SHIKHA LABS
Building the Frontiers of AI for Education in India
At Shikha Labs, we believe that every child deserves a high-quality education—one that nurtures curiosity, critical thinking, and a love for learning. However, scaling effective teaching practices across diverse classrooms remains a global challenge.
With the emergence of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) in 2022, we saw an opportunity to bridge this gap, right within the Shikha Ecosystem. AI has the potential to not only enhance classroom experiences but also solve scalability challenges in education. We believe that such technology centers should be housed closely, or even within the environment they seek to support.
Shikha Labs was born within the Shikha Academy and Shikha Institute, two institutions dedicated to redefining education for the 21st century. Our work is grounded in deep research in the learning sciences and powered by cutting-edge AI technology. We collaborate closely with teachers, schools, and students to design AI-driven solutions that address real-world classroom needs.
To date, our team has conceptualized over 30 AI applications for students, teachers and schools. Each of these innovations is designed to enhance teaching, improve student engagement, and scale best practices globally.
Here are some AI application ideas we have developed.
Personalized Story Generator
The Challenge:
Many young learners, especially in Grade 1, struggle with English reading due to the cognitive challenges of learning a new language. Traditional storybooks often fail to engage them.
Our Idea:
We built an AI-powered storytelling tool that allows teachers to generate personalized stories for their students. By entering the child’s name, interests, and reading level, the app creates a customized story where the student is the main character! Students can even co-create adventures with their friends, making reading an exciting and immersive experience.
Impact:
- Boosts reading motivation and engagement
- Makes language learning fun and relevant
- Supports differentiated instruction for varied reading levels
Discourse Moderator Guide
The Challenge:
Classroom discussions are a powerful way to develop critical thinking and communication skills, but effective moderation is key to making them meaningful. Teachers often struggle with structuring discussions, asking the right probing questions, and ensuring student participation.
Our Idea:
Our AI-powered Discussion Support app helps teachers moderate discussions effectively. By entering the topic and learning goals, teachers receive:
✔ A structured discussion guide
✔ Probing questions tailored to student levels
✔ Expected student responses
✔ A rubric for assessing contributions
✔ Solutions to potential discussion challenges
Impact:
- Empowers teachers to lead more impactful discussions
- Enhances student engagement and deeper thinking
- Provides a scalable framework for high-quality classroom discourse
AI Teacher Coach
The Challenge:
One-on-one coaching is one of the most effective ways to help teachers improve, but it’s resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Schools struggle to provide individualized coaching at the level needed.
Our Idea:
Our AI Teacher Coach provides personalized feedback on classroom teaching by analyzing real teacher audio recordings. Teachers upload a recording of their lesson, and the AI provides detailed, data-driven insights on what went well (glows), areas for improvement (grows) and strategies for better student learning.
Impact:
- Scales high-quality teacher coaching without requiring a human observer
- Helps teachers reflect on their practice and refine their techniques
- Enables continuous professional development at scale
AI-Assessed Portfolio Portal
The Challenge:
At Shikha Academy, students maintain public, personal websites showcasing their best work every month, reflecting on their learning and growth. Current student display websites do not service all our needs.
Our Idea:
We designed a custom Portfolio Portal with back-end student-friendly reflection scaffolds to guide self-assessment, and a beautiful, yet personalisable front end interface for showcasing work across subjects. An AI assessor is built in that evaluates a student’s 21st-century skill development with evidence from the portfolio.
Impact:
- Encourages student ownership of learning
- Helps students track skill development over time
- Provides meaningful AI-generated assessment to showcase a student’s 21st Century skills at scale
Join Us in Shaping the Future of AI in Education
Our products are currently in the testing phase and will be officially released in late 2025. We are excited to partner with innovative and early adopter schools that are eager to explore how AI can revolutionize education. If you are one such school, write to us at admin@shikhaacademy.org and let’s build the future of learning together!