Tell us about your company and the problem it solves, or its benefit to learners or educators.
Penda Learning is a digital science learning and intervention platform for students in grades 3-12. We focus exclusively on science and build our content from the ground up around the standards and performance expectations students are expected to master.
That distinction is important. We don’t simply create one generic piece of content and map it across different state standards. We develop learning experiences around the specific expectations, evidence statements and assessment blueprints educators and students are working with. That also gives us opportunities to make science more relevant, for example, by incorporating phenomena students may recognize from their own state or community.
For students, we want science to be engaging while still requiring meaningful thinking. Purposeful gamification, immediate feedback and repeated opportunities to work with concepts can help students strengthen their understanding rather than simply move through content.
For teachers, the goal is visibility into student thinking. We provide actionable information that can help teachers identify misconceptions and understand where students may be struggling so they can respond in real time.
That reflects a core belief behind how we design Penda: technology shouldn’t replace the teacher. It should help teachers better understand what students know, where they need support and what to do next.
What is the challenge educators face today that is fixable?
One challenge we can address is the lack of coherence among the many resources educators are expected to use.
Curriculum, assessment, intervention, technology and professional development are often introduced as separate initiatives. Teachers are left to connect the dots, and they simply don’t have enough time to do that. Having spent 22 years in K-12 public education before moving into edtech, I know how easy it is to become skeptical of the latest “flavor of the month.” What educators need are resources that work together, are sustainable and give them information they can actually use.
Technology companies can help solve that problem by designing with coherence in mind. Curriculum can align tightly with assessment. Technology can uncover patterns in student performance and make those patterns actionable for teachers. Professional learning can then help educators understand not only how to use a resource, but why it was designed the way it was and how to respond to the information it provides.
That’s the standard I think we should be working toward: coherent systems that reduce unnecessary complexity for teachers, connect curriculum with assessment and professional learning, and provide information educators can use to make better instructional decisions.
What is the challenge educators face today that will persist?
Teaching will always happen under variable conditions.
Students come into classrooms with different experiences, background knowledge, motivations, misconceptions, opportunities and needs. At the same time, schools will continue to face educator shortages, particularly in specialized areas such as science. Those realities aren’t going away.
However, technology can help us respond to those differences. We can provide students with different ways to access content, including language supports and accessibility features. We can give teachers better information about what students understand and where they need help. But we shouldn’t confuse supporting teachers with replacing their professional judgment.
Teaching and learning remain fundamentally human endeavors.
That’s an important distinction as technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. The goal shouldn’t be to automate every decision or create a one-size-fits-all experience. It should be to give educators better tools for making informed decisions about the individual students sitting in front of them.
Technology will continue to change. Students will continue to be different from one another. And teachers will continue to be the people who bring those pieces together.
What are the areas of education, training, and workforce development that are being overlooked?
I think we’re overlooking two closely related areas: scientific thinking and the role science itself can play across the curriculum.
As AI makes it possible to generate information almost instantly, students need to know how to evaluate what appears on their screens. They need to notice patterns, question assumptions, recognize when evidence may be missing, distinguish confident language from evidence-based conclusions and revise their thinking when the evidence changes. Those are scientific habits of mind, but they’re also becoming essential life and workforce skills.
At the same time, particularly in elementary school, so much attention understandably goes to literacy and mathematics that science can receive less instructional time and attention. That’s a missed opportunity because science provides a powerful context for developing those very skills.
Science asks students to analyze and interpret data, use mathematics and computational thinking, evaluate information, communicate ideas and support conclusions with evidence. In that sense, science doesn’t compete with literacy and mathematics—it can help strengthen those subjects.
We also need to build educators’ confidence in teaching science. Not every elementary teacher enters the classroom with deep science content knowledge or feels equally comfortable teaching it. Providing strong instructional guidance and well-sequenced support makes science content and pedagogy more accessible.
If we want students prepared for a world in which they will constantly encounter new information and new technologies, giving them more opportunities to think scientifically is increasingly important.
What do you foresee will be a challenge in education in three to five years?
One of the biggest challenges in education over the next three to five years will be preserving authentic evidence of student learning in a world where AI can generate polished work almost instantly.
There is an important difference between producing something and understanding it. A student may use AI to create an impressive response, but the quality of that response does not necessarily tell us what the student knows, how they arrived at an idea, or whether they can apply their understanding in a new context. That will require educators to rethink not only how students use AI, but also how we design learning experiences and assess what students have learned.
Educational AI, therefore, needs to be designed intentionally. It should support students’ thinking rather than enable them to offload the cognitive work. At Penda Learning, our AI instructional assistant, Cosmos, provides hints and scaffolding rather than simply feeding students answers. The objective is to help students move forward while keeping them engaged in the productive struggle that leads to understanding.
Schools will also be navigating a rapidly changing policy environment. Districts, states and families are taking different approaches to when and how students should use AI. Edtech companies will need to adapt to those decisions while protecting student privacy, maintaining the integrity of the learning experience and giving educators meaningful control over how these tools are used.
AI can be enormously useful for productivity, and I use it myself. But efficiency is not the same as expertise. Everything we place in front of a teacher or student still requires human judgment to determine whether it is accurate, instructionally sound and worthy of being taught.
The defining question over the next several years won’t simply be how much AI we can incorporate into education. It will be whether we can use it in ways that make student thinking more visible, strengthen human judgment and deepen learning rather than simply make the production of answers easier.