Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Transforming Screen Time into Learning Time with Nurture
Julie Stewart and Scott Stewart, award-winning creators behind global children’s shows for Disney, Netflix, and Sesame Workshop, co-founded Nurture with serial entrepreneur Roger Egan, former CEO of RedMart, and learning expert Musa Roshdy, a Minerva University alum and advisor at Transcend Network, to build future-ready skills through immersive play.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- How Nurture turns screen time into active learning
- Why story and humor drive deeper engagement
- How AI enables adaptive, personalized play
- The power of using beloved characters for learning
- Why fun and learning should never be separate
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:01:00] Julie Stewart on kids becoming heroes inside immersive stories
[00:02:30] Roger Egan’s shift from e-commerce to early childhood learning
[00:09:30] Scott Stewart on humor and engagement as core learning tools
[00:16:00] Julie Stewart on AI and the Model Context Protocol for storytelling
[00:24:00] The team debates AI tutors with personality vs. personality-free chatbots
[00:33:00] Musa Roshdy on preventing “learned helplessness” from childhood
[00:45:00] Nurture’s strategy to partner with iconic children’s brands
[00:50:00] Breaking the taboo that fun and learning can’t coexist
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[00:00:00] Julie Stewart: Nurture is an immersive learning platform. So our CEO, he identified that there would be a learning gap between what skills kids are learning in school today and what they're going to need in the future. And skills like growth mindset, financial thinking, problem solving, creativity. So it's an app, and when you launch it, you'll see lots of islands and these islands each represent an adventure, but upon tapping, you immediately feel like you're pulled into an animated story and it feels like you're watching until all of a sudden something goes wrong and one of the characters looks at the screen and they say, you know what?
I think I need some help. I think I'm gonna call a nurture buddy. And guess what? That nurture buddy is you. So your phone actually starts ringing, which is really quite remarkable. Your phone rings. You are like, should I answer the phone? Of course, you should answer the phone. You answer the phone and they're like, oh my gosh, we need help.
Please help us do this, X, Y, or Z to save the day. You say, yes, you become the hero of the story. Once you solve the problem, then you're pulled back out right into the linear, and the story continues and the characters. Thank you.
[00:00:58] Scott Stewart: One of the things we've seen with a lot of EdTech platforms is they focused on AI as transmissive and not transformation.
I mean, when you look back since the 18 hundreds, we've had like chalk slate for kids, and it's drill and kill. It's skew, amorphism. It's taking like what have we always known? And then how do we kind of apply this but get it to like a wider audience? And what we focus on in, in Nurture is how to transform that experience.
Like it doesn't have to be a chalk site. I mean it can be, but then what else can it be in addition to that? So this is why we do all this stuff in a game engine because it can live and breathe and it can be modified. You know, if the child wants to spend 30 minutes customizing or doing the art part of the project before they dive back into the story, they can, they kind of set their own speed.
As a result, it really does help that kind of learning seep in because they're living in that space for as long as they want to.
[00:01:45] Musa Roshdy: The more you work with adult learners, the more you realize the number one impediment to learning is actually their disposition to learning the negative experiences they had early on.
The sort of learned helplessness that develops. And to be honest, from my perspective, there's this almost stigma and gap between adult learning and childhood learning. Like they're their two different worlds and they don't touch much. And to me this kind of felt silly. And so I was excited about the chance to take everything I'd learned there and extend backwards and really work with.
Children who don't yet have these encumbrances on their experiences of learning. And so the whole vision of childhood media and using these places where kids are already responding to building that sort of pro-social, that growth mindset element into it, while also building the concrete building blocks of these skills was just so incredible.
[00:02:32] Roger Egan: If you wanna build in the motivation for learning, having it be aligned with their interests matters a lot. I know my son loves Monster Trucks and cars and Hot Wheels is his favorite show. And if there's something being taught through Hot Wheels, it's definitely gonna work with him, but he might not be as interested in something else.
So that's the point is these are already beloved brands. They have different audiences for different interests. And if we can just get a collection of them. My co-founders, Scott and Julie, have created many successful children's television shows, and we have our own original ip, which I think will do really well.
They have an excellent track record. But we said, why not leverage all these brands that are out there? And the good news is that. They love the mission behind Nurture, and we're getting a lot of traction despite being a small startup, so we hope to add more and more over time.
[00:03:27] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to ai developments across early childhood, K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events.
And back channel Insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
We have a super special episode of EdTech Insiders. This week we are talking to the team behind Nurture, which is a platform for animated, story driven learning games that help kids between four and seven years old build future proof skills through play, and includes characters from well-known ip. Today we are talking to the award-winning husband and wife team, Julie and Scott Stewart.
They're co-founders and chief creative officers of Nurture. They have a proven track record of creating and producing global children's animated hits, such as Abby's Flying Ferry School, Kate and Mim Mim, Rev and Roll, and Lego Friends The Next Chapter, their extensive experience includes producing Emmy winning content for Sesame Workshop and leading projects for major companies.
Disney, Nickelodeon, BBC, Netflix, and YouTube. Julie brings an educator's lens to playful, story-driven learning. While Scott applies his entertaining storytelling and brand expertise, and together they create engaging worlds that resonate with kids and families worldwide. Scott Stewart and Julie Stewart.
Welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:05:18] Scott Stewart: Alex, thank you so much for having us. We're very excited to just be talking to you.
[00:05:22] Julie Stewart: Yes, thank you, Alex.
[00:05:23] Alex Sarlin: Julie, I gave a little bit of an intro about what Nurture is that It's story driven learning games. Tell us more about what you're doing with Nurture.
[00:05:31] Julie Stewart: Thanks, Alex. Nurture is an immersive learning platform, so our CEO, his name is Roger Egan.
He identified that there would be a learning gap between what skills kids are learning in school today and what they're going to need in the future, and skills like growth mindset, financial thinking, problem solving, creativity. And so he thought that we really needed to create this experience for children.
So it's an app and when you launch it. You'll see lots of islands and these islands each represent an adventure, some ip, so that's either our home ip, which is Dokey Delivery, or Fluffle Factory or something like that, or third party ip. And those are all gonna be announced soon, which is really exciting and we're, we'll be continuing to license more characters for that as well.
But upon tapping, you immediately feel like you're pulled into an animated story and it feels like you're watching until all of a sudden one of the characters, something goes wrong and one of the characters looks at the screen and they say, you know what? I think I need some help. I think I'm gonna call a nurture buddy.
And guess what? That nurture buddy is you. So your phone actually starts ringing, which is like. Really quite remarkable. Your phone rings. You are like, should I answer the phone? Of course, you should answer the phone. You answer the phone and they're like, oh my gosh, we need help. Please help us do this X, Y, or Z to save the day.
You become the hero. You say yes. You become the hero of the story. You are immersed in this game. Once you solve the problem, then you're pulled back out right into the linear, and the story continues, and the characters thank you for being their hero for saving the day. In addition, we have these really cool moments where you, the child, are propelling the narrative forward, and so perhaps there's something that you need to catch.
Perhaps there's something that you need to reveal. Or perhaps there's a door you need to knock on or something you need to open. So you, the child are in the, you are the hero and you're in the driver's seat the whole time. And plus, last thing that we have is this really cool customization. So you can create, you can, there are certain characters that you customize and then those characters show up in the story.
And there's also certain vehicles that you customize. And so you see your own creations in the story. So this makes it incredibly immersive. But at the heart of it, we have these phenomenal learning outcomes that we're all aimed at for the future of life and work.
[00:07:38] Alex Sarlin: That approach sounds very compelling for young people.
The idea of being pulled into really immersive, animated stories, deep stories, and part of what excites me about your team and what you're doing is that you come to this with a long ex, lots of experience creating really serious children's animated work from with, as we mentioned, Sesame Workshop, Netflix, YouTube.
Scott, let me ask you. You've created preschool shows seen in over 130 countries. And you've done many different types of projects, how did that global experience influence your vision for what you're doing with Nurture? And how do you think it's gonna change your growth compared to traditional ed tech companies?
[00:08:15] Scott Stewart: What we've learned is that kids all around the world have very similar taste. They like to be entertained, they like to learn, and they also like to teach. So what we try to do is set up our stories in a very clear structure so that it's easy for them to digest and kind of reiterate. We've also learned in a very humbling sense that kids have very finite amount of time and you are competing with everything.
Whether you're competing with a Pixar movie or you're competing with a brand new puppy, there's only so much time that they have every day to engage. So one of the things that we really try to do at Nurture is make sure we make it worth their time, not just worth the parents' time, but we also wanna value and honor them as little learners and little storytellers and whatnot.
And as Julie mentioned. They have the opportunity to kind of impact what they see on screen. The story is always the story. We don't do kind of like branching narratives at this point in time, but they can do something. They can create art, they can influence the way the characters look, and they can influence the way the vehicles look.
And that to them lets them know that they're kind of heard and felt.
[00:09:13] Julie Stewart: The other thing that's really nice about it is at the end of each of the adventures, there's a little bit of a reflection moment. So the character looks back at the screen and they say, when have you ever experienced something like that?
So what Scott's kind of referring to with like that ability to teach, that's where that comes. It's prompting the child to go forth and explain to their parent or their caregiver what they've learned.
[00:09:34] Alex Sarlin: You, you mentioned that the educational outcomes for nurture, it's not like you're teaching traditional academic subjects through Nurture, at least not at the moment.
It's not math, ELA science. You're teaching mindfulness, you're teaching mindset, you're teaching this idea of future skills. So Julie, as a teacher and a creative producer, how are you making sure nurture's adventures, respect the developmental stages, and are really thinking about that sort of skill development?
While sparking curiosity and playfulness and story for four to seven year olds.
[00:10:04] Julie Stewart: Well, nurture is literally the convergence of everything I've ever done in my career. I started out as a preschool teacher and a first grade, and then I went into teaching first grade. That traditional education for me was amazing.
You know, to be able to understand child development, to be able to really honor children who are that young and be their first educators was a beautiful honor for me. I then went on to create my own computer school for children where they were creating their own books, their own movies. It was a very creative environment, and what I learned in those two scenarios is that two things, first of all, I learned a whole bunch about child development and what they were ready for, and I could see on the fly what they were listening to and how they were learning.
In addition, I learned that it was really, really important to engage, really important to think about different ways to engage different types of brains, because not all brains are the same, and it's really important to honor the individual child. We've now merged all of this together, right? So we've merged this educational aspect and this entertaining aspect right together to create this beautiful, immersive, creative storytelling games.
[00:11:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And you know, that idea of putting children in both sort of the learner and the teacher's seat, literally pulling them into the story with a phone call is really, is really innovative. And I always say, you know, story is one of the most fundamental ways in which we communicate, in which we think. But we don't use it nearly as much as we should and could in education or in ed tech.
And so, Scott, let me pass this to you. You, you, you've done story in so many different contexts and you've always thought of story as an engine for learning. You've done Sesame Street work. We mentioned Abbey's Ferry School, you know, Kate and Mim, rev and roll. These are all properties in which story is really leveraged for learning.
How do you see that same storytelling, DNA, evolving now that you're creating learning experiences, especially AI powered learning experiences at Nurture?
[00:11:54] Scott Stewart: So story is at our core, right? That's how we communicate. That's what we do. And everybody, I mean, regardless of what happened in your day or your child's day, it's story.
And you know you need prompts for little kids. If you ask a little kid if they had a good day, they're just gonna say yes or no. If you ask them if they painted with the color purple, they get very specific, right? So you kind of have to prompt, you have to make them care. You have to make it worth their time.
You have to give them narrative world building characters that they feel that there are stakes there, that they actually really care about it. And we do put these little Easter eggs in where if you do go and kind of customize something that the characters see it for the first time you painted the airship.
And they'll be like, is this a new color on the airship? I like it. And like, and of course that's a canned audio file that we've done, but just the fact that the child kind of sees that there's this opportunity to actually be felt. One of the things we've seen with a lot of kind of ed tech platforms is they focused on AI as kind of transmissive and not transformation, right?
I mean, when you look back to since the 18 hundreds we've had like kind of chalk slate for kids, right? And it's drilling kill, it's skew morphs. It's kind of taking like, what have we always known, you know, and then how do we kind of apply this but get it to like a wider audience? And what we focus on in, in Nurture is.
How to transform that experience. Like it doesn't have to be a chalk site. I mean, it can be, but then what else? What else can it be in addition to that? So this is why we do all this stuff in a game engine. Because it can live and breathe and it can be modified, and it can really, you know, if the child wants to spend 30 minutes customizing or doing the art part of the project before they dive back into the story, like they can, they kind of set their own speed and it, it's the way in which they want to engage the story of the narrative.
And as a result, it really does help that kind of learning seep in because they're living in that space for as long as they want to. Yeah.
[00:13:37] Alex Sarlin: That ability for children to sort of decide where to lean into a particular story, what excites them is, I think, fundamental to what the media experience is right now for children.
They, they have so many, you mentioned, you know, the Pixar movie versus the the New Puppy. There's so many different things that are competing for children's attention right now, but certain aspects of each thing really grab them based on their interests, based on what their difficulties or fears or excitements.
And so I love that you have sort of set up an environment where children can really put themselves into it and dive deep and spend time where they really want to. You know, I, Julie, from your perspective, one of the things that you do with Nurture that is very interesting. You mentioned sort of in passing this idea of, but it's very important obviously, this idea of these islands and that you can have different.
Types of islands that might have different types of characters in them that might even come from different media. They could come from television shows, they could come from networks. You know, you're not confining the students to your own stories, but you're actually allowing others to create stories.
And from your perspective, what makes innovations like that? And this, this con, this idea you have of the model context protocol, exciting for creative learning design. It sounds incredibly exciting to me. Tell us what your vision is of how this is gonna go.
[00:14:47] Julie Stewart: It is really, really exciting at a simple level model context protocol helps AI systems keep context and memory.
And the reason why this is important is because they can respond intelligently. It's not just one-off interactions. And this in animation is absolutely critical because you need to have that iteration. So when I was a teacher, what was so fabulous about teaching and you are live with the kids, right? And so you might teach the same lesson all day, or you might teach the same lesson all week and every single lesson.
It's a little bit different. You're honing your skills, you're honing, you're, you're watching, you're paying attention to what they're responding to, and that is the live feedback that is amazing in TV or my other career, it's summative. You get to do all of that at the end after it's been produced, which can be a little frustrating when you wanna change some simple thing that you know will really affect the engagement or will really affect the way the child is perceiving the world or learning.
This, the model context protocol allows us to actually be able to iterate. So we can beta test, we can learn and we can quickly refine. And that's what's really exciting for us as creators, is that you get to really meet the child where they are and you get to make sure that everything is as engaging and as immersive as possible, and that the learning comes front and center.
[00:16:08] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And people who listen to this podcast may know that the model context protocol from Anthropic or from the idea of the age agentic ai, that a model context protocol creates this sort of glue where all the different interactions and different applications can sort of work together. And I'm hearing you say that in this context.
It's a model context protocol that can put together the pieces and keep the story engaging, keep the different types of animation, basically allow a agile. Development of story instead of having to just put out an episode at the end and say, oh, I wish we had done this one thing differently, but we never will be able to.
[00:16:41] Julie Stewart: That's exactly right. And the beauty of it is that the memory, the context of it, it's retaining all the assets, it's retaining all of the animation, it's keeping the characters. So these are things that have not yet been done or explored as an industry. We've been trying to do it, but this is the way of the future with respect to AI and the cp.
[00:17:00] Scott Stewart: So, you know, every now and again I've been Julie's teaching assistant if someone called in sick and I worked from home as a visual effects artist, so I was always so entranced with the way that she would teach. And you know, Julie's point about kind of iterating as you go throughout the day, you know, telling a child that a blue whale is as long as three school buses doesn't really mean a whole lot.
Right? That's a very hard thing to grasp. Then I remember, you know, Julie was kind of trying to explain this and instead she took a piece of chalk and she took the entire classroom out into the playground and she drew a very, not the best, but a blue whale, you know, and she drew it across the entire playground.
And then the kids could actually have that lived in experience of like, oh my God, this thing is massive. It's huge because otherwise there's no context. So part of what is so great about the MCP is that it allows us to take that kind of in-class learning that Julie has had and experience and apply it.
Very quickly to the experience that we can give to children all over the world.
[00:17:52] Alex Sarlin: We, uh, recently went to the Museum of Natural History in New York with my 3-year-old, and it's that moment, that same exact moment where you actually see the thing, the blue whale hanging from the ceiling in real life. It's totally transformative and they go home and remember it for, for years.
And I agree with you that the ability to adapt your metaphors, adapt your analogic. Thinking and teaching in real time or in response to what you're seeing on a platform like Nurture to say, kids are really responding to this and maybe not as much to that. We can use this model context protocol in this particular way.
To evolve the story towards what people are responding to or towards the learning outcomes is really exciting. So I have a question for both of you, Scott. Let me, let me kick it back to you to start us off. You know, you both built in media and education. I think these go really well together. What unique lessons do you think you both learned?
And again, I'll start with you, Scott, about engaging young people in the context of learning that you think a lot of ed tech companies might overlook. They might not realize how important engagement is and how to do it.
[00:18:54] Scott Stewart: I love this question and honestly it's humor. I think that humor is really underestimated.
I think that people get caught up in the value proposition and they think that, that, that's kind of it. You know, I always kind of joke, it's like the way that I play tennis. I think my serves gonna win the point, and it's not ever gonna win the point, you know, you, you have to follow up, you have to run into net, you have to be there.
And we kind of call it whoopy cushion humor, where you have young kids have spent any time, it's not sitting on the whoopy cushion, it's almost sitting on it five times. That builds that heightened, you know, response from them. And you're just about to sit down like, oh, I forgot water. Like, sit down. Oh, who needs a fork?
And then they're like, sit on the whoopy cushion. You know? So it's like this goes back to world building and character. This idea that they begin to expect, you know, or anticipate what's gonna happen, which again, goes back to the learning, right? It's that whole thing of like, what's gonna happen now? And like, how's this character gonna respond?
Like, this character loves baked goods, right? And he, he has to paint like a storefront right next to a bakery. Like, well, this is not gonna go well, you know? And so you're kind of like giving them the lead of what to anticipate and how to go. So it's not necessarily. Telegraphing the entire story in advance, but it's giving them the moments to wait for, you know, and, and, and learning can be really funny.
Like it can be hilarious. I'm like, I do this all the time. As a parent, where I learned a long time ago when my kids were like, Hey, did you know this? I learned to stop saying, yeah, I know. I. On the one hand, you wanna be like the cool parent. You're like, yeah, I totally know about this. I read about it. But what they're really looking for is the opportunity to share what they've learned with you.
So you'd be like, no, I've never heard of that before. You know? And then they share it with you. And like of course you always actually learn something new. 'cause at the very least you learn their interpretation and their perspective of that. So this is something that we've really learned with our storytelling, is kind of like give them the lead and give them the opportunity to kind of take ownership of communicating what you're sharing with them.
[00:20:42] Alex Sarlin: I love both of those lessons. Right? And keep it humorous. Build that humorous tension over time, the almost sitting on the Whoopi cushion. And then give the kids, especially younger kids space to explain what they're learning, what they're thinking about, and give them the ability to communicate it back without stepping on that and saying, I know.
I know, I know. Julie, how about you? What have you learned in your experience between media and education, what are some lessons that EdTech companies might take away about how to use story for learning?
[00:21:08] Julie Stewart: Use it. Story's important story is the way to engage. It's the oldest and most successful form of learning, and that is completely neglected.
You're talking flashcards, you're talking skill and drill. You're talking direct instruction videos. These are not ways to truly engage. Story is the way to truly engage, create great characters, create great worlds. You're halfway there. Another one of the things that I think is really important with respect to nurture is we have what's called the three pillars.
And those three pillars are story learning and games. And we talk all the time. So when we're concepting stories, when we're concepting adventures, we first start with the learning outcomes and then we build. And we don't just, it's not a handoff, it's not a pass off. We are building together, the three pillars are coming together constantly in order to be able to achieve what we're trying to achieve, which isn't actually all that easy, so, so that makes a big difference as well.
And I think it's a good learning for those out there.
[00:22:05] Alex Sarlin: I think that integrated approach is really important. I mean, EdTech has, for many years, has been accused of doing like chocolate covered broccoli. That's what they always say, where it's like, oh, you need to teach division, so let's make a game about division, where we just sort of interject some.
Setting on it and, and some metaphor and then try to make it work, but you don't actually think through, like, I think the, the whoopi cushion example is still coming back to me of like, if you're going to incorporate story and you're gonna incorporate it in this integrated way, like you're mentioning Julie, how does the whole story, the whole game come together?
And it's not just a handoff between what we're trying to teach this, so we're gonna use this and they sort of have to wrestle with each other. They, it's how do they actually weave together to create a really compelling experience? And that's what the best education media is, and I think the best education technology.
I have a question for both of you. That's just been something top of mind for me recently, and I'm so curious about your reactions when you mentioned about the characters in the game, calling the student or turning to them for advice and help. We're at this interesting moment with AI and ed tech where the tools that kids are using most right now, especially slightly older kids than the ones that you are working with, but 13 and up, they're going to.
Chad, GBT, they're going to Claude, right? They're going to the sort of frontier consumer tools to ask questions or converse with them, and those tools, for the most part have absolutely no personality, sort of like negative personality. They're slightly sycophantic. They're very humble. They try not to draw any attention.
They don't have any backstories. They don't particularly have any faces or anything like that. And I keep wondering about whether that's the right approach, whether the idea of having these sort of, I, I always think of them as like C3 po, like very sort of fade into the background kind of characters as the AI tutors.
As the AI advisors is where we're gonna end up or whether there's gonna be this quick turn and suddenly you're gonna see this flourishing of AI characters that are actually characters that are the cookie monsters. Inside out characters from Pixar and people you're just like, I wanna be around these characters.
Paw Patrol, blues Clues, miss Rachel, all of those things. Abby Kby. I'm curious how you both think about it. Scott, I wanna start with you on this. Do you think that we're gonna enter a world of AI characters very soon, or do you think AI is still gonna be chatbots and that we'll have to do characters in a different way?
[00:24:17] Scott Stewart: That's a great question. And just to rewind a little bit, I think that one of the things that's so important about what we are saying about character and world building is to have characters who are flawed, right? I mean, little kids love being the teachers. They love knowing a little bit more. They love the telegraph, they love seeing, and the default, I think, with AI is, and this is actually, it's good in a couple of ways, that you don't want like a computer that can just basically say, this is the truth, this is it.
Period. Right? There's no exploration there. There's no processing data and it's wrong a lot. Like AI is wrong all the time. So there is a little bit of that kind of skeptical thing that we need to all learn. When you look at it and it's like, okay, I mean like all the time, like, you know, we'll use like chat petit and it'll tell me something.
I'm like, that's actually not correct. And it's like, oh, you're right. That's not correct, you know?
[00:25:04] Alex Sarlin: Right, exactly.
[00:25:05] Scott Stewart: So I think kind of teaching kids that skepticism, but doing it through character, you know, we have a character, her name is Glitch, and she's like super eager. She's a little bit like scuttle from the Little Mermaid.
She's like, oh, that's a dingle hopper. And you're like, no, that's a fork. And she's like, you're right. That's a fork, you know? But giving kids that opportunity to step in and not just be kind of this one way. Output kind of thing that they then kind of regurgitate. So I do think that AI is getting better, but I also think that especially with young children, we need to be careful not to teach them that AI knows everything and that AI is exactly the right answer.
And I think leaning into that adds to humor, it adds to story, it adds to character. And it also kind of teaches them, I mean, there's a famous, not famous, it's famous in our household about when Julie, you know, she was a physics and bio major and she was in a study group. And the textbook was wrong, and Julie was the first one to be like, no, it's wrong.
And her friends were like, absolutely not. We're doing it wrong. And Julie's like, no, the textbook is wrong. You know? And just having that ability to just look at something and just say, I don't think this is correct. And then you find other resources to prove whether you're right or wrong. So I do think that AI is critical, but I also think that we need to kind of like teach them that AI is not gospel.
[00:26:10] Alex Sarlin: I love that idea of sort of a character for, I'm paraphrasing a little bit of what you're saying, but like, if AI was a character, it's a character. It's sort of like a know-it-all, but it's also often wrong. And when you correct it, it's the first to admit it's wrong. And that's an interesting character trait.
But you don't, you don't actually experience that when you're working with Claude. You don't feel like it's a fun character like Little Mermaid. I wonder if it's gonna move that way. Julie, what do you think?
[00:26:33] Julie Stewart: I think that for the most part, it won't move that way, but I do think that it would be awesome.
And I think the probability is that if there's an opportunity to give people the choice to have an interesting, fun chat bot as opposed to a personality list, one, I think they'll choose the fun one. But it's hard, right? Like technology doesn't often come. Right together with creativity, we are fortunate enough that that's exactly where we sit.
We sit at the intersection of those things, right? So when we were we, we did have a need. We need to be able to guide our kids. We also need to be able to have a future chat bot. It's not working currently as a chat bott. So what Scott did is he created this character, this character's glitch. Her name is Glitch for a reason.
It's because you automatically know that she's silly. She's fun, she's engaging. Her personality is a little outrageous. This is fun, funny, engaging. And in the future, when she is a chat bot, and that's not that far down the line, but in the future when she's a chat bot. It will be funny
[00:27:28] Scott Stewart: and, and Glitch also has kind of become oddly, a little bit more of a human term.
You know, there's this whole thing called glitch art, which I know is generated by computers. But this idea that like humans are imperfect and sometimes kind of leaning into that imperfection is part of what makes humans beautiful. Like, we're not perfect. Not everything that comes out of our mouths is exactly accurate or true.
[00:27:48] Julie Stewart: And I think as a society, it's time for us to start leaning into that. It's okay. Like our differences are really truly what makes the world sing. Our differences make a difference when we lean into that, when we appreciate who we are for literally all of our flaws coming together and presenting ourselves to the world as authentic humans.
That's really what should be honored instead of this idea that school is giving us, which is, this is how you get a 100%. This is what it means to be perfect. That's actually really damaging.
[00:28:16] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. It also teaches you how to communicate and work with people who are different than yourself, right? I mean, just understanding characters and trying to have that sort of theory of mind.
Oh, that character is, yeah, that character loves baked goods. If they're gonna work through it next to a bakery, that they're gonna have trouble doing that. I mean, that's a sophisticated, empathetic. Endeavor to understand that, but it's one that we all need to do as adults and it's important to give kids that opportunity as well.
Well, this has been a blast. I wanna thank you both. This is Julie and Scott Stewart. They are an award-winning husband and wife, team, co-founders and chief creative officers. Of Nurture, which is a platform for animated story-driven learning games, which the characters call you on your phone for kids ages four to seven, building future-proof skills through play and including characters from other well-known intellectual property worlds.
Very, very interesting. Thank you so much both of you for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:29:09] Julie Stewart: Thank you so much. It's been an absolute pleasure.
[00:29:11] Alex Sarlin: Thank you for having us. We are here with Roger Egan. He is the co-founder and CEO of Nurture and a serial entrepreneur. He was previously the co-founder and CEO of RedMart, a leading online grocery platform, which was acquired by Alibaba.
Musa Roshdy is the head of Learning at Nurture, an advisor at Transcend Network, and a mentor at Supercharger Ventures. She was also part of the inaugural class at Minerva University. Roger Egan and Musa Roshdy. Welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:29:41] Roger Egan: Hi Alex. Thanks for having us. Great to be here.
[00:29:44] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, really
[00:29:44] Musa Roshdy: excited to be on.
[00:29:45] Alex Sarlin: I'm really excited to talk to you as well. Nurture is such an interesting idea. And you know, Roger, we just mentioned you came to education through RedMart Online Groceries. What gave you the idea to move into Childhood Ed Tech to do this really interesting venture with Nurture, which is combines gaming and storytelling and learning.
What made you think that education would be the next big venture after RedMart?
[00:30:09] Roger Egan: Yeah, so I had resigned from Alibaba. We acquired in November, 2016. I spent a few years working for them, but I'm not cut out for big companies. Wanted to get back to my happy place, early stage building and take a sabbatical year in between.
After an 11 year grind, that was February, 2020. Perfect timing. I resigned and COVID hit, and instead of traveling the world and, and my plan, I was stuck in a lockdown in Singapore. It proved to be a blessing in disguise because it led us to the idea for nurture. So I'm a dad. I have two sons, 10 and six, and I have to admit, as a parent, I sort of outsourced education to school before that and and said, you know, they're gonna take care of it.
I just have to pick a good school. But like many parents during COVID remote learning, and now with a lot of time on my hands. I got very involved in my kids' education and was participating, and I made a realization that was fairly important for me, that the traditional education system, at least I know there's a lot of progressive schools.
Aren't really keeping pace with technological change. Being in tech, I see where AI is going. I think there's a lot of skills that we're missing. I call them life skills, but things such as critical thinking, problem solving, creativity, but even social emotional skills, resilience, growth mindset, and even practical skills like financial literacy.
So I started making a list and the list became pretty long of skills that I think are at least as important as academic skills for the future of life and work, but weren't really going, you know, the traditional education system doesn't change fast enough to keep pace with these needs for what kids are actually gonna need in 20 years.
So I said, okay. I looked to the market. I know there's a lot of games and apps for academic learning. I said, there must be some stuff for these life skills as well. Tried everything on the market, couldn't find what I was looking for, and said, okay, I'm gonna build this. I think other parents will be interested.
Came up with the name, nurture and the Kernel. The idea was to leverage the engagement power of animated storytelling. Storytelling has been a great way to learn since probably the dawn of human history. But combine it with a more active experience. So think of a children's television show. Kids love the story and the characters, they're very engaged.
And if you've ever seen a kid in front of their favorite TV show, it's like Zoom, you know, totally engaged, maybe a little too much. But I didn't wanna make it a passive, mindless sort of screen time experience. So we combine that with what's more like a video game. So we introduced learning concepts in a story through the dialogue and behavior of the characters, and then they get a phone call from the characters.
They get to practice and apply the skills in the game. That was the first idea for nurture.
[00:33:04] Alex Sarlin: I love when people come into the education space and bring all of this experience from other worlds, from other e-commerce worlds and other consumer products and say, how do we make this work in an educational context?
And I think the realization about non-academic skills being a huge part of what is missing is, uh, important one as well. And so most, let me ask you, you know, you have a background in global learning networks in research what. Educational gaps or opportunities stood out to you and made nurture's mission to bring these life skills to kids in a really compelling and engaging way.
What made that compelling to you?
[00:33:37] Musa Roshdy: I through Minerva and being part of the inaugural class, helping build that institution. And then through working nonprofits, governments, higher ed startups, I've had the chance to engage with adult learners from university students onwards through like people who are re-skilling and adapting and like that's where a lot of the ed tech money goes is this sort of upskilling culture and all of the things Roger identifies as pain points for his children.
They're what we call professionally, like 21st century skills. We've known for a long time. These are the things we have to crack. How do we work well together? How do we solve problems? How do we bring our unique creativity into these challenges? And the more you work with adult learners, the more you realize the number one impediment to learning is actually their disposition to learning the negative experiences they had early on.
The sort of learned helplessness that develops. And to be honest, from my perspective, there's this almost stigma and gap between adult learning and childhood learning. Like they're, they're two different worlds and they don't touch much. And to me this kind of felt silly. And so I was excited about the chance to take everything I've learned there and extend backwards and really work with children who don't yet have these.
Encumbrances on their experiences of learning. And so the whole vision of childhood media and using these places where kids are already responding to building that sort of pro-social, that growth mindset element into it, while also building the concrete building blocks of these skills was just so incredible.
[00:35:04] Alex Sarlin: That really resonates with me. As somebody who's also worked with learners of different ages, I feel like there's that line. People draw between, you know, pedagogy and andragogy. Adult learning is not as thick a line as I think many think. There's a lot of related learning concepts that go to all ages, and I think with this type of learning where you're teaching life skills in a way that's all about engagement, where the, the kids are literally getting calls from characters and it's like all about sort of grabbing them and immersing them in this type of.
Story. It's a great way, as you say, to sort of make learning a joyous experience and avoid that negative disposition towards learning that they're gonna avoid as adults. I think it's really powerful. You know, one of the things that is really interesting about nurture from a technical perspective is that you are really thinking about the model context protocol.
You know, listeners will know that as how AI agents work. It's sort of puts together all these different types of applications you use this technical innovation, the model context protocol in a very specific way. So, Roger, let me ask you. How are you thinking about model context, protocol to use for adaptive learning in the context of nurture?
[00:36:03] Roger Egan: So when we identified this life preparedness gap and said, okay, this type of media is the best way we can think to have the most impact and reach the most kids, we realized that making this content in the old way is very expensive and takes a long time, right? You need animators and story writers and unity engineers and so forth.
So we had to find a way to leverage AI to produce the content much more efficiently. And a little cool story. My co-founder, Danny, has been vibe coding games using Grok and Cursor. Elon Musk's ai. He was followed by Elon Musk and Retweeted and then just the kind of a showcase for Brock four in his games.
And we said, what if we could vibe code games? The problem with those games is they're web games and you can't really change them. So we said, what if we can vibe code the learning games and have it be built in a game engine Unity? So the MCP allows our agent to, gives them the context of how to use Unity, all the data that they need.
Go in and you just describe in plain English what you want in the game and it just builds it in the game engine. So we have one of the first, and we think one of the best CPS out there and we just open sourced it. 'cause our small team can't build everything. We're rallying a developer community around it, but they're getting involved and engaged and we hope to expand upon that and, and let everyone use this MCP that we've built.
To reduce the time and cost of creating this type of content.
[00:37:39] Alex Sarlin: That's amazing. I feel like that is right at the heart of what's so exciting about this AI age in education, that the creation of rich media content for education, that's animation, that's games, that's video, was always historically very expensive and you would have to do lots of planning and then once you put it out, you couldn't change it.
It was out in the world and it was sort of fixed and it would take a whole other project to change it. And I think, you know, this idea of being able to vibe code animation or gaming or. Video in an educational context and using this underlying technology is incredibly powerful. Listeners to this may, might wanna take note that this is open source and it's something they might want to contribute to or use in their own platforms as well.
That's really exciting to hear. Let's shift to the actual learning outcomes here. I mean, I think there's something so interesting about the realization. You mentioned Roger, that you know critical skills, 21st century skills. You know, this idea of non-academic skills, or sometimes they call 'em non-cognitive skills, durable skills, this power skills.
This is a whole, whole vocabulary around this, but traditionally, non-academic skills, not math, not science, not ELA, are incredibly important and very much missing from school. You're focused on children ages four to seven, very transformational. Moment for these types of skills. So Musa, how do you think about getting these skills, financial literacy, mindset and resilience into the minds of four and seven year olds in a way that's developmentally appropriate, that uses learning science, and how are you gonna measure that they're actually sort of starting to really incorporate them into their lives?
[00:39:03] Musa Roshdy: There's so much to unpack there. One thing, like you said about the line between andragogy and pedagogy, not being as firm as people often say, all of the science of learning of terms of how you chunk content, how you spaced it, the, the value of repetition and practice that all applies at this age range.
So taking what we already know works from existing 21st century skill learning programs and applying that into our structure. Every adventure we build on nurture, we have sort of a, a focus skill of it. And so we have this, like, this is the core thing children are learning, but then we're also tagging the backend, all the other skills that we think are relevant in, in showing up within it and looking for sort of implied practice.
So we know that a child's touching and engaging with this concept quite often. Right now our reflection questions at the end of each chapter, so each little bit of engagement are tied to that content with AI in the future. And they're like, you know, this is a big thing. How's it going to be enrolled?
When do you do it? You get the opportunity to target those questions more specifically to where the child's at. And this is just by tracking their engagement, seeing their responses, seeing where there's like cognitive gaps that you can help support them through. I think this is one thing we've already seen proven out in the AI learning age is that the sort of zone of proximal development work, the how do you keep something just challenging enough to keep a learner hooked and push them to keep progressing.
That's something AI does really well, so long as you give it a context for how all of the learning objectives scaffold up. So you have to do that work first, but on that foundation it becomes. Actually really easy to then take a, a learner on a much more expansive learning journey. 'cause they constantly feel challenged and excited and that sense of accomplishment success that you need to like learning.
[00:40:48] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, so lots of practice, lots of using the learning science for spacing, for repetition, for really, uh, giving them the ability to transfer what they're learning inside the nurture world, to outside. And then as you say, that really important idea, the, the Vygotsky's and Approximal development, that idea of sort of personalized learning, basically keeping people right at the border of what they're capable of and pushing them.
So that they're challenged at their own personal level. That is, as you say, something AI is incredibly good at. And you're obviously thinking a lot about it at Nurture. And then, you know, I think it, it dovetails with what you're saying, Roger, about the ability to create content quickly, because this is another thing that's been a limiting factor in the past is you can only do so many branching scenarios, so much personalization, if you're doing animation or video.
In the past, that was a limitation. Now with a lowered cost of animation or video, you can actually meet children at different levels and adapt to them even with animated content or you know, character-based content. And is that sort of how you see at Nurture starting to evolve where people, as it becomes more adaptive to students', individual needs, you can still meet them with actual story and activity.
[00:41:52] Roger Egan: It's not that farfetched anymore to, to you. You had sort of the choose your own adventure stories. And in our stories, what we do is. If we have the characters call with some type of issue and you feel part of it, and you come in and join them and participate in the story, and whatever you do make or create in the game ends up persisting in the rest of the story.
So if you customize your airship or you make an avatar or whatever you do, so they feel it's already personalized. That's available now 'cause we build it in a game engine. But you can imagine infinitely branching stories where whatever you did in the game can take the story in any direction. And if we're trying to practice or apply the skills, we can instantly hit your level of ability in in that game real time.
I mean, this is not all available right now, but you could see that this isn't that far off anymore, right?
[00:42:43] Alex Sarlin: Oh. It's possible, I think for the first time really ever to do that sort of infinite branching type of work or really, really really meeting people where they're at. One thing that is incredibly interesting about Nurture, Roger, I want to ask you about this first, but then, uh, Musa, I wanna ask you as well, you are developing your own characters.
You have your own story, they're animated characters. You mentioned building in, in Unity. Everything's very, really rich and animated, and you have your own library of characters, which are. Building out these activities and these, uh, these interactive experiences, but you're also working with existing intellectual properties, existing characters out in the world, and sort of inviting them to come in and create their own adventures and their own lands inside the nurture world.
That's a really interesting strategy. I think it's a very sophisticated strategy. Roger, tell us about what that looks like in your mind. You know, where is that gonna go a couple years from now if you continue to build these relationships with existing properties?
[00:43:35] Roger Egan: We can't announce the names yet, but very soon we have some press releases coming out about some iconic children's brands that are joining the platform.
Names that everyone will know and love. There might be even some nostalgia on some of them from parents joining the platform. So we're really excited about that. But the point of having, you know, DI, partnering with these ips and iconic brands is. Every child's different in what they like, right? So somebody might like Monster trucks and want the Blaze characters, or someone might like Bluey or Care Bears or whatever.
And if you wanna make build in the motivation for learning. Having it be aligned with their interests matters a lot. I know my son loves Monster Trucks and cars and Hot Wheels is his favorite show. And if there's something being taught through Hot Wheels, it's definitely gonna work with him, but he might not be as interested in something else.
So that's the point is these are already beloved brands. They have different audiences for different interests. And if we can just get a collection of them. My co-founders, Scott and Julie, have created many successful children's television shows, and we have our own original ip, which I think will do really well.
They have an excellent track record, but we said, why not leverage all these brands that are out there? And the good news is that they love the mission behind Nurture, and we're getting a lot of traction despite being a small startup. So we hope to add more and more over time.
[00:45:01] Alex Sarlin: It's a really exciting strategy and, and then Mua, I think the follow up question for you is, as you're bringing in these beloved children's brands that kids are already fans of and you're adding them into the nurture universe, in this context of learning life skills, how do you plan to maintain a sort of consistency of a learning experience where, you know, are the kids getting called by the characters and they're joining these experiences?
How do you keep a consistent and effective learning experience as you bring in all of these different types of new characters and new stories?
[00:45:31] Musa Roshdy: Yeah, I mean, I think part of this goes back to the, the brilliance of what Scott and Julie have helped us build in our structure in this integration of learning story and games where the characters hit a problem and then they call you and you're helping them solve the problem.
And so there's already the structure of. This active engagement to really dig in and solve challenges. So the problem solving basis is already built into the structure and the brands we're talking to are actually excited about the learn. They know that in this age of media, parents are more discerning than ever about what they're letting their children engage with.
And so for them, this is a positive factor. I think something that's also interesting is, you know, sometimes when we talk about AI and stories, we talk about, you know, like you're gonna have your own story. And I don't think we actually need that in terms of stories because there's a benefit to shared stories to knowing characters.
And some part of the reason children respond to these brands is they know these characters, they know how they respond to problems. So having even the same problem, but totally different characters come in and face it. You get a totally different experience, but it's also unreal that a child can expect, understand, relate to, and then add their own brilliance in how they're solving problems and get to figure out how they relate to these worlds and these challenges.
So I think it's actually really exciting. And then on the backend, there's just a lot of documentation, helping brands understand the learning vision and then QA X with them and. They're actually excited to go on that journey. 'cause this is a challenge that has been alive in the kids media space for a long time.
How do you make this screen time more valuable, more engaged?
[00:47:06] Alex Sarlin: That's a great answer. It makes a lot of sense, and I agree with you that part of what's great about great characters is that, that you can put them in a variety of different situations, including ones in a situation you maybe have seen before from another character, but it's gonna be a totally different experience.
I think that's a, that's an interesting insight. And then of course, the learning orientation, the idea that brands and characters want to. Brought into a learning tool because it's a way to reach new audiences. So it's a way to win parents over and it's just a new way to use the characters. I think that's really insightful as well.
It's a really interesting strategy and one thing that strikes me as I talk to both of you is that this is a really, you're going, you know, non-academic skills. You're primary customer. As for what I'm hearing is, is parents and children, it's homes. Do you envision having a relationship with schools or teachers at all?
Do you think that this is something that, because you know, as you bring this really engaging content and animation into the world, do you think that there's going to be a school version of the product? Is that something you're planning or is that sort of off limits given your orientation, given the background, given that it's not, that it's not an academic topics at all, I'm curious how you think about that.
Roger, lemme start with you.
[00:48:07] Roger Egan: We actually have some preschool teachers on the team who said that they would love a tool like this for use in the classroom, so they're obviously welcome to use it. We haven't sort of designed the product for the classroom yet. There'd probably be some changes we'd make. We have to, as a startup, stay super focused and narrow focus with a small team and limited resources.
But yeah, there's not as much regulation in preschool education. They have more leniency to use the tools that they want, and teachers are sort of influencers in a way, right? I know that my friends and I, whatever apps the teacher says to download and use Epic Reading Seesaw, we just blindly do it. So if you can convince them that it's good, that can be very powerful.
[00:48:56] Alex Sarlin: We've seen these interesting blurry lines between consumer apps and schools in the last few years. You know, as you say, teachers can be very influential and, and some applications work both at home and at school. We, prodigy Math is sort of a famous example of one that has a school product and a home product, and they integrate really well together, but, but you then you see Duolingo, which never made a Duolingo for schools and is yet still used in huge numbers of schools as a consumer product.
It's an interesting landscape to sort of think about in the EdTech space. We're almost out of time. Melissa, I want to give you the last word here, which is when you put on your sort of futurist hat here and say, let's say at this moment, nurture is a big hit, it comes out and it really changes the direction of how people think about, especially, you know, life skills learning.
What do you think this would change in the education? Landscape. If people start saying, oh yeah, have you heard of Nurture Nurture's doing all this stuff? Are they bring all these characters? Like what changes would you like to help manifest in the EdTech space based on what you're building now?
[00:49:54] Musa Roshdy: I think the number one thing I'd love to see change as a result of nurture is parents have this taboo about fun and learning.
In their mind, the two are not reconcilable, whereas in reality, I mean think this is what Game design's done so well. Learning is fun when you have that sense of mastery and accomplishment, when you can apply it to things you care about, that is like inherently intrinsically motivating. So creating a world where people are driven by their own sense of accomplishment, by their own desire to learn, and they don't have this taboo that anytime I'm having fun, that's not really learning.
Anytime I'm learning, it's not really fun and breaking that down, I would love to see that gone in a generation's time.
[00:50:33] Alex Sarlin: I love that. And that sort of bridge between watching cartoons for the characters in them, like Blaze the Monster Truck, is not necessarily the opposite experience of learning and figuring out how to navigate the world and, and embedding experiences, which I is an, I think an extension of what you're saying.
Fun and characters and just sort of the joy of childhood is not the opposite of learning. I love that. Really, really compelling. Thank you so much. This is Roger Egan, the co-founder and CEO of Nurture and Musa Roshdy, the head of Learning at Nurture. Thank you so much, both of you, for your vision of what you're doing with Nurture.
I'm really excited to see where it goes.
[00:51:09] Roger Egan: Thanks so much, Alex. Great to be on and share it with you and really appreciate it.
[00:51:13] Alex Sarlin: Yeah,
[00:51:14] Musa Roshdy: thank you so much.
[00:51:14] Alex Sarlin: Such a joy. Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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