In a world where there are so-called ‘tiger moms,’ it seems that there are tiger SAT test-takers, too.

That’s the demographic SAT test prep startup Altair Prep is catering to when they bring their online Stream SAT tutoring technology and in-person classes to Philadelphia area high school students this summer.

Or as cofounder Darwish Gani refers to the customers he’s looking to target “high achievers.”

“We don’t want to segregate and prevent admission because if you looked at my original SAT score, you might not think I was a good fit for Altair Prep. When in reality, I was the perfect fit,” Gani said. “We just need kids who are willing to work harder than their peers and are very motivated.”

Visit the service here.

Gani, 20, says he came up with the idea for Altair Prep while working as a student SAT tutor at Northwestern.

“I first proposed the idea of having a SAT class created for smart kids – as we had some of the smartest undergraduate tutors in the Chicago area,” Gani said. “We launched an accelerated SAT class that summer in Chicago and had a lot of success.”

He and fellow Northwestern student Salil Kumar, 21, asked Abhi Ramesh, 20, an old friend and student at UPenn to join them in starting the business. They set about engineering the Altair SAT curriculum and patching together 15 college tutors from their alma maters as well as Princeton and Georgia Tech. All of them, Gani emphasized, ranked in the 99.5 percentile and above on their SATs.

They then began matching tutors with intelligent, motivated students who wanted a more rigorous SAT prep course than what Gani says is available at larger, more well known SAT prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review.

“With the SAT re-constructed 5 or 6 years ago, students are often getting tutors who haven’t even taken the same test they did. Also, some companies have tutors of the SAT in the top “95%,” Gani said. “Some of my friends took these courses and scored better than their teachers.”

But rigor is not the only thing that Gani says is unique about Altair’s approach.

Stream, Altair’s complementary online tutoring system, will launch this summer and vastly improve the way students practice for the SATs, Gani says. The system is built on complex problem categorization system that allows Stream to identify both the type of problem missed and the reason why a student missed the problem, Gani told Techniaclly Philly.

“Altair’s Stream attacks your weaknesses in an immediate and precise way,” Gani said. “Stream makes it tough to miss a problem twice and ensures that you get a completely comprehensive test prep experience.”

Altair also offers custom-assigned 30-60 minute online Office Hours, a feature that Gani says was inspired by the familiar teaching method used in most colleges.

Although Altair’s classes first launched in Chicago and Atlanta, launching in the Philadelphia market seemed like an obvious next target since half of Altair’s leadership are Penn students. In addition to Ramesh, Wharton undergraduate Ashwin Muthiah, 19, serves as Regional Director.

The startup was also recently accepted to the Wharton Venture Initiation Program (VIP). But Muthiah, who will oversee classes in Atlanta and New Haven in addition to Philly, says the location of Altair’s headquarters is yet to be determined.

“We think the Philly area is a great one, and we hope to always have a very strong tie to Wharton students and so I think we hope to always be strong players in the local Philly area, regardless of where we are physically located,” Muthiah said.

Muthiah says that Altair currently tutors about 15 Philadelphia high school students, but expect about 100 highly motivated students to register for classes and tutoring this summer. Registration in Philadelphia is expected to go live next week, Muthiah told Technically Philly.

Altair Prep is an unusual pitch in an environment that tends to be more concerned with getting its high schoolers to graduation than making sure students get perfect SAT scores.

But if you’re going to pay for your child’s SAT prep anyway, it may be worth giving Altair’s customized and high intensity a curriculum a try — whether you’re a tiger mom of a tiger student, or not.

To learn about the classroom courses Altair plans to launch in Philadelphia this summer click here.

Launched in November from DreamIt Ventures co-founder Steve Welch, news from KinderTown, the curated app store within the app store for kids, hits TechCrunch news:

KinderTown, the startup behind the educational iOS app store for parents (and honestly, a personal fav) is expanding its focus today. According to feedback from its users, the number one complaint was that KinderTown wasn’t available for older children. Now that changes, as the service will bump up its supported age range from 3-6 to include children ages 7 and 8 as well. To kick off the launch, 125 new apps aimed at older children have been added to service, and more will be added every week.

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In school, lessons about the emancipation of slaves during the Civil War tend to focus on the struggles of individuals — of Lincoln or soldiers or those enslaved.

The University of Richmond Digital Scholarship Lab imagined that there might be a better, more thorough way to tell the emancipation story if you could see it — on a map.

The lab, led by Richmond president and historian of the American South Edward L. Ayers and the lab’s associate director Scott Nesbit, teamed up with Callowhill-based GIS development firm Azavea to build “Visualizing Emancipation” an interactive map that documents 3,000 events — from news reports to fugitive slave notices — that contributed to the end of the practice of slavery in the United States.

Visit the tool here.

The map allows researchers, teachers and students alike to focus in on various aspects of the Civil War and how it tracked with the progress of emancipation, or zoom out to get a sense of the huge swath of the country affected by the conflict.

Using a high performance geoprocessing GeoTrellis framework, Azavea helped build a variety of features, like the heat map which demonstrates the density of events in particular area or an animation which shows the progress of events across location and time. The application also makes use of both open source and commercial software, including OpenLayers, GeoServer, PostGIS and an ArcGIS Online base map, according to the press release.

Events were sources from newspapers, letters and diaries from Cornell University’s Making of America digital collection, Tufts University’s Perseus Project digital library, the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow online archive, and University of Richmond’s Richmond Daily Dispatch digitized newspaper archive.

“The trick is finding and making events visible, while acknowledging the complexity of when, where and how slavery fell apart in the U.S.  The site aims to make exploring emancipation more straightforward and understandable,” Nesbit said in the release.

The project was funded through an Office of Digital Humanities startup grant of $48,155 as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities We the People initiative. The University of Richmond then matched the grant, offering approximately $98,500 in cash and in-kind support, according to the press release.

Going forward, the university hopes to incorporate the “Visualizing Emancipation” map into larger digital Atlas of American History. In the meantime, it’s easy to see how a tool like this could change the way students learn and think about the Civil War.

President of Widener James T. Harris III, PECO SVP and COO Craig Adams, WPCS President & CEO Rosemarie McNeil-Sampson, Exelon Senior Exec. VP and Exelon Utilities CEO Denis O’Brien, and Exelon Foundation Presdient Steve Solomon display the million dollar check.

Widener University received a $1 million dollar grant last week from PECO and the Exelon Foundation to fund expanded STEM education programming at the Widener Partnership Charter School.

PECO offered $750,000 and the Exelon Foundation gifted $250,000 to be put toward the university’s charter school based in Chester, PA, according to a press release.

Widener launched the school in 2006 in order to improve educational opportunities for seventh and eighth grade students in the area.

The STEM programming involves both afterschool and Saturday supplemental education, as well as a community education program designed to involve parents and caregivers in students’ academic interests. The grant will continue to support this programming and help Widener make STEM-related workshops available to parents, according to a release.

In addition to the monetary grant, PECO employees will also get personally involved with the Chester students by participating in Widener’s afterschool mentoring program.

“These students already believe that they can be world changers, and with the knowledge and resources of such a strong corporate partner like PECO, their dreams and aspirations of becoming scientists, doctors, engineers and community leaders are that much closer to reality,” Widener University President James T. Harris III said in a release.

Most of Justin Lavner’s summer camps are designed to get kids up and out of the house, so it’s hard to see where his summer robotics and video game programming camps fit in.

But these camps help exercise that other part of children’s bodies that tend to be underused in the summer months — their brains.

After testing out the robotics camp idea last summer, Lavner has made the camp available at four locations in the Philadelphia area: the Cynwyd Club in Bala Cynwyd, the Barrack Academy in Bryn Mawr, Abington Friends School in Jenkintown and Valley Forge Educational Services in Malvern, PA.

“I wanted to create a camp where kids can shine, even if they do not always excel on the sports field. Robotics Camp is a place where this happens,” Lavner, the owner of Lavner Camps and Programs, said. “We received a lot of feedback from  parents who thanked us for running a great camp, and said their kids much preferred our Robotics camp over general day camp, where sports can be an emphasis.”

You can learn more about the camps here.

Last year, the robotics programming attracted approximately 200 campers to the one week camps that run throughout the summer.

The Robotics Camps aren’t simplistic either.

Campers work in groups of three or four to actually build small humanoid robots and, as they advance, can even create their own robot design. At the end of camp, campers of all levels and ages compete in what’s called ROBOWARS, which sounds futuristic and dystopian, but allows kids to show off their robots’ abilities.

In order to teach kids that range in age from six to 14 with little to no computer programming experience how to build small humanoid robots, Lavner says he actively seeks out highly experienced counselors and pays them well. Many of the counselors are student or graduates from top schools known for their engineering programs, including: Colgate, Columbia, Drexel, University of Pennsylvania Engineering and its school of arts and sciences and Temple.

“As a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, I have had a great network of highly intelligent and technical people to draw from both in and outside of the university,” Lavner said. “By investing financially in our excellent instructors, the overall quality of the camps reaches an extremely high level.”

Lavner, 30, who lives in Bala Cynwyd, was a tennis player at Penn, he says. Lavner Camps and Programs started out as the Lavner Tennis Academy for high level tennis training, a business that grew out of his tennis experience, he told Technically Philly.

But Lavner says his passion for helping kids learn and gain confidence himself motivated him to apply the lessons he’d learned running tennis camps to other types of programming.

“We have always understood how to help our students succeed, have fun and feel great about themselves,” Lavner said. “The model is growing to new areas, and we are reaching many new kids and families, which is a great success for us.”

This summer, the Video Game Programming and Design camp takes a much-reviled childhood activity and turns it into a learning opportunity.

“It offers great value in the sense that campers are being very proactive by creating their own video games, as supposed to playing videos games mindlessly on the couch for hours,” Lavner said. “There is nothing wrong with gaming in moderation, but this particular camp is all about creating, building, learning, and challenging themselves with games they make from scratch.”

Lavner’s camps run in one-week increments, but campers can participate for as many week as they want. During the school year, Lavner also offers after-school programming.

If you’ve got a child who might want to make a video game instead of just play it or build a robot instead of just watch one on TV, you can learn more about the camps here.

Kids these days do seem to love their mobile devices. So what better way to help them learn some arithmetic than with a mobile game?

That simple concept is what helped Drexel University’s Drexel Dragons claim the “Game Design in Mobile” victory at the Microsoft U.S. Imagine Cup last week.

Matthew Lesnak, 23, Keith Ayers, 23, and Nicolas Mullen, 22, — all Drexel seniors — designed “Math Dash,” to help elementary schoolers learn a subject they often hate — math. The application is scheduled to be released on the Windows Marketplace, according to a release to Technically Philly.

In addition to a $6,000 cash prize to be split between the team members, the group also netted a $10,ooo donation to their alma mater, according to the press release.

The Microsoft Imagine Cup is an international student technology competition. This year’s U.S. Competition was held at the Microsoft office in Redmond, Washington. The competition is in its tenth year.

In total, 74 students competed in three different categories, though approximately 113,000 students applied to participate, according to the release. Team FlashFood from Arizona State University won the entire competition and will go on to compete at the international level in Sydney, Australia in July.

University of Pennsylvania-housed GRASP Laboratory may likely be the city’s only incubator that produces things that actually fly.

That’s because GRASP — which stands for General Robotics Automation, Sensing and Perception — incubates robotics startups inside Penn’s engineering complex near 33rd and Walnut in University City.

Inside the lab, which is also home to Penn’s robotics research, you’ll find soccer playing humanoids, flying drones, and all kinds of other robots, as FastCompany reported.

To find out more about the robotics research and startup incubation, watch the above video FastCompany posted about GRASP:

Tom Shakely joins St. Thomas Aquinas as its director of digital services.

Most people don’t think of technology when they think of church, but St. Thomas Aquinas, a 125 year old Catholic church at 17th and Morris, is ready to enter the digital age.

And that first digital step starts with Thomas A. Shakely, the parish’s first Director of Digital Services. Shakely says he’s among the first people in the country to hold such a role with an individual Catholic church.

“It may possibly be the first of its kind in the country devoted exclusively to integrating the ‘physical’ and ‘digital’ aspects of ministry,” said Shakely, the 24-year-old dedicated to disrupting his corner of the faith world.

Updated: To clarify, Shakely is not a full-time employee but rather has bartered his services for office space and administrative support, he said.

Shakely is passionate about what he calls pastoral media — media services for churches and schools. He has written extensively about the need for the Catholic church to use digital technology to better connect its religious community on his personal blog and at the Huffington Post.

The position, says Shakely, began at the start of April as a pilot trial with him working on Monday each week.

Despite the limited hours, Shakely has big goals for the St. Thomas Aquinas, who says he’s focused on “creating a holistic approach to presenting St. Thomas Aquinas to the public.” In addition to religious services, the South Philly church has a PreK-12 school, a community center, gym, and auditorium.

“St. Thomas Aquinas seeks to serve ‘the immigrant and the stranger’ and its mission work flows out of its spiritual conviction. The work that’s done every day represents a very compelling story that’s unfolding in South Philadelphia,” Shakely said. “My job is learning how to unite these units and help them use new media and communications tools to share that story with the city.”

In case it’s not obvious what a Direct of Digital Services might to do to achieve that goal, here’s his short-term To Do list:

Being in uncharted parochial territory means Shakely, who recently moved from Manayunk to near the Aquinas parish, has a lot of digital inroads to make.

“Statistics suggest as many as 70 percent of self-identifying Catholics do not attend Mass regularly,” Shakely said. “If our retention rate is only 25-30 percent, we need to do more to engage those who love their Catholic identity but are struggling in practicing it in daily life.”

Though he’s young, Shakely has a strong social media background to work from.

Prior to taking on the challenge at St. Thomas Aquinas, Shakely started the Pastoral Media Letter, a subscription-based digital literacy service to train parishioners and church staff in community engagement strategies, which he still curates.

He says he plans to continue to push parishioners, church staff, and church members to strengthen the community through digital engagement.

“Using new media is a simple way to finally satisfy curiosities, and potentially cultivate stronger relationships and greater loyalty as a result,” Shakely said. “This is one example, and while it’s simple it’s also something practically no institution in the city has bothered to try.”

But religious communities are not the only groups he plans to reach out to. Shakely told Technically Philly that part of those inroads he’d like to make include creating partnerships with interested partners in the Philly tech community.

“We’ve got our eyes on North 3rd Street, at Indy Hall, and at all that’s unfolding just north of us,” Shakely said. “To start, we’re focused on getting our tech fundamentals to the point where they need to be internally, but I’m absolutely going to keep lines of communications open, and welcome any conversation over partnerships.”

Bringing digital savvy to St. Thomas Aquinas is the first step in building a stronger Philadelphia Catholic community, Shakely told Technically Philly.

“What I’m suggesting is actually very simple,” Shakely said. “It’s that Catholics can thrive if we seize the opportunities of new communications platforms, technologies, networks and tools to share our story.”

Roberto Clemente students planning their latest robot built in February. Photo by Matt Albasi.

Evelyn Cruz did not always want to be a robotics teacher or even dabble in technology. In fact, she started out as a bus attendant at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Hunting Park, making a meager salary.

Now, a technology teacher leader and robotics instructor at her old middle school alma mater, as Technically Philly first reported on in February, Cruz’s passion for teaching and giving back to her own community shows her dedication and promise to the neighborhood she grew up in.

“I’m a product of this school. I was one of them. I am a product of this neighborhood. I’m homegrown.” Cruz said.

Evelyn Cruz, who organizes the Roberto Clemente Middle School robotics program. Photo by Matt Albasi.

Cruz acknowledges the problems with advanced education in her community, noting that some kids do not have the resources or even knowledge to excel in an advanced field, such as engineering. Some of her students may not have basic tools at home, such as books or internet to even understand there are greater opportunities. Having grown up in a similar situation to many of her students, Cruz has a unique perspective.

“Some of my students tell me ‘Ms. Cruz, you don’t understand’. And I tell them, ‘I don’t understand? I don’t understand what it’s like to come home to no working heat or no food on the table?” Cruz said.

She considers herself a successful product of her neighborhood, attending Potter Thomas Elementary School, Roberto Clemente Middle School and Olney High School in North Philadelphia. Cruz obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education from Temple University in 1984.

Now, Cruz is a Technology Teacher Leader at Roberto Clemente, coaching other teachers in technology such as SMART boards and computer science. Her robotics classes range from 5th to 8th graders, where she teaches technology as a significant art. Cruz’s after-school robotics club also demonstrates her dedication to teaching, where she coaches students on how to build working robotics and to work in teams.

Her robotics team has participated in various competitions over the years, including the Boosting Engineering Science and Technology competition, First Lego League, and the Marine Advance Technology Education. Roberto Clemente has won awards in all three of these competitions.

“One of the main reason why I enjoy doing these competitions,” Cruz said, “is because it brings up real world situations where kids come in with some level of background knowledge, they apply it, then they use it.”

Watch a video report on the program.

The report was done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.

In the nearly two decades that the YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, an education program for low-income youth, has been in Philadelphia, it boasts helping more than 1,700 students transition to post-secondary educational programs and train for jobs in construction, health care and technology, according to a recent profile from the Inquirer.

In May 2009, Technically Philly profiled the program, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary next month.

YouthBuild, which originated in the Bronx, now employs locally about 50 staff who help offer a second chance to 213 18-20 year old students on North Broad Street above Girard Avenue. The program is largely publicly funded, according to the Inquirer.

In addition to improving their own lives, the students also contribute to the larger Philadelphia community.

From the story:

“In the first three years of the program, 13 houses in South Philadelphia – YouthBuild was quartered in the United Community Services building at Sixth and Catharine Streets – were rehabbed for low-income owners. That number now exceeds 70.

To round out the picture, add to that the 2,500 computers that technology students have refurbished and donated, the 5,000 hours of care they have provided for residents in long-term facilities, and the thousands of hours of community-service activities they have performed.” MORE

The program will be celebrating it’s 2oth anniversary on May 9, 2012. Click here to learn more.