Online Education
Prince William County Grants $100K to Startup Scriyb to Produce a Cloud-Based Teaching Platform
The Prince William Board of County Supervisors has authorized a $100,000 performance agreement with Scriyb, a technology startup company based at the Virginia Serious Games Institute, to pioneer a new cloud-based live-streaming teaching platform for online education.
This agreement allows Scriyb to scale up and deliver on its mission of engaging STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) K–12 students, who will potentially be a future generation of workers able to address high skill shortage needs regionally and nationally.
“By reshaping access to education, we are unlocking the potential to continue to deliver a highly skilled workforce and fundamentally shift the new economic paradigm,” said Corey A. Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, in a statement. “We hope this marks just the beginning of the potential for Scriyb and the advancement in STEM learning.”
The Prince William Board of County Supervisors authorized an agreement between Scriyb and the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) of Prince William County and assigned a $100,000 grant from the Prince William County Economic Development Opportunity Fund (EDOF). The conditions of the grant require Scriyb to receive matching funds from the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology GAP Funds, maintain five full-time staff positions, and relocate to commercial space in the county along with 13 full-time hires and $25,000 in equipment by the end of December 2017.
According to Scriyb, its cloud-based online education platform bridges the gap for increased demand for specialized STEM instruction of K–12 students, allowing a single teacher to effectively instruct thousands of students in real-time, via a live streaming tool, without sacrificing quality of instruction. Scriyb’s patent-pending algorithms segment an instruction course’s body of students into smaller groups, creating peer-to-peer learning and teacher-student matching, while virtually tracking, measuring, analyzing and correctly balancing the social learning environment.
Scriyb’s online platform will be used to deliver the project lessons to the students of two participating Prince William County public high schools — Forest Park and Potomac. The dual enrollment program will begin in spring 2017 and potentially benefit 200 students.
For more information on Scriyb, visit the company’s website. More information about Prince William County can be obtained by visiting the county’s Department of Economic Development.
About the Author
Richard Chang is associate editor of THE Journal. He can be reached at rchang@1105media.com.