Our Story

The founder of Engines for Education, Dr. Roger Schank, has devoted his career to understanding how people think and learn. His career was the result of a series of coinciding events: He began his career teaching Computer Science and Psychology at Stanford and Yale where he focused on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, figuring out how to get computers to "learn". To do this, he studied how people learn things. At the same time, he had two young children, and was watching how they learned.

Then, his kids went to school. When Roger looked at what they were doing in school, he was appalled. The school was overlooking most of what he knew to be true about learning. He decided to build new kinds of educational devices, ones that would excite students and teach them things that would be useful to them in the real world, and that would actually take into consideration how people learned. Andersen Consulting offered to finance a new research institute under Roger's direction at Northwestern University. The Institute for Learning Sciences (ILS) was born. Roger served as Director of ILS for ten years, spearheading the development of new learning methodologies using the computer as a simulation device. Using his new methodologies, he built computer-based curricula for major companies and government agencies, including GE, IBM, Walgreen's, Wal-Mart, the US Army, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Veterans Administration, and a host of others.

In 1994, he founded Cognitive Arts Corporation, a company that designs and builds high quality multimedia simulations for use in corporate training and for online university-level courses. The latter were built in partnership with Columbia University.

In early 2002, Carnegie Mellon University agreed to adopt his curricula at their new Silicon Valley campus, where he served as Chief Educational Officer.

That same year he founded Socratic Arts, a company that is devoted to making high quality e-learning affordable for both businesses and schools, and Engines for Education, a non-profit organization dedicated to designing and building new curricula for primary and secondary schools.

See how we’re providing alternatives to traditional education based on our Philosphy and Mission and through VISTA, a completed full-year curriculum.