My Study Rewards, a new startup cofounded by Dominique Wilkins, is having a big week. The company was among 15 recently tapped to present at Tech Cocktail's DC Mixer next week, and Wilkins says he is ready to unveil the product.
"We've submitted to the App Store," Wilkins says. "We're just waiting for approval. And our Android app is 75 percent done."
My Study Rewards does what it says—rewards students for mastering new material. As users read and watch videos in the app, they earn points, which they can then redeem for "discount offers [for] national brands and retailers like American Apparel, Sephora and Coke," says Wilkins. "The rewards pop up instantly and can be claimed with the user's email address. From there, [the rewards] can be used online or in-store." Wilkins is using
kiip.me, a rewards engine, to manage the incentive part of the business for now. Eventually, he says, "I want to be able to create our own rewards system."
Wilkins has partnered with Khan Academy and Pearson Publishing to provide content for the app, which right now is geared toward middle school and high school students. He is working with an assistant professor of Finance at Johns Hopkins' business school to develop an extension for the university market, and says he would like to expand the app's reach to target students at the elementary level, "once the one-to-one iPad program becomes more robust," he explains.
A
one-to-one iPad program, in which a school district provides an iPad for every student in its district to use, is currently in place in the
Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest public school system, and is
slated to begin in the Miami-Dade County School District in Florida, the nation's fourth-largest public school district, in 2015. "Within a year," Wilkins explains, "we fully expect...a proliferation of these programs."
My Study Rewards is free to download. An game called PopQ that can be purchased from within the app is $.99. "PopQ helps users earn more points and rewards, and has different subjects and questions," Wilkins says.
Wilkins is also using the launch of My Study Rewards to bring awareness to the issue of food insecurity, with five percent of in-app purchases for the first month to be donated to Capital Area Food Bank.
Wilkins says is his team is currently looking for interns and "angel investors with inroads to the education market."
An earlier version of this story misstated the relationship of My Study Rewards and the game PopQ, which is available as an in-app purchase. Elevation DC regrets the error.