Vishal Bhatt

Co-founded the non-profit called "Innovation & Science Promotion Foundation" (ISPF) and later the social enterprise called ThinkTac, along with 3 other partners. The goal of the two organisations was to make learning science engaging and meaningful for children aged 5 years to 15 years. We later added a Maths programme as well.

Being one of the founders, I was involved in almost all the decisions. However, my contributions can be categorised in five buckets: product development, on field implementation, teacher trainings, partnerships and business development.

• Product development:
• design of activities based on a common design principle of low cost repurposed material
• design of learning content like observation worksheets to enable students to learn through the activities
• syllabus maps of activities for all boards - CBSE, ICSE, Cambridge, State boards
• case study based competency assessment workbooks: 10 books having around 1000 questions around 200 real life case studies with around 15 man years of R&D effort
• toys & tales programme designed for foundational literacy & numeracy (FLN)
• Raman Clubs - a product option with lower cost and mixed age group designed for the affordable schools
• Designed the QPOSE framework which stitches together all the pedagogies used in various ThinkTac products.
• On field implementation
• experiments with different formats (one time workshops, teacher driven, ThinkTac driven, student driven, etc) and a variety of schools (metro, tier 2 pvt schools, govt, APS, rural, etc) so as to arrive at the best implementation method
• annual programme design including session plans and SOPs to support schools
• Teacher trainings: Involved in training of around 30 thousand teachers from a variety of backgrounds
• Partnerships: Initiated and maintained partnerships like
• Rotary Gujarat: 105 clubs under district 3060, 9 year old partnership, trained around 2000 teachers and 300 schools located in rural regions of south gujarat.
• Siemens Jigyaasa project: around 100 govt schools in Goa, Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad and Nashik. The CSR team is now signing a 3 year agreement to handover entire implementation to ISPF. This partnership has fetched around 5 Cr business for ThinkTac/ ISPF till now.
• CSRs: Wipro, Synopsys, Concerned India Foundation, UST Global
• Uganda schools: attempted partnership with Joban group to implement ThinkTac programmes in Uganda schools. We also got an approval from NCDC Uganda for our programme but we could not convert it to any sales
• CCMB Hyderabad: knowledge partner for ThinkTac
• Oxford University Press: was involved in a sustained partnership of ~3 years with OUP. We provided 5-activities programme for grade 3 to 8 to be published on their online platform.
• Business development: Multiple schools including Marque schools like The Doon School, Shivnadar Noida and other Bangalore based schools like Ekya (chain) , Chrysalis (chain), DPS (multiple branches), etc. I have made sales pitches to around 500 private schools till now.

BeMe is an alternate school based out of Bangalore. With the freedom of open schooling, BeMe is able to provide an environment to the children at BeMe to choose their learning path and hence take ownership of their decisions and life. I have not been involved in the day-to-day operations here but I have been an active member of the team which designs the roadmap and systems at BeMe.

I had worked for an year with the toys designed by Arvind Gupta's team. The objective was to link these toys to topics from the K-10 curriculum so as to make the toys more acceptable to school teachers. I had linked around 200 of the toys to science and maths NCERT curriculum.

I was one of the co-founders of amable which was started with the objective of scaling the programme called Train The Trainer. This programme was designed by Geniekids Learning Centre. It was an intense parenting programme spanning across 4 months with 40 modules. When amable was initiated, Geniekids had already hosted this programme in Bangalore for 8 batches. Our goal was to scale this programme in as well as outside Bangalore.

• We experimented with the format, delivery mode and frequency. Online programmes were not common those days but we successfully hosted multiple online batches.
• We also launched a unique programme for children aged 10 to 13 called Genie Duniya where we had children work on real projects from the industry. This programme was run for 2 years with these 6 projects: Market survey for peanut farmer (offered by IIMB), Children movie critic (Reliance Netflix), Awareness to reduce mobile phone usage while driving (Bangalore Traffic Police), Design and setup windmill (Aarohi Life School), Design and market activity kit using thread & needle (Madura Garments), Make your own movie from scratch (Omshree Studios)

This was my first job after completing my masters in computer science. Synopsys designs and licenses EDA softwares to firms which design VLSI chips like Intel, nVidia, AMD, etc. I worked at the Synopsys R&D team with their verification group.

• On the technical side, my work involved writing code to optimise and maintain softwares like compilers and simulators.
• After spending 3 years at the company, I was rewarded with team management responsibilities. I discovered my ownership skills and ease of working with people as part of this role.
• The part of the software which my team maintained, often required responding to urgent bug-fixing requests from the field. This exposure helped me see the value of customer's perspective for business.
• Our team overhauled the architecture of the code which gave ~2x speed and reduced the memory requirement by ~10x. However, the project was not sponsored for more than 2 years. I took the initiative to present it to the GM, get the approval and successfully drive the completion & deployment. This initiative reduced the development team size for this part of the code from ~20 to 3 people.