Posted by Carlos Lopez Gonzalez on 2026-08-27
Ed-tech founder Amrutha Vasan sat down with Carlos Lopez Gonzalez and Michael Todd Edwards to discuss why widening access to learning depends far less on the technology than on giving students real problems—and real purpose.
Vasan left a job at Procter & Gamble at 23 to build virtual-reality learning in Mumbai, and over seven years her team brought more than 800 interactive simulations into K–12 classrooms on whatever devices students already had. But the research that started it all pointed somewhere else entirely. "You just can't replace a bad teacher," Vasan says. "There's nothing that replaces the human element of a teacher."
She is blunt about where her own deepest learning happened: "The fastest and most intense education I've ever had was actually building my own company. It was not in a classroom, and it was not in college." Students learn fastest, she argues, when they are actively building something they have a reason to care about.
Asked how teachers can make learning feel that real, she points to a San Jose parent who connected his students to the XPRIZE and has watched them reach the semifinals seven times over twelve years. "The kids got completely into it, because it's real," she says. "It's not a worksheet or a case study. It's an actual problem."
On who gets left out of conversations about educational innovation, Vasan is direct: "It's always the students. I'm one of the few people that actually works with students to build my products—which is crazy, if you think about it." Her closing note is an optimistic one: "Once people find a purpose, and now they actually have the tools to meet that purpose, that's when the greatest learning happens."
Read the full interview (PDF): https://ohiomathjournal.org/media/journals/14/amrutha_interview.pdf
This interview was conducted by Carlos Lopez Gonzalez as part of the Voices from the Field series.
If you know of someone who we should interview, please reach out to Tuto Lopez Gonzalez at caalopezgo@gmail.com.