced the launch of its new creator-driven platform for experiential learning.
Founder & CEO Jared Schiffman said, “This is the first EdTech platform for digital natives by digital natives,” referring to Phenomena’s unique creator-driven approach. “It’s a space where the mind’s eye meets the creator’s hand – where students learn by exploring and playing with dynamic interactive experiences.”
To engage today’s students in the study of STEM, Schiffman believes you need to meet them where they are. Visual communication is the expected baseline for digitally native students who consume diverse visually-based media in their free time. Interactive visual-based STEM education tools bring to life dynamic relationships while promoting long-term achievement through process-oriented learning.
Phenomena is realizing this solution with its collection of bite-sized digital learning experiences designed by creators and ready for use by students and teachers. Teachers can use the experiences as a “do now” to start class, as a demonstration or as an assignment to bring textbook readings to life. Presently the collection contains nearly 100 experiences across math, physics, chemistry, biology, and even music. That number and breadth of subjects will expand in the months ahead as more creators join Phenomena.
“Ultimately, there won’t be just one way to teach a concept. There will be ten or twenty experiences made by different creators with distinct perspectives on how to convey the concept,” says Schiffman. “And these experiences can be created by anyone in a matter of hours with the Phenomena Creator Tool, rather than the weeks or months it usually takes with teams of developers and designers using existing tools.”
The Phenomena Creator Tool is an intuitive, browser-based design and coding space that enables anyone to quickly and easily create engaging interactive experiences. Publishing is done with the click of a button, and experiences are thoroughly vetted by the Phenomena team before going live. This new medium makes it possible for a much broader range of creators with diverse backgrounds to contribute to STEM education, fostering a greater sense of belonging for all students.
Founded in 2021, Phenomena is a brand new destination for experiential STEM learning. The startup believes every student has the capacity to learn and excel at STEM when given the right medium for learning dynamic concepts. With that belief, it created a platform that builds intuition, simplifies complicated ideas, and nurtures hands-on, interactive digital learning, to foster achievement for all students.
