Venture: Genius Plaza
Genius Plaza is the first multicultural education platform built for diverse communities.
Expert: Jeff Argast
Sr. Director of Engineering, Adobe
• VP Engineering, Shutterfly
• CTO, Penguin Digital
The Genius Plaza platform improves student learning by providing engaging, practical, research-based curriculum where students are the protagonists of their learning, with interactive, culturally relevant content. Genius Plaza has shown an 83% increase in academic achievement, and more than 240 point increases in SAT scores.
Genius Plaza’s top priority was to deliver its service to the poorest of the poor who do not have reliable (or any) internet access. In order to do so, Genius Plaza needed to build a system that enables offline usage of its platform, while being able to synchronize offline content and data with its existing web-based platform. Genius Plaza partnered with Rippleworks to design and test data synchronization between its online and offline systems.
Working with Rippleworks and Jeff helped us build our offline product to reach the world’s poorest children in rural Africa and Latin America. This was one of the most rewarding projects we’ve built. Now we’re in the middle of the pilot phase and we can already see the great results.
—Genius Plaza CEO Ana Roca Castro
Genius Plaza teamed with Rippleworks Expert Jeff Argast, who has led technology teams as a senior engineering executive at companies such as Adobe and Shutterfly. Together, they:
• Reviewed product and database architecture, defined scenarios for offline data sync, designed and iterated the algorithm for defined use cases
• Developed the data sync algorithm, including creating baseline design and designing cloud, hub, client structure
• Prototyped and tested offline data sync algorithm, and documented solution architecture for offline sync
• Prioritized key features of Genius Plaza’s offline Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and identified features for the MVP, alpha release, and full release
• Developed roadmap and launch plan for taking product from MVP to alpha/beta release
