This post is part of a special “Meet the Finalists” series, featuring Q&A with the five Reach Higher Career App Challenge finalists.

Our final Meet the Finalists post features Q&A with Ryan Hoch, Co-Founder & CEO of Overgrad, a web platform that leverages community resources, technology, and data to support long-term student outcomes. Overgrad combines academic performance information with results from a career interest survey based on O*NET data to help students select pathways and track their progress toward aspired outcomes.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired you to work on this type of app?

Before starting Overgrad I was a high school math teacher in St. Louis Public Schools. 90% of the juniors and seniors I taught told me they planned on going to college after they graduated yet the data told me only 8% would graduate. I am committed to the work outlined in this challenge because I witnessed first hand just how needed it is.

What have been your biggest challenges and successes in developing your app?

The biggest challenge for us has been the limitations on the size of our team. There is so much we want to do, yet with only four people, prioritization is essential. In terms of successes, since applying for the Challenge, we have grown the number of high schools using Overgrad by 7x.

Your team has now completed the Virtual Accelerator, which included expert mentorship and curated learning modules. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?

That technology cannot solve this problem alone. The process of preparing for life after K-12 education must account for more variables than a platform can address. The role of technology in this space should help facilitate thought and connect students with resources (whether that’s people or content).

What else do you hope to learn at Demo Day?

We are excited to see what all the other teams have been up to. This is a HUGE, complex problem that has room for a lot of different solutions. We can’t wait to see what innovative approaches the other teams have come up with to tackle the issue of postsecondary access.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Finalists” series, featuring Q&A with the five Reach Higher Career App Challenge finalists.

Today’s Meet the Finalists post features Q&A with MARi, a school and career coach app that brings together assessments, capability mapping, and achievement validation, along with personalized career and education opportunities into a comprehensive map of the labor market. MARi is an intelligently connected network that continuously tracks student progress to create a visual gap analysis and alert students of local opportunities.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired you to work on this type of app?  

We passionately believe that all students have such amazing potential within themselves. And, we have seen the transformative power of data when, through an app, students can see how they are progressing to both academic and skill-related goals that they have chosen. MARi wants to empower all students to reach higher – especially those students, that for whatever reason, have special needs and circumstances that are not as easily addressed.

What have been your biggest challenges and successes in developing your app?

MARi works to connect many data sources together for the direct benefit of the student.  Unfortunately, many education apps and data systems are not built to securely share this information.  The good news is that this is slowly changing and competitions like the Reach Higher Career App Challenge are helping to highlight the benefits of connected systems.

Your team has now completed the Virtual Accelerator, which included expert mentorship and curated learning modules. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?

The Virtual Accelerator brought together so many different insights from students, counselors, and industry experts. It’s been an amazing experience. Our greatest insights came from the school counselors. The challenges they face, even from different parts of the country were so very similar. Their passion and dedication to the success of their students – very inspiring to the MARi Team!

What else do you hope to learn at Demo Day?

At Demo Day, the MARi Team has an opportunity to present before a distinguished group of individuals that have been working on student career and college readiness – day in and day out through their various roles. We are very excited to get their feedback on our app and the direction we are headed. MARi is also in this for the long haul and we believe the relationships we begin at Demo Day, including getting to know the other finalist teams, will carry forward to future long-term success.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Finalists” series, featuring Q&A with the five Reach Higher Career App Challenge finalists.

Today’s Meet the Finalists post features Q&A with Inform Journeys from EDmin.com, an interactive learning map app created to help students explore life’s possibilities as they navigate through K-12, CTE, college/university, military service, and/or vocational training. Journeys provides students the ability to create personalized roadmaps to explore career opportunities and access curated resources, in addition to offering career interest surveys, self-assessments, and progress reporting.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired you to work on this type of app?

From the moment we saw the mission of the Reach Higher Challenge, we knew it was a perfect fit with our vision of providing “a platform for innovation that supports student achievement and lifelong learning in a global society”. Students using Journeys can explore life’s possibilities, plan their learning trip with turn-by-turn directions and assess their progress and success. We want all students to have access to Journeys Learning Maps by 2020. Our inspiration is the interactive GPS driving maps used every day and are the foundation for driverless cars of tomorrow. We want Journeys to be equally transformative for lifelong learning.

What have been your biggest challenges and successes in developing your app?

One of our biggest challenges early on was unifying the vision of our diverse team members (teachers, administrators, parents, software developers, marketing and sales) and legacy systems to create a product that would have a positive social impact. These team members ultimately agreed upon a range of use cases that now describe the features and benefits of the Journeys platform. Since then there have been many success stories, not the least of which was being selected as a Reach Higher finalist and the valuable feedback we have received from the expert mentor team.

Your team has now completed the Virtual Accelerator, which included expert mentorship and curated learning modules. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?

The Virtual Accelerator process provided the insight that there truly is a dire need for a

revolutionary platform that assists all learners, including those with accessibility accommodations, in their college and career pursuits. This platform should be open and easy to use. Most of all, it needs to engage students in a way that has never been done before. It is the opinion of the Journeys team, that this sort of powerful social impact starts with something as simple, and old, as a map.

What else do you hope to learn at Demo Day?

We look forward to having the opportunity to present in front of a wide range of experts from various fields and backgrounds. These individuals have provided enormous contributions to education. We view each Demo Day attendee, from the expert mentors and judges to the amazing products submitted by the other finalists, as partners and look forward to learning how we might collectively work together to create a truly transformative product.

This post is part of a special “Meet the Finalists” series, featuring Q&A with the five Reach Higher Career App Challenge finalists.

Today’s Meet the Finalists post features Q&A with ThinkZone Games, the creators of Hats & Ladders, a game-based app that supports middle and high school career exploration with swipe-to-choose self-assessments, connected activities, and mini-challenges. Hats & Ladders provides repeat exposure to a broad spectrum of careers and enables students to draw connections between their personal attributes and multiple pathways to career success.

Why is this Challenge important to you? What inspired you to work on this type of app?

ThinkZone was inspired to develop a learning tool that focused on careers as we were researching and conceptualizing an expansion of our learning games portal concentrated around 21st-century skill building. Our company’s ultimate mission is to build game-driven teaching and learning tools capable of transforming the lives of students by transitioning learning into motivating, authentic experiences. Hats & Ladders is such a tool—a game-based, swipe-to-choose app capable of removing barriers to career advancement that many young people have. Our engaging, game-based app provides repeated exposure to a broad spectrum of jobs and career clusters and helps students draw connections between their personal attributes (i.e., interests, values, preferences, motivations, aptitudes) and multiple pathways to career success.

What have been your biggest challenges and successes in developing your app?

One of our biggest successes during Hats & Ladders initial R&D came in discovering how to build our tool to appeal and have meaning to two distinct audiences—middle schoolers and high schoolers. Middle schoolers typically see career exploration as something they should do in the distant future while many high schoolers are already primed to focus on their future. To solve this challenge, we spent considerable time exploring (a) how to control the flow of career information incrementally to help app users process and organize data more efficiently and (b) how to integrate a range of media we know to be appealing and motivating to our audiences (e.g., still images, videos, game mechanics, rewards, and iconography). Another challenge we overcame during the process was discovering how to build our app to be both COPPA and FERPA compliant since requirements differ for our two audiences (students under and above 13 years old).

Your team has now completed the Virtual Accelerator, which included expert mentorship and curated learning modules. What’s the biggest insight you’ve uncovered through this process so far?

The Virtual Accelerator mentors were helpful in guiding us through decision-making around a number of key areas including ongoing R&D (UX/UI and data), preparing for Demo Day, and even honing our business plan. To maximize our time with mentors, we tried to organize conversations around the toughest issues and the most profound questions we had, and we quickly learned to send questions and visual artifacts ahead of time so mentors could better prepare for our meetings.

What else do you hope to learn at Demo Day?

ThinkZone looks forward to Demo Day so that we can show off the hard work we have put into Hats & Ladders during the Virtual Accelerator period. We also look forward to seeing our competitors’ demos and having a chance to speak directly to potential beta users, strategic partners, and investors.