Success Stories by Department of Education

Touch Graphics, Inc.
New York, NY 10018

Like many entrepreneurs, Steven Landau studied a field that ended up having nothing to do with the one he ultimately pursued. An architect by training, after graduating from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, he went to work in New York. Here, he “discovered that I really had a bent for invention.” He met up with a professor from the City University of New York who was blind, and, in 1997, a business was born making educational materials accessible for people with visual impairments.

Owing to a small market size and the limited purchasing power of its target audience, disability companies aren’t ideal clients for venture capitalists. Instead, Landau turned to the SBIR Program for what he describes as an R&D injection (the first of six grants). That boost proved to be vital. “We would not exist without SBIR,” he says. “There’s no question about that. It has been the central enabling tool that’s permitted...

Children’s Progress
New York, NY 10018

With funding from the SBIR program at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) in the U.S. Department of Education (ED) and other sources, Children’s Progress developed and refined its computer-adaptive dynamic assessment (CPAA) for early childhood. The assessment covers concepts in early literacy and mathematics for students in pre-kindergarten through grade 3. The CPAA facilitates student learning through animated interactive scaffolding procedures and instructional activities. The CPAA also delivers immediate formative assessment information to teachers through graphical, progress, and narrative reports that help pinpoint and address specific areas for individualized instruction. The product also provides parental reports that explain assessment results in user-friendly language and suggest targeted “at-home” instructional activities.

Through years of collaboration between Columbia University researchers and...