RP: I was living for 10 years as a blind person and my experience was interesting in college because professors are used to throwing things up on a chalk board assuming everyone can see it, will read books and always show up prepared. I guessed I shocked them all because they had to re-think how they were going to present information so that it was consumable for someone blind. What was interesting was when I finished college a professor looked at all the data and found that because the professors had to personalise the learning for me and customise the presentation of the material so I could consume it, everyone in my group, even though they were sighted, their scores all went up significantly. They realised there was something in this - on how we change learning and classrooms can effect all students whether they're differently-abled or challenged in some way. That stuck with me a bit.

I also worked at the Palo Alto brain centre in the US, working around building neuro assessments and found myself back in education. I was building assessments for soldiers that were wounded in Iraq, and I thought about what were our educators doing around assessments. I was confronted with the reality that our educators are trying to differentiate education for all their kids and they may see up to 130 kids per day. With the tools they had, that was absolutely impossible and it became my quest to try to solve that.

RP: I ended up getting my teaching certificate so I can speak the same language as our teachers and really support their work. I went to Seattle and became a district administrator working for Seattle schools, built a lot of solutions for them. I integrated all the data in the district and built an integrated learning management system, social network and parent communication tools. All those things integrated into one platform and I found that teachers which were resistant to change, really fell in love with this tool because it gave them an opportunity to have different conversations with students and their parents.