“Train a teacher and you will transform the lives of hundreds of students.”

“Train a teacher and you will transform the lives of hundreds of students.” This is the belief that led Vita Beans to create a gamified teaching, teacher training & open certification platform called Guru-G: an engaging environment that enables easy and intuitive adoption of pedagogy by teachers, schools, and governments.

Anand Joshi reflects on the first part of the Vita Beans experience with Unreasonable at Sea. 

At Vita Beans, our focus is education, and specifically – our focus is the teacher. That’s right, we build stuff for teachers. Many times, it’s the same stuff that everyone else has been peddling for students – apps, games, learning content, adaptive platforms etc. etc. etc. The teachers are our students, and we want to help them learn. It’s quite simple really – if we can empower ONE teacher, it affects HUNDRED’S, if not THOUSANDS of kids.

Since this is my first post, I thought I should include that 30 second spiel about the company. But what’s really on my mind is how incredible the past 10 days have been. We have been at sea for the most part, and have made a couple of short stops in Ensenada, Mexico and Hilo, Hawaii.

Anand Joshi, Amruth Bagali Ravindranath and Shivananda Salgame are representing their company Vita Beans
Photo by Danny Askew, Unreasonable Media

Both cities were small and boring but it was good to get out and get some decent food. Ship food tastes exactly like dorm food in UIUC, no taste at all and my room is actually smaller than my dorm room in college so I barely spend any time in it. Those are my only 2 complaints. Actually, my only real complaint is the food because being out of the room is awesome, and a huge change for me because I used to spend a lot of my day in front of the computer, either working or watching TV shows. I now spend most of my time with the rest of the entrepreneurs, or out on the deck where we had our first whale AND dolphin sightings today!

We are now on the way to Japan which is the longest time we will be staying at sea, and apparently the seas will be rough so this will be the true test for seasickness, which I thankfully have not experienced yet.  Before I left, everyone had a suggestion on how to avoid seasickness, and I wonder whose advice I should follow.

The Vita Beans team share their unreasonable business plans with the Semester at Sea students.

“Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?” – is a question I have often been asked, by many different people, including family, friends, recruiters and others. 5 years ago, I started my first company focused on the education space and my uncle had asked me the very same question. No matter how optimistic and exaggerated my reply would have been, it would fall quite short of where I find myself today – docked off the port of Honolulu, on a floating think-tank with some of the most amazing entrepreneurs and mentors looking to solve the world’s biggest problems.

Vita Beans participate in the daily workshops facilitated by Daniel Epstein and George Kembel

Now I haven’t been big on writing for a long time, and most of the writing I have done has been related to work. Before I left Bangalore, Dr. Murli, who I consider a very good friend and advisor, recommended that I keep a journal, to keep track of all my experiences through this amazing program. A couple of days into the program, Daniel handed out Flip Cams so that we could chronicle our experiences on video. As much as I wanted to follow Dr. Murli and Daniel’s advice, I didn’t.

I am actually writing this post, because Sarah is making me do it as a part of a workshop on communications. So this is my attempt at writing something interesting, that other people may read, that is sort of related to work, but not entirely. Maybe this will be the first piece for my journal (which will eventually become a book to be published in 100 different languages…)

Making an impact, changing the world – prime examples of easier said than done. I consider myself quite lucky to be involved in an organization that may have found one of the answers to bringing those dreams to reality.