• In July 2026, Plaut Pedagogy, LLC received a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I award from the U.S. National Science Foundation to support development of the company’s immersive courseware.

• Each year, approximately 800,000 US students enroll in calculus as foundational preparation for careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

• Traditional calculus instruction and assessment continue to emphasize low-level calculations that are rarely performed by STEM professionals.

• The broader/commercial impact of this SBIR Phase I project is to modernize how calculus is taught and learned by addressing a growing mismatch between instructional practice and real-world problem solving.

• This project develops immersive learning exercises that allow students to make real-time problem-solving decisions while the software manages routine calculations.

• The proposed research constructs internally developed decision frameworks for individual calculus problems that encode multiple valid and invalid reasoning pathways under conditions of uncertainty.

• Students interact with these exercises by making continuous decisions in response to contextual prompts, with all actions, omissions, and timing information recorded as high-resolution behavioral traces.

• These traces are used to iteratively validate and refine the decision frameworks through controlled student testing.

• As data volume increases, machine learning methods will be applied to model strategy selection, detect shifts in conceptual understanding, and adapt instructional responses at the individual level.

• This project will demonstrate that formally structured, data-driven decision environments can support individualized calculus learning while generating actionable diagnostic insight, establishing feasibility for a proprietary, technically scalable instructional system.

• By year three, the technology is projected to impact tens of thousands of students nationwide, with outcomes measured through adoption rates and demonstrated improvements in problem-solving performance.

• This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF SBIR Phase I: Creating Immersive Courseware for Calculus Pedagogy

View the Public Abstract and Additional Details of NSF - 2538031