For close to three decades, Casa Grande has focused its efforts on the design and development of innovative and motivational educational programs and platforms. The organization has been at the forefront of the region’s educational space with programs, such as One-on-One and platforms like: The New Virtual School and OE Saber.
Casa Grande has been recognized nationally by the United States (U.S) Department of Commerce and the U.S. Conference of Mayors for its cutting-edge technology and innovative programs. The Conference of Mayors elected Casa Grande’s One-on-One Program as one of the top two best national programs to improve the quality of life of a community. Internationally, Casa Grande has been invited and recognized by organizations, such as PALECH, Latin American Pact for an Education for Human Dignity, thanks to the impact of its programs on the present and future of education, on youth, and on communities.
Hundreds of thousands of schools, principals, students, and teachers from twelve countries have implemented Casa Grande’s programs and platforms, particularly its Learning Management System, known as The New Virtual School. Casa Grande has operations in Puerto Rico and Colombia. It is in Colombia where Casa Grande recently launched OE Saber, an artificial intelligence (AI) enabled App to revolutionize and democratize test preparation for Colombia’s national college entrance standardized test.
OPERATION SUCCESS (Operación Éxito)
Operation Success (Operación Éxito, in Spanish) was the pioneer of Casa Grande´s platforms and programs. The program integrates an educational and motivational math and science virtual platform, supported by a series of online and live educational events focused on STEM subjects, in which students from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Puerto Rico, Spain, and the United States have participated.
Operation Success, as an online and live academic tournament, was launched after five years of research and development and has been proven to be a highly innovative and effective method to get students excited about Math and Science, as it proactively combats students’ lack of interest and poor results in standardized tests.
Students representing each country first attended online events and then live competitions to draw a winner who received a college
scholarship and a car.
Operation Success is the leader in the region’s recent technology-enabled educational revolution which has brought education out of the books and into smartphones and tablets.
THE NEW VIRTUAL SCHOOL (Nueva Escuela Virtual)
Problem, solution, outcome. The New Virtual School was the response to a challenge posed to Casa Grande to have all the school content on a smartphone. Casa Grande went beyond content and designed a complete bilingual Learning Management System and Content Management System, which also integrated all the contents of the core subjects from Kindergarten to 12th Grade.
Developed to be the best and most powerful educational platform in support of the teacher, tthe New Virtual School has revolutionized the lives of every teacher and student which interacts with the training, technological and support model. It also provides high impact analytics to administrators and parents and 24/7 visibility of the educational achievement of students to promote and permit real decision-making based on data.
Its development is based on the four (4) steps of the educational cycle: Planning, My Dynamic Class, My Homework and Evaluation, so that the platform provides the teacher with all the lessons of their subjects, thousands of exercises, and tests, aligned to curricular maps, automatic evaluation systems, segmentation by learning levels, and areas of mastery.
In addition to opening a permanent communication channel between parents, teachers and students, the system promotes individualized teaching and learning, so that teachers can evaluate students individually and organize them in small groups according to their respective levels and needs, which also makes it the best tool for the Special Education teacher.
With the Planning and Evaluation modules for teachers, principals, and administrators, the New Virtual School becomes an essential tool for schools, districts, superintendents, and the governing entities of educational systems who have real-time access to the status and results of individual students, teachers, schools, regions, and the entire system, at all times.
Today the New Virtual School, with different adaptations, has been used in public and private schools in Puerto Rico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, and the U.S., and will soon be ready to be implemented in Spain.
ONE-ON-ONE PROGRAM
80% of all 5th grade students in Latin America and 50% of all 5th grade students in the U.S. cannot demonstrate reading comprehension at their level. 62.8% of Puerto Ricans who did not finish high school live below the poverty level. This calamity propelled Casa Grande to develop and test the One-on-One program over five years and create an intensive intervention aimed at improving retention by eradicating low academic performance. The One-on-One has reached solid promotion and graduation rates between 87 and 100% of all participants.
The program consists of the creation of an educational community between the student, teachers, mentor, and tutors, so that underprivileged students, often victims of neglect or violence, receive academic and social mentoring to get their grades up, recover their self-esteem, and continue their schooling.
With the New Virtual School as a communication and academic platform, participating students interact with mentors and tutors who work with them to cover the areas of deficiency and end the academic year with grades that allow them to be promoted to the next grade.
The positive repercussions of this program have been of such magnitude that the U.S. Conference of Mayors awarded it the ‘City Livability Award’ as one of the top two best quality of life programs in all of the United States.
OE Saber:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been venturing into many areas of human endeavor for several years now. The field of education is not the exception.
For Casa Grande this represented a new challenge: “How can we better serve our students, teachers, and communities by integrating the power of AI in our platforms?”
The answer came in the form of an alliance with an AI company based in South Korea and a program that is now being tested with excellent results in Colombia.
Only 18% of 11th graders in Colombia pass the national college entrance exam. The cause is simple: these students and their families do not have the financial resources to afford a practice program or test prep. Casa Grande’s OE Saber is a mobile application for personalized test preparation for college admission exams. Using OE Saber, the student completes a short self-evaluation, and the system automatically analyzes which are the student’s strengths and weaknesses and prepares an individualized
practice program.The AI-powered study plan takes into account the target test date and target score the student wants to reach on the real test. It also analyzes the student’s behavior to determine the possibility he/she may be abandoning the practice so OE Saber can proactively motivate the student to do his/her best until the target score is achieved.
The impact of this revolutionary and innovative project is reflected in a few words of the president of Casa Grande, Soraya Sesto: “OE Saber is a game changer. It will democratize the accessibility to test prep for all Colombian students who want to pursue a college career.’
