Ep 2:Immersive Classrooms in Mixed Reality: How Jonathan Teske's Reframe XR Brings Learning to Life

Nicole Jarbo:
Imagine a teacher building a lesson plan about the electromagnetic spectrum.

Jonathan Teske:
They're in a headset. They build their spatial classroom in a headset.

Nicole Jarbo:
With Jonathan Teske's mixed reality tool, Reframe XR, this can be more immersive than you ever imagined.

Jonathan Teske:
So in the headset, they're placing these stations in the room, up to five students per station.

Nicole Jarbo:
When students put their headsets on, a countdown timer begins. Three, two, one. Now those students have become NASA scientists.

Jonathan Teske:
And so what they see is the James Webb telescope right in the middle, and then there are controls on the right side to pick different wavelengths. They see all kinds of twinkles in the sky around them in a 360 experience, right?

Nicole Jarbo:
Reframe is a mixed reality technology platform that can support teachers, increase student engagement and bring learning to life, and it isn't just another shiny tech tool.

Jonathan Teske:
A classroom is a system and in the context of mixed reality or of XR in general, you need to be able to adapt the technology to that system, not change the system to fit the technology.

Nicole Jarbo:
Hey everyone, I'm Nicole Jarbo and this is Pitch Playground from 4.0. This season we'll hear 10 ideas from entrepreneurs reimagining the future of learning, and we'll get them in the hot seat with mentors who can help them strengthen their pitch.

Today, Jonathan shares his idea with Jin-Soo Huh. Jin-Soo is a partner at The Learning Accelerator. They're an education nonprofit that helps schools and teachers bring innovative and effective teaching practices to life. And Jin-Soo is particularly passionate about the potential for edtech to transform learning.

Jin-Soo Huh:
If the hardware is going to grow in this area, there needs to be an infrastructure and someone needs to provide it because you can give all the devices in the world, but if there's not curriculum or other things like that to use, then it's not going to be as helpful for students and teachers.

Nicole Jarbo:
At the end of the season, you, yes, you, will cast your vote and one of these ideas will get $50,000.

As a child, Jonathan was exposed to many different cultures and languages.

Jonathan Teske:
I would think I have a pretty unique upbringing as I was an army brat and for the first 13 years of my life I lived in five different countries before even moving to the U.S. That definitely informs how you approach people, how you, I think, want to be mostly helpful, and I think that flowed into how I thought about what I wanted to do.

Nicole Jarbo:
It turned out Jonathan wanted to do a whole bunch of different things. In college at the University of Miami, he was both an offensive lineman on the football team and a mechanical and aerospace engineer.

Jonathan Teske:
But I kind of fell out of love of mechanical and aerospace engineering I'd say because I got kind of bored. I wasn't really pushed or challenged. I'd taken a bunch of college courses in high school that weren't always honored or I think the experience of that was jaded by quote-unquote being a football player, which really frustrated me.

Nicole Jarbo:
He was also a nerd who loved video games.

Jonathan Teske:
I have absolutely grown up as a gamer, just being inundated with gaming technology since, I mean, as young as I can remember, having an old Nintendo and NES back in the day.

Nicole Jarbo:
Games can be great tools for learning.

Jonathan Teske:
I think the best game designers are really great teachers.

Nicole Jarbo:
And gaming can be used in the classroom.

Jonathan Teske:
I think there are some obvious examples that are kind of in play right now, which are... Minecraft has a Minecraft EDU version.

Nicole Jarbo:
Minecraft EDU allows teachers to create immersive worlds that engage students in meaningful learning experiences. For instance, teachers can design a fractions lesson within the game where students interact with a virtual room featuring furniture or everyday objects to explore math concepts. Let's say the virtual room has a chest for clothes and a shelf. Students will be given tasks like opening the chest and moving half of the clothes from it onto the shelf, then asked to take a third of them and move them onto a different shelf. These little challenges can help students become more immersed in what they're learning. Many mainstream games offer educational benefits as well.

Jonathan Teske:
The last two Legend of Zelda Games, Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, those have been built on amazing emergent design mechanics where it's a playground.

Nicole Jarbo:
In that game, you're learning about how systems work and what the limits of those systems are.

Jonathan Teske:
For a brief second, I did almost get a master's in gaming as opposed to education because I think there's just a lot of crossover. I always had a love for games, but also film and just the art of storytelling and craftsmanship of storytelling, and so I switched to film and philosophy as a major my midway into my freshman year at I don't know if at the behest of everybody or at the disappointment of everybody, but it was something that felt natural to me and wanted to get into.

Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan finished that degree at an unfortunate time for the media industry.

Jonathan Teske:
It was 2008, so the height of the recession and needed a job. Film work really dried up in 2008 around the country, and so I went back home back here to Maryland and didn't really have a lot of prospects, so I was like, "Okay, I'll coach. I'll coach high school football." And all the previous teachers I had four years ago were like, "Oh, Jonathan was a nerd and had all these high grades and knows really math really well, so let's put them in an Algebra 1 class that could be co-taught with another master teacher."

Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan decided he wanted to take teaching more seriously.

Jonathan Teske:
I got a master's in English as a second language here at Maryland. I've taught every grade level, K to 12. Started in high school, then went to elementary school for a couple years. I think the elementary school way of teaching is still the best way of teaching with station rotations and exposure and it was a place I learned the most, but man, it was so frustrating because I can't sit on carpets. I made a lot of kindergartners cry with probably too much sarcasm, and so while I learned a lot, I realized that that age group is not necessarily for me.

Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan taught for a few years and worked as a language coach and leadership consultant.

Jonathan Teske:
And then really wanted to grow my expertise outside of the classroom, still wanting to focus on education, but really wanted to see how I could expand and scale my footprint around impact, and so decided to do what I guess most people do in the early 30s, which is go get an MBA. It gave me the freedom to career change in the way I wanted to. I believe in education as a way of doing that.

Nicole Jarbo:
The MBA led him first to work in operations at Discovery Education, an edtech company that originated from the parent company behind the Discovery Channel.

Jonathan Teske:
And then found myself at Meta, and I think that's where most people outside of Montgomery County, Maryland, where I taught, most people know me from and the work that I did there.

Nicole Jarbo:
During his four years at Meta, Jonathan was part of an education incubation team. One of the projects he worked on was called Project Spark.

Jonathan Teske:
Which was at that point then Facebook's second edtech product ever. We started that in 2019, scaled it through 2020, the beginning of the pandemic.

Nicole Jarbo:
Project Spark allowed Jonathan to bring together his skills as an educator, gamer and storyteller to create immersive experiences for students, experiences like creating an online game, applying Newton's second law of motion or running urban planning simulations to learn about solving systems of equations.

Jonathan Teske:
And we got to about 10,000 student users that no one knew about across different states and districts, and we got sunset as kind of most things do there.

Nicole Jarbo:
But Project Spark lives on. You can still check it out at LearnProjectSpark.com. Jonathan shifted from Project Spark to being the future of education lead at Meta. That's when the idea for Reframe really started to form in his mind.

Jonathan Teske:
We funded a bunch of K12 startups. Most of the folks in the VR space we've worked with and have funded, and I was able to help them grow throughout 2021 and 2022. We funded a bunch of research to go along with that.

Nicole Jarbo:
I want to take a moment to clarify the difference between VR, virtual reality, AR, augmented reality, and XR, extended or mixed reality, the technology behind Reframe. The differences between them are a big part of Jonathan's story. All three technologies involve creating interactive three day experiences often using headsets, but the way they interact with the physical world is quite different.

Let's break it down with an example. Imagine you're in a forest. With VR, virtual reality, you put on the headset and you're fully immersed in the digital forest. Your vision is completely covered and the real world is blocked out. It's like stepping into another world entirely.

Now, with AR, or augmented reality, the force is partially overlaid onto your real surroundings. You might see a digital tree projected in front of you while still seeing your room around you. AR layers digital elements onto the physical world. Examples are Pokemon Go or smart glasses that display information.

With XR, or mixed reality, what Jonathan is using, the forest blends naturally with your real environment. A tree might appear to grow from your floor and birds fly overhead. You can walk around and interact with both virtual and real-world elements. The digital and physical coexist seamlessly. Jonathan and his team at Meta focused on VR, or virtual reality research. The findings from that research were invaluable for his current work and XR mixed reality.

Jonathan Teske:
Every time we put a teacher in a headset, they had typically three responses, which was, "This is awesome. My kids are going to love it. How the heck am I going to teach with this product, this tool, this technology?"

Nicole Jarbo:
Many VR users experience nausea. Many also find the cognitive load to be too much as you're exposed to a massive environment.

Okay, back to Reframe's story. After Jonathan was part of a series of mass layoffs at Meta, he decided to take what he learned and do something with it.

Jonathan Teske:
And so taking those experiences, then having the opportunity to do something fresh coming off the layoff, I wanted to bet on myself. With that, Reframe was born.

Nicole Jarbo:
Explain to us what Reframe XR is.

Jonathan Teske:
Reframe XR is a platform that provides teachers in schools the ability to create any type of immersive classroom while allowing students to just feel like they're controlling magic.

Nicole Jarbo:
Reframe builds on the research Jonathan collected about VR while at Meta.

Jonathan Teske:
Reframe is meant to solve the VR problem for classrooms, which is VR doesn't work in a classroom, and I think that needs to be more plainly said. Shouldn't need to disappear to a world to talk to someone two feet away from you. And so with Reframe, we allow any teacher, any school to build a mixed reality immersive learning hub, which gives you 90% of the great things about VR. The other 10% is an immersive environment that you typically don't interact with anyways when you're in VR.

Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan is an extremely driven person, especially when he feels like the work he's doing can make a positive difference in the world.

Jonathan Teske:
Personally, my worth and meaning is making sure that I leave an impact on folks. And so for Reframe and thinking about the classroom and thinking about if I were still in the classroom right now, well, if someone's going to tell me that this is cool or this is going to change how I teach or at least impact how I teach or how students are going to receive content and it's going to make all these grand statements, well then it damn well better have worth in meaning. And that doesn't always mean that it's the flashiest thing or that it has to be so grandiose and deep. It just needs to solve one really, really interesting or hard problem and then you can work your way up from there. And that to me is where worth and meaning come in. And I think that's where we started with Reframe. It has to have worth and meaning for sure.

Nicole Jarbo:
The fact that Jonathan spent so many years as a teacher helped to inform how he built Reframe.

Jonathan Teske:
A classroom is a system. It is a system that has a lot of interlocking parts that are human and non-human. And unless you have been a teacher, you do not understand that system. And I really want to emphasize that unless you have been a teacher, you do not understand that system. Specifically in the context of mixed reality or XR in general, you need to be able to adapt the technology to that system, not change the system to fit the technology.

Nicole Jarbo:
It's so important to meet teachers where they're at when it comes to edtech.

Jonathan Teske:
In a classroom setting, you need to shift to think about how to utilize what technology is available to us that can solve specific problems in a classroom as to seeing the classroom as a problem that technology needs to solve, and I think that comes from being a teacher.

Nicole Jarbo:
What pitfalls do products have built for teachers that are not informed by teachers?

Jonathan Teske:
I think the biggest, it still feels obvious, is that it's not utilizing the teacher's superpowers and that is giving them the right tools to create activities, instances, opportunities for students in a way that fits their pedagogy or their classroom makeup or their student population.

Nicole Jarbo:
And if I'm a teacher and I'm using Reframe with my classroom, literally illustrate for us, tell us the story of what that experience is like.

Jonathan Teske:
A teacher enters Reframe initially from planning, so they're by themselves or with maybe one other adult. They're in a headset. They build their spatial classroom in a headset.

Nicole Jarbo:
They can interact with both the physical and digital environment simultaneously.

Jonathan Teske:
The classroom is the opportunity to place what we call stations. Stations are where people work together, which is a visualization of seeing five stick figures in front of a 3D visualization that says, "Hey, this is where your students are going to work together." So in the headset, they're placing these stations in the room, up to five students per station. They're also being able to preview the content that they want the students to do so they can select from a menu any content that they want to preview that is aligned to a specific theme, topic, subject matter. They can try out the content immediately in mixed reality.

Nicole Jarbo:
Teachers can choose from experiences like creating an experiment on natural sinkholes to learn about ecosystems, erosion and water cycles, or experiences where students are immersed in lessons about physics where they're interacting with space shuttles, or lessons that teach students about earth sciences.

Jonathan Teske:
So say we're an earth science classroom and a teacher has the electromagnetic spectrum coming up.

Nicole Jarbo:
In case you're not familiar with the electromagnetic spectrum, it's basically all the different types of energy waves traveling through space. By switching a telescope to different wavelength settings, you can uncover all kinds of cool details about space, and that's exactly what students will be doing.

Jonathan Teske:
They'll start their sessions, students will then, they'll log in with their code, then they'll sit in the lobby and start to get used to the controls, which is really fun to watch 30 kids starting to get used to, if this is their first time in Reframe, let alone VR, having fun with this fun animated earth that they can manipulate while they're sitting in a lobby.

Nicole Jarbo:
So when students put their headsets on, they see a huge earth in front of them all while still being able to see the full classroom and their peers.

Jonathan Teske:
And then when the teacher's ready, they start the session again from the web portal, and then students get directed to the station that they're assigned, that they were assigned to on the web portal. And they see this countdown timer. So once that timer is done, the scene comes alive.

We wanted to allow students to role-play as NASA scientists, and so what they see is the James Webb telescope right in the middle. And then there are controls on the right side to pick different wavelengths, and they're pointing that Webb telescope at these different twinkles and they're trying to use the slider, which is just different wavelengths just like a scientist now would do, and trying to figure out, "Oh, this wavelength at this specific light source, it reveals this specific object."

Nicole Jarbo:
So imagine you're a student wielding a telescope as you look at different twinkles in the sky. In the distance, you see a super bright light shining across the entire galaxy. Could it be a star that's exploded, a supernova? Using the wavelength controls, you shine an X-ray light on the object and reveal it isn't a supernova but actually a neutron star, or I might think I see a rock, but when I adjust the wavelength settings to gamma, I see that it's actually a planet with a moon next to it.

Jonathan Teske:
So these are meant to be five to 10 minute experiences that compound over time because if you have three or four of those, well, that's 20 to 30 minutes of your class. That's a really good learning in a 50-minute secondary school setting.

Nicole Jarbo:
Part of what I love about Jonathan's idea is that he isn't just focusing on the student experience. He's focusing more on the educator experience with Reframe XR. A big part of what Reframe offers is helping teachers with their planning and facilitation in the classroom. All of this is informed by Jonathan's life as a teacher.

Jonathan Teske:
Well, I remember when I was planning whether it was today's lesson, tomorrow's lesson or next week, I was thinking about grouping strategies, movement around the classroom, the activities that students would do around the classroom, or if it was a lab, what if I could give you the power to do that in a headset and say, "Hey, you're going to have to use the same mental faculties to do that with Reframe in mixed reality. You will put a headset on, but you'll do it in five minutes." And that has been our wedge. That has been our door opener to both empowering teachers because it gives them a sense of control they've never had because they're deciding where stations will go, they're deciding what content will be interacted with because they will interact with that content itself in mixed reality.

Nicole Jarbo:
But the student experience is an important part of Reframe's mission too.

Jonathan Teske:
I think the low-hanging fruit is that it's hyper-engaging because you can literally only interact with what you can see, which does create its own level of, I would say more emotional engagement. The social engagement piece comes from A, you're in pass-through. You see the world just like you would, and so you get that social component that is an important driver of the classroom regardless of what technology you're using. That should also be a key sticking point here is what I love to say is a student's best resource is another student no matter what technology they're using.

Nicole Jarbo:
What are you going to do if you win this 50K? How is that going to help Reframe?

Jonathan Teske:
We talk about Reframe as an industry maker or industry expander in the sense that there has been no one that I can tell in the space who has died on the sword of saying, "Hey, someone needs to finally build some infrastructure around here." And what that means for us is investing in an ecosystem that empowers developers.

And so what we're actually testing with our first school partner, Broward, is not only a gen ed approach where gen ed teachers are just going to be using the content to facilitate their instruction, is we're actually working with a set of 10 teachers, 10 computer science teachers who are going to act as developers. And so where we would really focus is really helping any developer have access to building and deploying in Reframe. We need to get to that next step. That's where we'd start to focus on.

Nicole Jarbo:
Jonathan's got a bold vision for the future of Reframe. Now he gets to share his idea with Jin-Soo Huh. Jin-Soo is a partner at The Learning Accelerator. They're an education nonprofit working to transform K12 learning.

Jin-Soo Huh:
Part of what we do is we figure out what are best practices or exciting practices or promising practices at the classroom, school and district level. And this could look like assessment, it could look like technology, it could look like staffing. The last few years in particular, I've been working on edtech processes and procurement and selection, implementation and evaluation at the district level.

Nicole Jarbo:
Jin-Soo is also passionate about the potential for edtech to transform how we learn.

Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm also just excited about this work with virtual reality, augmented reality, other emerging technologies, as we've seen with generative AI, and we've been working with a lot of schools as they think about how to implement this and help support their teachers in doing this.

Nicole Jarbo:
He was also a teacher himself, so he understands these systems intimately.

Jin-Soo Huh:
I was also a math teacher and I taught middle school math, so all the way from sixth grade all the way to pre-calculus. I didn't get to calculus but could teach it, but haven't done it in a while on here.

Nicole Jarbo:
Now Jin-Soo will dive deep into what he thinks we should know about Jonathan's pitch. This can help you decide if Reframe should win the 50K. There's so many big questions about the product, questions like what is the impact of a tool like Reframe on student engagement in the age of chronic absenteeism beyond the electromagnetic spectrum lesson? What other lessons does Jonathan have up his sleeve that can help demonstrate the strength of his idea? And of course, is the juice worth the squeeze? How is this better than just watching a video? And finally, investment. How can Jonathan convince schools to buy this tool when their federal funding cuts across the country? Here's Jin-Soo's conversation with Jonathan.

Jin-Soo Huh:
So let's talk about Reframe XR. Something that I really liked about it was this recognition of meeting teachers where they are. I'm doing work right now on the school team's AI collaborative, and it's like recognizing we can't just have AI as an after-school club. It has to be embedded and classroom teachers need to know how to use it as well. So I saw that as a real strength of Reframe XR as something that you're like, "I recognize this is where teachers are. We need to meet them in the classroom and integrate it with their curriculum and make it a really easy lift as possible for teachers."

So that was something that really resonated with me, and I also really liked, right now after COVID, student engagement has just been really hard and also we've seen that with chronic absenteeism and it's not a new issue, but COVID and the post-pandemic has definitely exacerbated it. So I would love to hear a little bit about how are you seeing student engagement in these pilot schools that you're working on with Reframe?

Jonathan Teske:
When we've been running our pilot sites and doing demos as well with kids, they tend to resonate with the ability to talk to each other. So a lot of the students so far that at least I have interacted with across our pilot sites in Broward County and then other demos that I've done with kids over the past year, most of them have been in a VR headset. Most of them still tend to claim, "This is so much better because I can talk to people, I can move around with my feet. I feel safe, I feel grounded. I like doing things collaboratively and cooperatively," which we know is good pedagogy regardless of whatever technology is in the classroom.

We make sure that grounded from the research that my team and I did at Meta onto what we do now is just knowing that as long as we can empower the teacher, make them feel that they are in control of the technology, they will know how best to wield it knowing that the technology already captures student engagement and student excitement, so how do you use that novelty effect to build a sustainable program, sustainable implementation? That is kind of where we're shifting into now.

Jin-Soo Huh:
I am curious to hear, you gave the example about the electromagnetic spectrum. Is there another way that you have seen this in a STEM classroom of how is this integrating with instruction? How are teachers actually preparing to do this? How are they implementing it? What was the lesson that they're doing on it?

Jonathan Teske:
After the electromagnetic spectrum example, we were like, "Well, we've done some others, but let's target how a student can run an experiment on creating natural sinkholes and how they can do that together with other folks."

Nicole Jarbo:
A sinkhole is a hole in the ground that forms when the surface collapses. Learning about sinkholes can help students understand principles about the ecosystem, water and erosion.

Jonathan Teske:
So what we say is, "Hey, here's this 3D cutout of land. You have the ability to change all these different sediment types that have different levels of water flow depending on how you increase the water flow up or down, and there's a certain threshold where a sediment type and water flow creates a natural sinkhole."

Jin-Soo Huh:
I'm curious, I've also seen through the years, there's things like videos. So the sinkhole example, we could watch a video of a sinkhole and how it happens. There are other simulation tools, not with mixed reality or virtual reality. I was simply asking, is it juice worth the squeeze a switch to this versus using something like, "Let's watch a video together and have a discussion"? What for you is like, this is why we need to be doing the next generation of tools?

Jonathan Teske:
I would argue there's nothing greater than the level of engagement you get inside a headset. Video is still passive, and it's almost when we set up any type of group work, we think about... I mean, we use this term in XR, but it's like it's embodied collaboration. You cannot get that from watching a video or having a student click on a browser and have their friend right next to them and hoping that they either are doing the same thing together. Most browser-based experiences are actually not multiplayer. They're still single-player experiences.

If I'm putting students in a group at an experiment to run in a science class, it's not embodied collaboration. It's just a collaboration. We use embodied just because you're in VR and you are running that experience through the headset. But essentially, I think that's the big trade-off you're willing to make if you're willing to invest in this technology, is ensuring that students are still undertaking and interacting with content in a very natural manner versus either A, watching a video which is incredibly passive, or B, doing something on a browser that while not necessarily is passive, is still kind of an alone-together experience.

Nicole Jarbo:
Now, Jonathan mentioned a key word there that I'm sure our audience has been wondering about investment.

Jin-Soo Huh:
Unfortunately right now there's been the reality of a lot of federal funding that's been cut. How do you get folks to adopt something like a new technology when they're also making cuts at the same time? And so what does that look like?

Jonathan Teske:
I think it's balancing messaging and goals and I think not obscuring the now for the later. My head is always, well, what I am teaching them and how I'm teaching them, is that going to be useful in two, three, five years? And I think no matter what age you're teaching students, if you're teaching them to critically think and you're using the right tools for them to do that, you should always have one head in the clouds that's always thinking about innovation and what I want to expose my teachers and students to while also thinking pragmatically.

I like where we are with Reframe, because again, we're very focused on the teacher first versus a very kind of gamified VR experience, which is student first. And so I think that's grounded in a lot of pragmatism, and that's really where the next step of the conversation usually leads to is this can't be a flash in the pan. This can't be something that you want to buy because it's flashy and cool. It has to be followed through with really great implementation. It isn't just, "Here's 10 headsets, go buy some experiences and good luck." This is a sustainable and growing initiative that takes time to nurture. So that's how we kind of talk about the conversation and the need and just really helping schools find that balance if they're ready to finally take that step.

Nicole Jarbo:
Now that Jin-Soo has learned all about Jonathan's idea, he'll distill some final advice to leave Jonathan with as he moves forward.

Jin-Soo Huh:
This was really cool learning about Reframe XR and I think some strengths that I really see. I think that you clearly come in with a teacher mindset. You know what the day-to-day is and what planning looks like, thinking about how do I make sure I can put the teacher in the student's shoes and those kinds of things. I think that's clearly built in, and I'm excited that you have that forward-thinking. I like the way that you're framing the why, especially as you're talking to superintendents who are trying to figure out where to put their budgets. I do not envy their situation right now. You being able to say, if this is the critical thinking that we're building, these are skills that you're building, I think it's finding those partnerships, those STEM directors who understand that this is going to be an investment. And I also like that you just mentioned if VR, the hardware is going to grow in this area, there needs to be an infrastructure and someone needs to provide it.

Jonathan Teske:
Finally, someone needs to do it.

Jin-Soo Huh:
Because you can give all the devices in the world, but if there's not curriculum or other things like that to use, then it's not going to be as helpful for students and teachers. The advice I have for you, I think these are things that you're already thinking about, but I do worry a lot about the federal funding and funding for schools right now, and so thinking about what are pipelines? Is this going to be supplemented potentially by other avenues of funding, whether it's after school, potentially even parents and others? So I wonder about potentially diversifying as you go down the road, but wanting to work with teachers first. I think that's a good... I understand that.

Jonathan Teske:
I'll leave you with this too. I've told a lot of folks, both investors and even other schools, a lot of our pipeline is actually outside the country.

Jin-Soo Huh:
I also love to hear that other countries are thinking about investing more in their education systems.

Jonathan Teske:
Yes.

Jin-Soo Huh:
Perhaps we could learn from that on here.

Jonathan Teske:
Yeah, I hope.

Jin-Soo Huh:
Well, Jonathan, it was great to learn about your journey, about Reframe XR and the work that you're doing, and so I wish you the best of luck, and I'm excited to see where you go from here.

Jonathan Teske:
Appreciate it. It was great talking to you. Thanks, Jin-Soo.

Nicole Jarbo:
So as Jonathan continues to grow Reframe, staying true to his teacher first approach while continuing to build strong relationships with partners will be key. Thank you, Jonathan, for sharing your pitch with us today, and thank you, Jin-Soo, for your mentorship and advice.

All right, let's talk about a few things that all educators, founders, and social entrepreneurs can learn from Jonathan's story, first.

Jonathan Teske:
Personally, my worth and meaning is making sure that I leave an impact on folks, and that doesn't always mean that it's the flashiest thing. It just needs to solve one really, really interesting or hard problem.

Nicole Jarbo:
If you could solve one really interesting or hard problem, what would it be? And remember not to overcomplicate it. Second.

Jonathan Teske:
This can't be a flash in the pan. This can't be something that you want to buy because it's flashy and cool. It has to be followed through with really great implementation.

Nicole Jarbo:
Make sure your solutions are sustainable. Third.

Jin-Soo Huh:
I recognize this is where teachers are. We need to meet them in the classroom and integrate it with their curriculum and make it a really easy lift as possible for teachers.

Nicole Jarbo:
With any education innovation, consider teachers, not just their students. Thanks for tuning in to Pitch Playground from 4.0. I'm your host, Nicole Jarbo. Learn more about Pitch Playground at PitchPlayground.com and leave us a review if you liked the episode. Next episode,  we have Lisa Maria Rhodes, founder of ALAS on the show

Lisa Maria Rhodes:
Who made the systems? People did. So who can change the systems? We can. So my real question is, who are we not to?

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