For two University of Texas at Arlington students who won a $25,000 grant to scale their entrepreneurial idea, their collaboration began with identifying a problem.
Sami Ali, who recently graduated from UTA with a degree in information systems, was working in the university’s career development center when she noticed that there were important courses that students were constantly retaking. He asked his friend Ethan Debnath, a senior computer science major he met early in college, to help him come up with a solution.
“I went back to my native Pakistan and worked on some startups. Ethan went back to Bangladesh and worked with his father in his company,” Ali said.
In April 2023, they began work on what would become Pluto Learning. Over a year later, they entered UTA’s MavPitch competition. The competition is a Shark Tank-style pitch competition where students come up with a business or product idea and pitch it to a panel of judges. The judges are all experts from TechFW, a startup incubator and accelerator. I started my own business.
“This event is a great way for students to be exposed to the entrepreneurial spirit and help develop a sense of innovation and outside-the-box thinking,” said Jeffrey McGee, a professor in the UTA School of Business and program organizer. said. “The structure of the program helps students gain confidence and improve important skills, while also giving them a chance to win up to $40,000 in prizes.”
Winning student works this summer received prizes ranging from $2,500 to $25,000. Projects ranged from carefully selected art supplies and themed boxes to an outdoor security camera system that feeds into a touchscreen display that can be used for a variety of purposes.
Pluto Learning’s home dashboard includes a shared calendar, AI-generated quizzes, and shared folders. (Image provided | Pluto Learning)
At Pluto Learning, Ali and Debnath turned to artificial intelligence to make it easier for students to form learning communities that coordinate their schedules and form study groups around core courses. The software creates a learning dashboard for students in each learning group with windows for tasks, notes, shared folders, and AI-generated subject questions.
“Students who just start attending the course are very attentive, but as the semester progresses they gradually start missing lectures, either because they are commuting or because they cannot find someone to study with. . That’s when it goes down and the university loses,” Debnath said. “Team learning is the best way for universities to retain students in their courses.”
Now that the business has moved from idea to reality, the duo plans to use the funding to help with marketing and scaling up the product.
Shomial Ahmad is a higher education reporter for The Fort Worth Report in partnership with Open Campus. Contact shomial.ahmad@fortworthreport.org.
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