The Seneca Story

Whilst at university, I became more and more interested in how we learn, and how we can learn more efficiently. The more I learned about Neuroscience and Psychology, the more I realised that what most people do is completely wrong. When it comes to revision, most kids in the UK make loads of notes and read them again and again and again. The danger is that as facts are read repeatedly they become familiar, but as a result, you skim over them and stop focusing on their content.

I was one of the people using the worst possible learning techniques and we wanted to fix this for everyone. If we could build a free system to allow people to learn more effectively and having fun whilst they did it, we thought that would be a good goal to aim for.

When we first built Seneca, the first thing we did was test it in a 1,120 student Randomised Control Trial to make sure that it was effective and helped people to learn more efficiently. Students who used Seneca scored 105% higher on the final test, compared to the students who learned using traditional methods. These results were amazing to see and were a great motivator for continuing to pursue this project.

That was back in 2017 and now we have 4 million people using Seneca in the UK, which is crazy to think about. 1 million of these came in the month that followed the coronavirus-enforced school closures and the functionality that people needed changed overnight! We built a whole new platform & interface to support parents as well as some big new features to help teachers during the school closures. We hope that adding these extra data insights has proved invaluable for helping to make distance learning as productive as possible.

The whole team has loved seeing the positive impact this style of learning has had on so many kids and we are focused on having this impact on more children in more countries. Our primary goal is to create a free & personalised education for every child in the world!