Stile Education
Stile Education has been recognised as an ABA100® Winner for UX Design Excellence in The Australian Business Awards 2017 for the research and development of Stile. The Australian Business Award for UX Design Excellence [UXD] recognises products and digital solutions that offer a point of difference from their competitors in user experience through design excellence.
“One thing that’s for sure is that the ‘user experience’ of the classroom isn’t linear, consistent or formulaic. It’s crazy to think that a static resource like a textbook could satisfy the needs of any classroom… We set out to put the teacher in control and designed a product around the experience of teaching STEM in the 21st century. Turns out that both teachers and their students love it – Stile is now used in over 10% of Australian schools and is growing daily.”
Stile Education was founded in 2012 by entrepreneur, educator, and scientist Dr Alan Finkel, and is now run by a passionate group of teachers, engineers and scientists who have come together to build cutting-edge lesson delivery technology and relevance-led resources. Stile Education partners with leading science organisations and schools in its continuing mission to rethink textbooks, and STEM education at large.
At Stile’s inception, it was marketed as a lesson creation and delivery platform for teachers. In 2016, this offering was extended to include access to an extensive library of pre-made science lessons that align to the national and regional science curricula. Stile is now used by almost 140,000 Australian students in over 275 schools.
Stile can be accessed on any device with an Internet connection, whether at home or at school, and its lessons incorporate traditional mediums like text and images, but also include video, virtual reality, animation and interactive activities to deliver a STEM education that is comprehensive, fun and accessible to all students, regardless of their levels of literacy.
Engagement is a key metric in determining a student’s likelihood for undertaking an education or career in STEM, which is why Stile places such a strong emphasis on producing engaging lesson content. The combination of mediums that Stile employs in its lessons present an evolution of traditional textbooks – maintaining simple to understand explanations, but with the addition of visual elements that bring examples and difficult concepts to life.
Not only does Stile provide best-in-class content that’s aligned to national and regional curriculum frameworks, it also allows teachers to modify and customise materials to suit their students’ needs, with virtually no technical experience needed. Stile is intuitive to use and designed to fit around familiar workflows, allowing all teachers to adopt modern teaching styles. Stile also enables teachers to work together to collaboratively build a library of lessons that can be used year after year.
The team behind Stile consists of teachers and scientists who believe that the responsible citizens of tomorrow must be strong critical thinkers, that a strong science education is key to developing critical thinking skills, and that the resources available to science teachers today are alarmingly uninspiring. Stile was founded to address the very real issue that is Australia’s declining levels of interest and competency in STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering and maths – and to inspire school students to develop a lifelong curiosity in the world around them. It is this growing problem that Stile was created to tackle. Stile Education believes that the problem lies not with the quality of Australia’s teachers, but with the fact that students are still being taught by textbooks that are outdated as soon as they are published, and which are completely antiquated to a generation that has grown up operating iPads and smartphones, and referring to the Internet for answers. Today’s students need an engaging and exciting science education in order to produce our next generation of problem solvers and innovators.
For more information about Stile Education go to stileeducation.com