Actionable Innovations Conversations Show Notes: Alefiya Master
Winter Series — Week 8
On Friday, March 11, 2022, Julene Reed interviewed Alefiya Master, Founder and CEO of the award-winning app development program, MAD-learn. Please listen to the entire episode below to fully experience Alefiya’s enthusiasm and the ensuing rich discussion. Many thanks to Alefiya for taking the time to share her expertise with us. Please reach out to her if you’d like to connect!
Highlights
- MAD-learn is a web-based tool that kids log in to and work on building apps.
- Alefiya’s passion is to inspire students to take ideas and turn them into something real. She wants to prepare kids for a technology-driven world.
- MAD stands for mobile app development.
- MAD-Learn is helping kids to become creators. The goal is to help kids be able to create something as usable and functional with the potential to solve problems. MAD-Learn works with kids from grade 3 through 12.
- MAD-Learn is designed for any teacher to use in their classes. It can be integrated into any subject area. Teachers do not need to be coders.
- Kids create a project in a WYSIWYG interface and then progress to examine the code behind their project.
- Funding can be a barrier to educational entrepreneurship. Most traditional investors are leery of education companies because we have a very complicated and difficult education system. Alefiya found that her voice was not always heard in entrepreneurship spaces.
- MAD-Learn is the winner of the Supe’s Choice award in the STEM and STEAM category.
- Alefiya was named to Emory’s 40 under 40 list.
- MAD-Learn won the STEVIE award for the best product of the year.
- To see examples of student work, go to the MAD Store. Alefiya feels that this is the best evidence of their success.
- MAD-Learn is aligned to ISTE standards and several state standards.
- Teachers have a lot of on their plates, but teachers are still wanting to expose their kids to things that matter like MAD-Learn. If something is authentic and relevant to kids’ lives, teachers are behind it.
- MAD-Learn launched a global collaboration program called Mad about Mattering with Angela Maiers and Vicki Davis. The hashtag for this program is #appsthatmatter.
- Alefiya’s advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: talk to everyone. This will help you hone your ideas based on feedback.
- Testing and test prep is not preparing kids’ for the real world. Kids need to develop a portfolio of what they are interested in. Students need to know how to create their own jobs. We need to model our schools to be more like our future workplaces.
About Alefiya Master
Alefyia Master is the Founder and CEO of the award-winning app development program, MAD-learn. She believes that enabling students to have passion-driven career choices should be a key focus for all educational institutions. It’s not often that you find a millennial, woman, minority, educator turned entrepreneur who has founded and grown 2 EdTech companies that now impact over 50,000 students in 30 states and 5 countries. She knows the critical role of education in workforce development and the need to have ALL kids learn to think and create for themselves and be exposed to technology creation, not just consumption. When we don’t know what jobs are going to be available 10 years from now, we have to teach kids how to create their own.
