Do you have a teen who’s trying to find a direction in life? Maybe you know a kid who’s really passionate about video games, but doesn’t know what skills they need to make it in the industry.
Sparkon, a Redmond-based startup that launches today, aims to provide resources for teens who have questions like those and many more. It’s built on the foundations of a service called empower.me, which we reported on last year.
“Life in a box”
The service, primarily targeted towards teenagers and their families, uses a student’s interests and a pair of personality tests to create what Sparkon calls a “SparkMap” – a large, interactive document that outlines opportunities for teens to explore their interests as well as potential college majors and careers.
“The SparkMap is effectively visualizing their path ahead, getting them excited about it, and out from that comes a very custom learning curriculum that builds that future,” said Sparkon CEO Bryan Starbuck.
Teens are then able to hook into Sparkon’s library of 16,000 educational videos, each with their own quiz to test comprehension, including the Khan Academy library of videos. The videos themselves range from traditional academic subjects like chemistry and politics, to more tech-centric fare like starting a successful startup and modeling 3D objects in Maya.
Sparkon also includes an entire track of videos designed to educate teens about applying for college, and has a collection of life skills videos for them once they’ve started their undergraduate career.
“It’s like a life in a box for them to build up their entire life,” Starbuck said.
Students can sign up on their own for a free Sparkon account, but that significantly hampers the resources they have access to. In order to get to all of the features of the site, their parents have to sign up for a paid account, which will cost between $4 and $6 per month, depending on payment plan.
Parents, in turn, have access to email progress reports about their kids’ activity on the Sparkon site, and can tie rewards to the successful completion of video quizzes.
Finding “internal passion”
Growing up, Starbuck knew he wanted to be a programmer from age 11. For him, having the experience of knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life and how to achieve those goals was a major boon.
“I had a vision of my life. And a lot of kids who end up programming at age 11, 12 — that same thing happens to them. And it gives them a lot of security and clarity,” he said.
But while he was able to find solace in his future career path, he doesn’t see the same avenue being made available for people who choose other majors, or who don’t necessarily know what majors match up with their personal interests.
“For most majors outside of programming, maybe a few, I haven’t seen too many of them, people don’t have that clarity, they don’t have that confidence,” Starbuck said. “My whole vision was take the wonderful experience that the programmer kids get and bring it to every major, every kid of every internal passion.”
What he found, though, was that while he had his passion figured out from a young age, others don’t have it so easy. That’s why Sparkon uses personality tests as a part of their metrics for sussing out a student’s potential life path.
From Sparkon’s internal testing, it seems their system has been successful in driving passion. “In our market studies, we say, ‘From one to ten, how much do you want this?’ and they came off nine and 10 across the board,” Starbuck said.
In the event those passions change, Starbuck says the Sparkon platform is built to support teens in finding what else might be a good fit for them.
“We do not want kids to go lock into one thing and think they’re in a track and they can’t move,” he said. “We think diving into [something you’re passionate about] before college, learning if it’s going to click with you fully, and then hopping around until it finally does click with you fully is a huge success.”
