Atom Learning

Atom Learning is a UK-based EdTech platform aimed at primary school children and their teachers. Founded in 2018, it now works with thousands of schools and families across the UK. Co-founder Alex Hatvany shares his thoughts on the future of Atom and using technology to close the loop in personalized learning.

Atom Learning was born out of a desire to make personalized learning more accessible and consistent. How does the platform use AI to address this?

When I was in law school, I started doing private tutoring to make ends meet and noticed that parents were investing early in their children's education. But private tuition is something that only wealthier families can afford. The quality of teaching also varies greatly. So, I wanted to see how we could use technology to recreate the private school experience online and automate it as much as possible to make it more accessible and consistent. Our home learning platform, Atom Home, combines high-quality, teacher-made content with AI that adapts the content to a child's individual level and then gamifies it.

Is it all about making learning fun? Put simply, is this the gamification of education?

We want children to find the platform fun to use. But we also noticed that with a lot of apps, children were spending an excessive amount of time changing the colour of an avatar's hair, versus doing math or science. The big unlock is if you can get children learning at the right difficulty level for them, and then gamify that – but not to the point where they lose academic rigor. It's a delicate balance to get right.

How is Atom adaptive? How can parents and schools be sure it is picking the right questions?

With adaptive assessments you can get children to a point where they're learning at exactly the right difficulty level for them. So, you're pushing them, but not to a point where it's demotivating. Our algorithm can quickly predict within 1% the probability that a child will answer the next question correctly or incorrectly. So, you can start to determine the right probability to keep them engaged and build their confidence. That type of personalization just isn't possible in a class of, say, 30 children.

There are no shortcuts to getting within that 1% accuracy level. Whenever we create new questions, our educators at Atom will assign them a difficulty level from -1 to 5 based on specifications. But as hundreds of children answer the questions, the model learns and adapts the difficulty level as needed. As a result, we have a question bank that is standardized by many thousands of students, from which the algorithm can choose and assign to children at the level best suited to them, based on their previous answers.

What's been the key to your growth?

As soon as we launched our home learning platform – which today has tens of thousands of paying parent/guardian subscribers, we started getting messages from schools and teachers saying how much they liked it and asking us to build something for them.

So we built our school platform, Atom School, which allows teachers to create lessons and homework, run tests, and get performance insights. Crucially, we've kept it free of charge. As we onboard schools and build trust with them, they start to recommend our home learning platform as a tool that parents can use when they inevitably ask, “What more can my child be doing?” That B2B2C model has been key to our growth.

It also enables us to bridge the disconnect that can develop between home and school learning. We see so many students answering questions over the holidays, and with parents' permission, we can share the learnings from that with teachers.

How many schools are now using the free platform? What's next?

Over 10,000 teachers are now using Atom School with 200,000 children able to access teacher-assigned work free of charge. We're about to launch a third product: Quest, our first paid platform for schools. Teachers can run assessments during the academic year and see how children are doing as they work their way through the school year. It's taken years of having our free school platform in market to understand where the real pain points are and how we can add value.

What are some of those pain points? How are you addressing them?

When we talk about how AI could change education, I think it's important to take a step back: a lot of schools are still using spreadsheets to enter data manually, which is very time-consuming. We can give teachers that time back: for example, our free school platform allows them to create lessons and homework. All the content is there so they can decide how much guidance to give the children. For example, do they want them to see help sheets or videos? They can track progress in real time to see how the children are progressing, and everything is automatically graded. They can also run tests.

Through our data visualizations, teachers can understand at the school, class, and individual levels, where the strengths and areas for improvement are, and use that to assign personalized work to each child. They can also demonstrate impact and have more informed conversations with stakeholders, from parents to governors.

What further gains will Quest enable?

Atom, at present, focuses on learning at home and in schools.

Quest lets you track students' progress, and it also lets you run assessments. Primary schools have to do both, but don't currently get both from a single provider. Quest provides the questions and content, automatically marks answers and provides a filterable dashboard to find the information you need and allow you to share it with anyone who needs it.

The final step is bringing together learning and assessments. It connects the data from testing to the student's learning personalization and so closes the loop of assessment, data and personalized learning. That holistic approach is where we want to head as a company.

What is Atom Learning's point of differentiation?

Our connection with the teaching community sets us apart: until you sit down with hundreds of teachers to understand what problems they want solved, you don't really know what's going to be useful to them. Having a free platform out there, which tens of thousands of teachers are using every month, has helped us to have those conversations, adapt quickly to feedback, and understand how to be a true and helpful digital partner to teachers and schools.

What do you think AI and technology can help us achieve as a society in the long run?

I think AI is going to enable a more immersive, engaging, personalized experience for children, helping to keep every single child motivated and uncover their strengths.

It's also essential that on the teaching side we retain as much talent as possible. The best way to do that is to allow teachers to get back to teaching and what drew them to their jobs in the first place. It wasn't manual data entry or burdensome end-of-term formalities. AI can help automate the administrative side of things. In that way, we're also more likely to get reliable, consistent, objective data across multiple years.

What lessons have you learned through Atom?

When it comes to education, you need to take a long-term view. Building an EdTech company isn't like creating a consumer app that just takes off. You need to be patient to get a sense of where the pain points are. But if you build something high quality, it's amazing how quickly word spreads, and it all starts to compound.

Why do you think EdTech's moment is now?

It feels like this is an important moment in time when schools and other groups are considering their digital strategies – partly because it was forced on them during Covid. They're a long way behind the business sector because often the budget isn't there.

The other issue is that, at least in the UK, the large companies in education are typically paper-based publishers, not technology companies. So, it's not that teachers are anti-tech; it's more likely they haven't seen any good technology solutions. We want to be spearheading that.

It's virtually impossible for those incumbent paper-based publishers to cross the chasm into being tech companies, so as the world continues to move online and AI speeds up this process, there is now a real opportunity for tech companies to step up and be a helpful partner to schools. It makes me feel bullish and excited about the future.