We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful The Modern Scholars. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with The Modern Scholars below.

The Modern Scholars, start with education – we’d love to hear your thoughts about how we can better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career

If we could change anything about the educational system, it would be to minimize the emphasis of standardized testing. The trending issue in today’s public education is that students are no longer inspired and motivated in school. Instead, there is an increasing emphasis on standardized testing, pushing the focus away from authentic learning and teaching. This takes the fun out of learning for students, and they feel unmotivated about school as a whole. With the emphasis being on the formative assessments and end of the year standardized test, teachers are teaching to the test and neglecting to provide students with an authentic and quality education. We can prepare students by updating curriculum to ensure more real world learning is taught, especially financial literacy. Also, with minimizing the emphasis of standardized testing, learning can be more project and experience based. Students are slowly falling out of love with learning and we as educators want students excited about a lifetime of learning.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

The Modern Scholars are two educators that are updating learning and student motivation through technology. We want to build positive behaviors and academic success in today’s scholars. We have created a gamified learning platform, Where It Pays To Learn. Kash-In helps teachers with classroom management and student engagement, while rewarding and increasing academic accountability in students.

Kash-In was launched in 2020. It allows teachers to use digital kash as an award. Teachers can monetize behaviors and actions to reward students. Kash-In Academy was launched in 2021. It’s a learning platform that allows teachers to use digital kash to monetize lessons, quizzes, and classroom assignments to award academic achievement. “Kash” is then deposited for the positive actions/behaviors or correct response; withdraws can be made for negative actions/behaviors. Students have online checking accounts where they can track “kash” in real-time. Students can then use “kash” to make purchases from online incentive stores.

We plan to transform education by: 1) Updating the physical token economies such as paper money, stickers, and a system beyond ‘points’. 2) Creating a classroom management and student engagement tool geared towards secondary teachers and older students. 3) Increasing real-world teaching and building financial literacy in our students. 4) Providing Social & Emotional learning and a behavior intervention system 5) Providing a reward system to help motivate At-Risk students.

As a new company, we anticipate that our app will be known for its versatility. It can be used in every classroom.
We’re proud of our app’s ability to teach students financial literacy. We allow students to practice and develop the skills necessary to manage their own money. Our app is student-centered, technology based, and a real world learning system, that will change how students learn and teachers teach.

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

My co-founder and I met while working at a Title I school in the greater Houston area. Coming from different backgrounds, we found our calling in education. We both started as substitute teachers and have worked more than 10 years together. LaTasha came up with the brilliant idea to give students “STAAR Bucks” to buy different incentives on campus. The STAAR Bucks were a hit! All of the students were doing their very best to earn STAAR Bucks but this paper based system had its flaws. Students were losing the paper money and it was time consuming to cut the paper money. While traveling to San Antonio for a professional development, we decided to take the STAAR Bucks digital. This is when the idea of Kash-In first started. From that day, we have been vibing and building a thriving brand, The Modern Scholars.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Our most effective strategy for growing clientele is using social media. Social media allows us to reach a wide variety of different users that can benefit from using Kash-In and Kash-In Academy. TikTok has been the platform that reached the most users and helped us to really grow our clientele. Making TikToks videos are fun but they also serve as great marketing tools! We post videos daily that get the attention of an audience of teachers, parents, coaches, and organization leaders. This has been a real game changer for our company.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.kash-in.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/the_modernscholars/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/KashInApp2/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/the-modern-scholars
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/modern_scholars
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCRT2dAgfvh5JVQWU-cL-GmQ
• Other: App Website: www.kashinapp.com

Image Credits
Channing Castex Jr., Jennifer Stelly and LaTasha McMurry