Field report 06 · Education · Pilot
Students were checked out by first period. So we built a morning check-in.
After years building a morning app, Uzair saw middle and high school students arrive distracted and overwhelmed. DistrictZero turned a classroom stand-up into a daily check-in, and a $100K Intel grant brought it to the school district he grew up in.
A one-page PDF of this field report.
- Company
- DistrictZero
- Role
- Founder and CEO, product engineering
- Backed by
- Intel Pandemic Response Technology Initiative
- Research
- EdTech Recharge white paper, July 2021
- Classrooms
- Elementary, middle, high school, bilingual
S1The situation
Fine one day, the counselor's office the next.
Teachers tracked wellness in Google Forms and searched the answers for warning words by hand. Students had no middle ground between fine and crisis, and COVID made it worse.
S2The one outcome
A check-in every student would do, and every teacher could read.
Catch blockers early, suggest a quick remedy, and route serious cases to a counselor while keeping the teacher informed.
S3What we built
A stand-up for feelings, grounded in research.
- Focus, blockers and goals, aligned to CASEL
- Sentiment summarized for teachers at a glance
- A resource library matched to each blocker
- Crisis language routed to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
Before it had a name · 2018 – 2019
Early pilots, battle-tested in U.S. K-12 classrooms.
Before DistrictZero had a name, Uzair ran design thinking workshops in middle and high schools. A stand-up with middle schoolers (what's working, your goal, your blocker) became the daily check-in, and every workshop sharpened it.
The bridge · from Cleu’s provisional patent
The alarm clock that became a morning announcement system.
Cleu's patent already imagined this: a teacher records a morning message, and it plays only once the student is truly awake.
The connected campus · from DistrictZero’s provisional patent
From a notebook sketch to a patent figure.
In February 2020 Uzair sketched a whole campus working together: school Wi-Fi, bus and traffic data, and campus services, so whatever was blocking a student could be cleared by the right person nearby. That sketch became part of DistrictZero's patent, and it even names Bosch and Innit from his connected-kitchen years.
Food and nutrition
Campus service
Curriculum and knowledge
Campus service
Campus security
Campus service
Mental health professional
Campus service
Teacher communication
Campus service
Inside the product
A check-in teachers could read at a glance.
Teachers saw blockers, sentiment and progress over the school year, and families, teachers and the district all had a place in the picture.
On the road
Pitched in Silicon Valley, proven in a binder.
The debrief
What act one proved.
We documented everything we learned with researcher Dr. Kripa Sundar of EdTech Recharge, so each pilot could make the next one better.
What we learnedMid-pandemic, a district-wide rollout was too much to ask of teachers, so we went deep instead: 2 administrators and 12 teachers for 8 weeks. They asked who chooses the resources, and how to respond when a student is in crisis. Both answers became features, and the same care later served 16 clinicians at Loyola.
- $100KIntel grant at Indian Prairie School District 204
- ~400District licenses, plus teacher training
- 30Students in a hybrid high school usability study
In their words
“Uzair, one of my earliest clients, has shown an avid interest to collaborate with experts to learn how to do things “right”, per what the evidence suggests, and to build it into District Zero’s product roadmap, current and future.”
Founder, EdTech Recharge
“He puts the students first and seeks to understand how to remove blockers from their learning environments.”
Peter Hostrawser
Business Educator, on a 10-day session at Glenbard East High School“His empathic day-to-day leadership with care for team members and customers inspired everyone around him do better.”
Amit Jai Kadam
Vice President, Analytics, dentsu international
Laps · how it got here
2018 – 2019
Early pilots
Design thinking workshops in middle and high schools.
2020
DistrictZero
The company founded, the connected campus sketched, a remote team built.
2021
Intel grant
IPSD 204 front page, white paper, provisional patent.
2022
On the road
Elementary pilot, SXSW EDU with AWS EdStart.
Next
Act two
A medical school. Field report 01.
