OKC entrepreneur profile: Ryan Bupp

Ryan Bupp is the founder of Quest to Learn. Through Quest to Learn, Bupp aims to help learning and studying become more fun by bridging the gap between game developer and the end user. Quest to Learn makes game development simpler for the designer and more easy to customize for teachers and parents. 

VeloCity recently sat down with Bupp to discuss Quest to Learn and the startup community in Oklahoma City.

VeloCity: In your own words, what is Quest to Learn?

Bupp: We are allowing schools and students to take their homework, quiz questions and reuse them in fun, online games. We’ve found educational games broadly fall into two categories. The first is one big game that's focused on a specific subject, similar to Prodigy. It's this vast adventure, but you're playing math. The issue with that is it's only one subject and it's only a certain amount of time, or the kids might not like that kind of game.

And then you have games, like Kahoot!, that does allow you to put in some multiple-choice information and study, but the only option is an online quiz game. And even in that game, there are not many options. For example, as soon as the question is asked, those milliseconds are going down and your score is going down, and so the children who think faster and respond faster win every time in their class.

The problem that I am trying to solve is using your homework and quiz questions in different games. You have to separate the two. What Quest to Learn really is, is it's an online API that allows game developers to get access to that information so that you can build your own experience.

Quest to Learn- web platform

Quest to Learn- In Game

It seems like developers are really important to your product. I know you are early in the process but what kind of initial feedback have you gotten from game developers?

I’ve talked to a couple of local companies and the response has been good. It's a good question because it's a two-sided market. Developers, of course, would be more attracted if I had a thousand schools. Schools will more be more attracted if I have developers, right? That's part of the reason I started. I've gotten a lot of good interest because what I'm essentially doing for the developer is solving the original problem I described. Think about how much effort goes into building an educational game. You have to build the game and you have to build all the curriculum. You have to worry about all those standards. It's a lot of work. And then you end up with something that is targeting a very small part of the education market.

The pitch to the developer is you can do half the work, not worry about the curriculum, and every kid that signs into your game is going to be getting something tailored to them. They can allow a fifth-grader and a seventh-grader, maybe that are siblings, to jump into the same game at the same time, but get their own questions. It could be a quiz game, it could be an online game and it could be a racing game where you drive over the correct answers. It's a data feed and it's limited to the imagination of the creators and people are pretty creative.

Talk about the end-user of your product. I’m guessing you feel the market is bigger than just schools.

I'm looking at three levels of integration. A parent could let their students sign in, create their own home and quiz homework, somewhat like they do with Quizlet. It's just the type of information that goes into flashcards. If your kid puts together their flashcards, they can put together their Quest to Learn quizzes and questions sets, and then log in and play with them. The next level is the classroom, where kids can now share that information with their class and teachers can put new stuff out. And that's one of the cool things about it is, if your teacher puts out a new homework assignment, that will now feed all of your Quest to Learn games and the students will have some controls. Let's say you had a spelling test tomorrow. You could just limit to that in your game. Or if you had a midterm coming up or SAT prep, you could say, "Hey, give me everything from the start of the school year.” And then, beyond the classroom level, there is the district level. Student, classroom and district levels are the tiers that I'll be selling at.

It sounds like Quest to Learn is easy and customizable for the end-user.

Absolutely, it all comes down to what you can do with the information teachers use for homework and quizzes. I want them to be able to print out flashcards or take a practice quiz. One of the developers I talked to was asked if they could put a QR code on homework that would allow a kid to scan the QR code and it pops up into an augmented reality thing on their tablet. All of that stuff is possible. You just have to get back to the data. Once you have the data, you can do neat things with it.

Due to the challenges we’ve all faced this past year, teachers, parents and students have all spent a lot more time with online learning. Do you think there is more openness to online learning and the types of platforms you are building than there was a year ago?

I do. I originally started this early last year (before the pandemic) and when the pandemic hit it did show there is a need for this. In reality, the ecosystem is a lot better now and there's never been a better time to be starting an ed-tech company. Parents are seeing the need for improved online learning because sadly we have a lot of kids who are falling behind this year. Part of starting a business is solving a problem and creating opportunity. And so the opportunity there is: can we help kids catch up?

A lot of studies have shown just how critical study time is for kids. That's kind of where this started. I hated studying when I was a kid. But I would play video games and I could quote any number of stats, right? Studying is boring and I want to make it fun.

Kahoot! is fun, but it's fun for a time. If you give kids choice they can continue to have fun. If they get bored with one game, they can hop to a different game and still get their exact custom-tailored curriculum. If you make studying fun and kids do it more, they will achieve better. It's an important building block of learning.

How did you come to the cross-section of education and technology? Your background is more on the tech side right?

I'm a developer and I've been a developer since I was a little kid. I got that first TI calculator and was just hooked. I've been blessed. I was in the Air Force. I worked as a defense contractor for 10 years. I worked in the healthcare industry. So where does education come in?

In reality, I was a spoiled developer with a lot of job security. I create automation. I built business rules and screens. I build integrations between systems. It's all the same. What's different is what is coming out of it. When you're building a program to track something for the government to save the government money, there's not a lot of satisfaction in it. When you're doing healthcare and you're helping patients, there's a lot there.

I like mentoring and I like kids. It was less about creating a business to make money and more about, I want to do this and have this impact, and I need to make enough money to do that. That was the goal. I was going to build an educational game and then I started realizing some of the problems that I was originally telling you about. It's a heck of a lot of effort. It might be useful for my daughter for a month and once she's learned the thing that I baked into the game, she's going to move on. How do we change that? And that's kind of where the idea for you have to separate the game from the curriculum started.

You are active in the Oklahoma City entrepreneur/startup community. How would you describe the community here?

I think the community is buzzing. I was blessed to go through the OKC Thunder Launchpad and it was a fantastic program. The Chamber got me involved with 1 Million Cups. I'm currently working on trying to connect technology and entrepreneurs. We have technology silos and we have entrepreneur silos. How do we connect the two?

Bupp participated in the Thunder Launchpad program. 

For example, when I went through the Thunder Launchpad, eight other software-as-a-service companies were going through at the same time that I did, and I was the only developer. When I look at that, I think we have all these people that are entrepreneurial and want to work at a startup, and we have all these startups that need tech people. Typically, if you're an educator, you see a problem you can help solve in education and then you start a company. We don't have a lot of tech founders here, so to speak. I've been connecting with groups like the Chamber and the Innovation District on a lot of things. We aren’t Silicon Valley but I think that there is a presence here and there is a personality in Oklahoma that's great.

Along the same lines, if you were talking to someone who wasn't familiar with Oklahoma City, what would you tell them are some of the practical advantages of being a tech company in OKC?

I think the thing with Oklahoma City is the people are great and with any company, you need good people. It's not just about talent or technology. There are a lot of people here in Oklahoma City that want to do something good and want to build something good. The people in Oklahoma City are hardworking and that's more valuable than most realize. I've got meetings with so many people that I would never get the time of day with in other cities. They were willing to put their time out. People here have been generous in that perspective.

In your opinion, what are some next steps or things the community, as a whole, could focus on to make sure the momentum around our technology/startup sector continues?

I think a big thing is continuing to get groups around the city, like the Chamber and Innovation District, more plugged into the startups themselves. I’ve learned there are a lot of groups, resources and tools here but they aren’t all obvious at first. We need help breaking down the silos

I also think we, as a city, need to invest more in the space so we can attract outside investment. You see what MAPS has done for infrastructure for the city itself. I would love to see some type of future MAPS project, or a similar initiative, to encourage companies to move and grow here. Tulsa has the George Kaiser Foundation. I think that we need something from the city that is similar. A program where you're not just giving people money directly, but working with the groups and infrastructure that already exists to encourage that to be increased in Oklahoma City.

What are some things that people might not know about your startup?

Early on I knew what I was building would be useful because educational games are a huge market, but I had to learn the realities of dealing with schools.  Every student needs to log in, data reported, you need the context of who their teacher, sections, school, and district are.  It needs to be secure because privacy is important but especially so with kids.

What I realized was this:  to be in ed-tech you need a core set of functionality built before you even get to the specific problem you are trying to solve.  I also saw that most startups lacked the technnical expertise to build their vision.  So I decided to build a “core” set of these features first in a way that would make them reusable for other startups.  If we can help them and support development at the same time, that’s a win/win.

We built a prototype with ReadWriteCommunicate, a platform for measuring students writing grade level and the ease at which that writing can be read.  By reusing the core features I just mentioned, we quickly had a prototype built and added to the clever.com library for students and teachers to test.

I’m also working with TEAM Clinics, a local K12-focused telehealth company connecting students, nurses, and providers through their platform.  Parents don’t need to leave work to get their child seen by a healthcare provider, and kids get the care they need a lot faster.  They are growing fast and I am excited to see what we do together in this space.