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94

BizVoice/Indiana Chamber – November/December 2017

Long term, Mimir wants to “essentially follow a programmer through their entire

education and career life cycle.” For now, the Indianapolis-based developer of an education

technology platform is among the most valuable resources for computer science teachers.

Company CEO Prahasith Veluvolu describes the flagship product, Mimir Classroom,

which was developed by he and other company leaders while they were students at Purdue

University.

“We have a platform for instructors to teach their computer science courses. We

provide no content as of right now, but that’s something we’re working on adding,” he

offers. “Instructors purchase our platform, take their content, upload it to our system and

we automate their entire grading process. Students log in to our platform, turn in their

work and essentially get their grade in seconds.”

The automation brings additional benefits, Veluvolu notes. “Take a math problem for

example. You can grade it in one way. An essay problem, you can’t. Code is like a math

problem. There’s a right answer and a wrong answer. There’s a lot of ways to get to that

right answer and we’re able to account for all those. Teaching assistants and instructors can

spend more time with their students instead of being locked away grading assignments.”

Universities (from single courses to full departments and multi-campus

implementations) are the primary clients, although some high schools and independent

instructors have signed on. Customization of submission processes and plagiarism analysis

are among the added features.

Mimir strives to assist students in a variety of ways. Among the offerings in development:

free programs and content, an internship and job matching system, interview tool and more.

Veluvolu believes Mimir will eventually help fill a need between in-person education

with an active instructor (“very effective but the problem is they can’t scale”) and massive

open online courses (“which scale like crazy but have completion rates of less than 10%”).

“Our approach is to build our products kind of in the middle – a hybrid approach. We want

to be where people first learn how to program and we want to power their more

professional courses.”

And the company is “back home in Indiana” after 2015 participation in Y-Combinator,

a Silicon Valley start-up accelerator.

“For us, Indiana is home. All three of us pretty much grew up in Indiana, went to

Purdue. We also have the professional network and connections we built while getting

Mimir off the ground. It’s important that we stay close to that,” acknowledges Veluvolu,

who was born in India but moved to the United States at a young age.

“We saw the ecosystem growing. Ten years ago, I don’t think Indy would be a good

place to start or build a tech company. Today, it definitely is. Silicon Valley is a great place

to be for tech but it’s very built up. Being here – we’re here while it’s starting.”

COMPUTING FOR THE FUTURE

“Liberal Arts Lose Luster” was the headline

of an article in

The Wall Street Journal

earlier this

year. It noted that majors such as history and

philosophy on some campuses were being scuttled

in favor of nursing and engineering.

It also stated that the number of humanities

degrees declined by almost 9% between 2012 and

2014, according to the American Academy of

Arts & Sciences. For a specific example, it cites a

jump from 9% of all bachelor degrees in 2005 to

17% in 2015 for these three disciplines –

homeland security, parks and recreation, and

health care.

The story quoted a former college president

saying, “People just can’t afford to be educated;

they almost have to be trained.”

Closer to home, the 30 schools that comprise

the Independent Colleges of Indiana (ICI) did see

a 26.5% increase in STEM (science, technology,

engineering and mathematics) degrees from 2010

to 2015. A valid comparison of changes in

humanities degrees is not possible due to the lack

of a clear definition of what falls in that category.

Jake Docking, ICI data and policy analyst

who provided the STEM statistic, adds, “We

don’t see our institutions backing off

programmatically from the humanities. They still

view that as an integral part of the educational

program their students go through.”

Mary Ellen Hamer, executive president for

ICI, puts it this way: “Whenever you see surveys

of employers saying what they want or need in an

employee, it’s always those liberal arts/

humanities skills – communication, problem

solving, self-discipline, teamwork, creativity.

“Those are the things that even if our schools

are having their students major in STEM or other

fields – they still get a very strong foundation in

that because they’re not just training them for the

first job, but for all the jobs they might have over

the course of their careers.”

Docking points to a recent example – a

coding academy in June that included a variety of

liberal arts majors. “That combination of technical

skills that are practical for the workforce but also

the communication and teamwork make you a

stronger employee throughout your career.”

Note: See Page 10 for the final installment of a

five-part series from Indiana Humanities on business

leaders who are successfully combining STEM and the

humanities.

Different Degrees of

Education

Helping the Teachers – and the Students

Technology and Innovation: Yearlong Series

RESOURCE:

Mary Ellen Hamer and Jake Docking,

Independent Colleges of Indiana, at

www.icindiana.org

RESOURCE:

Prahasith Veluvolu, Mimir, at

www.mimirhq.com

Indiana roots led the founders to bring

Mimir back to the state after its participation

in an accelerator program in California.