Test teaching methods on 10,000 students overnight
What if you could compare teaching strategies on thousands of synthetic learners — without involving a single real child? SYNTHIA is a virtual, AI-driven simulated environment where learner agents and educational interventions interact in realistic ways, enabling rapid, evidence-based innovation in education.
Why Synthetic Classrooms?
There are over 150 years of learning science research available, but those interventions have not been implemented at scale. Today, many e-learning tools rely on only a few simple interaction types — multiple-choice quizzes or text boxes — because those are easy to program, not because they're effective. SYNTHIA changes that.
Learning Science Testbed
A virtual lab where new teaching interventions are rapidly prototyped and evaluated using AI learner agents. Run hundreds of experiments on teaching techniques in silico before trying the most promising ones in real classrooms.
Learner Digital Twins
Swarms of synthetic students that behave like real learners — logging in, clicking through lessons, attempting assignments — to rigorously stress-test e-learning platforms and catch issues before real users encounter them.
Pedagogical Modeling
Generate synthetic students and learning data to test AI tutoring systems — complete with realistic performance trajectories, mistakes, and behaviors — enabling risk-free "pre-clinical" evaluation of adaptive learning platforms.
Key Advantages
Rapid, Risk-Free Experimentation
Test many instructional approaches on virtual students without putting any real children at risk. Real learners are only exposed to interventions that have been pre-vetted in simulation.
Discover What Works for Whom
Simulate varied student personas and conditions to reveal which interventions work best for different learner profiles — struggling readers, advanced students, ELL learners, neurodivergent students.
Scalability & Speed
Run thousands of scenarios overnight. A traditional education experiment takes months with a handful of classrooms. The synthetic testbed provides statistical power at a scale previously impossible.
Privacy & Safety by Design
All testing is done with AI agents — no real learner data is involved. New features can be vetted for security and privacy compliance without involving actual users.
A collaboration between
SETA Education
Project Lead
Scientific and Engineering Technical Assistance for Education R&D. SETA-ED amplifies R&D impact by helping teams envision, plan, execute, and scale their efforts with scientific, engineering, legal, and ethical assistance.
- •Scientific & Inclusive R&D Support — scientific and engineering review, analysis, execution, and evaluation for R&D proposals, including cost realism, technical merit, and scientific rigor
- •Legal & Ethical Frameworks — ensures alignment with IRB requirements, data sharing agreements, and privacy laws across federal, state, and local landscapes
- •Privacy & Security by Design — infrastructure built for federal ARPA organizations with secure storage, sharing, and analytic tooling for highly-sensitive datasets
Data Machines
AI & Engineering Partner
Empowering data, powering discovery. Data Machines leverages data analytics, DevSecOps, machine intelligence, and data science to engineer solutions for federal government, defense, and commercial customers to solve real-world, critical mission problems.
- •Advanced Analytics & AI — transforms raw data into smart data through advanced analytics, new algorithm development, and machine learning
- •Software Engineering — builds and delivers high-velocity software applications across government, defense, and commercial sectors
- •Machine-Human Partnerships — builds AI systems that elevate the way organizations harness the power of data in decision making
Ready to see it in action?
Configure an experiment, run a simulation, and explore the results — all in under 5 minutes.