Imagine K12

Seriously, I love these kinds of pitches, though I personally am so over-extended I can't do much beyond offer hit & run advice.

I don't know what other technical contacts you're making, but my biggest suggestion is not to wait. There's a huge amount of work you can do without being "the technical one" yourself, and the great thing about this work is that it gradually leads you into a better understanding of the technical side yourself -- which you'll need to do at some point, if you want to be centrally involved in a tech business. You don't have to write code, necessarily, but you have to learn a lot about the tech side.

All that really means is "details" -- take the best of your ideas, and start breaking it down all the way into separate pages, separate bits of data ("so we're letting teachers enter assignments here... that needs a name, description, due date -- er, wait, some teachers will have sets of assignments to do in sequence with no specific due date -- and what about extra credit assignments?" etc.); how to enter data, organize it, show it to the users who need to see it (and how to organize them). And so on. What do you do when the user "does it wrong"? Will you handle different time zones, languages, etc.? This is where the important work is; you have to add in solutions to problems, then remove most of your ideas and strip it down to what's most essential & useful & easy to build.

This process is much more difficult than the original brainstorming, but also more rewarding -- your project becomes so much closer to "real".

It is also true that teachers don't want to mess with more of this stuff. We are already beat over the head on a regular bases with the latest and greatest methodologies, books, ideas, etc. on a regular basis. Ask any experienced teacher about their faculty development meetings and they will just laugh and tell you about the last 30 years of innovations that were supposed to have changed education.

Here is what someone needs to do in my opinion. Ideas should include LONG TERM training (2-3 years) that is mandatory in their sales package, back it up with solid research, and provide a payment model similar to a lease or student pay-to-play (where you aren't hoping their newest principal or school board also likes the idea the previous group did). In other words, PROVE it works, teach teachers how to use it, and give schools a realistic way to pay for it over a period of years. If not, you're just another one of the 40-50 "latest and greatest" idea I've seen come and go over the decades.

Good luck.

I, a CS masters student, and my wife, a PhD EE, who attend University of Texas at Austin run an after school program for middle school kids to teach robotics and programming using lego mindstorms.

The school is one of the poorest in the city, but also has an integrated math/science magnet program within it. Our students are a mix of both the local children and the magnet kids who are bussed in.

At the beginning of class we place logic problems on the board and we were surprised to find that often the kids not in the magnet program solved them correctly often on par with those who were supposed to be the best and brightest in the city.

However when it came to programming and using the computers, the non-magnet students lagged behind the others at a pace of almost half the speed. Though they both were able to mechanically develop and debug their robot equally well.

I meet with the parents throughout the program and the correlation I noticed most prominently with those that suffered with programming was if the kid had easy access to a computer outside of school.

In many of my college classes I spend more time using wikipedia than my textbook.

Furthermore, I know many teachers who have written widely used (assigned reading in over 1k classes) who want their books to be available for a greatly reduced price if not all together for free. Unfortunately the publishers ban this and the writers must relent since the only way to get their book known is if it comes from a major publisher. They justify this mostly based on promotion costs, but this is not even close to their profit margins.

Books are expensive because there is little competition, particularly with k-12 schools, largely based on political lobbying.

Of course, we aren't likely to dissolve lobbyists anytime soon; but the idea of socially conscious startups is to dream big.