Company: VINCI Education, North Andover, MA
Entry Submitted By: Child's Play Communications
Company Description: VINCI Education has pioneered the creation of a new category of fun learning tools with the goal to engage, empower and educate young children. By using a scaffolding teaching method designed by developmental psychologists and educational experts, VINCI’s products and solutions offer both a technology platform and the immersive gaming content to engage young learners at home and in the classroom.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Product Development/Management Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Dr. Dan Yang, Founder and CEO

1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2013 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Dr. Dan Yang is the founder and CEO of VINCI Education, a new category of fun learning tools including mobile devices and data-enabled digital curriculums for children at home and in schools.

In 2010, Dr. Yang, a mother of two then-preschool-age children, noticed that though her young kids loved to play with her mobile tablet, there were no apps that satisfied her desire to provide meaningful educational playtime experiences. Disappointed by the lack of educational apps yet stricken by the power of technology to fascinate her children, the serial entrepreneur was inspired to start VINCI Education with $10 million of her own funds. The mission of the company is to leverage technology to engage, empower and educate young children both at home and in the classroom.

Under Dr. Yang’s leadership, the company has had a successful four-year journey. Last year in particular proved to be a banner year as Dr. Yang guided the revolutionary education technology brand to focus its efforts on developing its classroom products. ClassVINCI, the company’s school solution, is the only complete blended learning solution for early learners. Blended learning is an educational technique that combines technology tools with traditional teaching methods.

With ClassVINCI, students access game-based digital curriculums tied to Common Core state standards on VINCI Learning Tablets. VINCI provides digital curriculums tailored to each individual teacher’s needs, so the digital content compliments the teacher’s traditional lesson plans and is seamlessly integrated into his or her teaching instruction in small increments called “VINCI Time.” Students are able to interact with the digital curriculum independently, empowering them to take ownership of their learning and allowing teachers to deliver small-group and individual instruction to struggling students while the rest of the class in engaged.

In 2013, Dr. Yang led the early childhood curriculum design for ClassVINCI and spearheaded the release of the industry's very first digital game-based learning math curriculum for students in pre-K through grade 1.

To ensure that teachers have instant access to student progress while classes engage with ClassVINCI, Dr. Yang developed the industry's first real-time data enabled learning management platform for tablet-based learning. The learning management system is fundamental to student success as it enables teachers to immediately assess how students are performing with the digital curriculum and identify those who are struggling. This gives educators a GPS-like guide for their instruction that is unparalleled in the industry and allows them to instantly modify each child’s lesson to ensure learning success in real-time.

Finally, to ensure the efficacy of the curriculums and learning tools she developed, Dr. Yang led the team to implement pilot research program at more than 20 school districts. These programs demonstrated the effectiveness of technology-enabled instruction, which not only saves teachers time but also gives the ownership of learning back to young students. These programs saw improvement in baseline assessment scores, with low-performing students in particular seeing significant gains.

Overall, through Dr. Yang’s guidance, VINCI Education saw $2.5 million in sales last year.

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2. Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the nominee:

In 1991, after graduating with a Ph.D. in physics from University Paris-Orsay, Dr. Dan Yang began her career in France as an associated professor of Optics and Photonics. In 1993, she moved to Montreal to work as a scientist and designed fiber-optic networking systems before quitting to pursue her career as a technology entrepreneur. Very well recognized and “crowned” as “Queen of Optical Amplifiers” by fiber-optic industry insiders, Dr. Yang is a renowned inventor with close to 20 U.S. patents, some of which have become the standard for today’s fiber-optic network. Following a series of technology ventures, including two startups in Canada and in California, an acquisition of a German public company, and multiple science and technology, Dr. Yang launched VINCI Education in 2010.