We are all about revolutionizing the way people think about learning

Socratic Arts employs a unique design and development methodology to build programs that help people learn. We help clients look at training and educational needs from a different perspective, asking what employees need to learn how to do as opposed to asking what they need to know. Workplace skills and common mistakes are our focus not the transmission of information. Led by visionary Roger Schank, our team of professionals has delivered learn by doing solutions to Fortune 500 companies, the government, and post-secondary schools.

Our knowledge management solutions, leveraging Dr. Schank’s artificial intelligence work over the last 30 years, capture and catalogue corporate knowledge, making it readily available for future use precisely at the moment it is needed.

Why is Socratic Arts different from all other learning solutions companies?

Socratic Arts’ strength in design differentiates us from our competitors. We partner with our clients to develop a refined understanding of desired business outcomes, performance objectives and details about their business in order to create learning experiences that will have the greatest impact. Participants in our programs learn by doing authentic, motivating tasks in the context of solving real world problems that are relevant to their job roles. We do our best to meet and exceed our clients' high standards. Here's an indication of how they think we're doing:

The simulation was by far the best professional training course I've ever participated in. It was relevant, simulated real-world pressures and events, and forced us to look at our interactions with people from a professional and strategic standpoint. I've never had a training course from which I've learned so much about the job, and about myself as a professional.

A manager for an F100 Financial Services firm
on a course developed by Socratic Arts.
October, 2009

What's New

May, 2011

Virtual Graduate School

Socratic Arts partnered with La Salle University in Barcelona and Carnegie Mellon University to provide online masters degrees in a variety of fields using our unique Story-Centered Curriculum idea. Read more information on the BES La Salle MBA program or watch a speech that Roger Schank gave at La Salle University: The Cognitive Processes that Underlie Learning. Socratic Arts has started to enter into new partnerships with world class universities to new master's degrees funded by outside investors.

May, 2011

Alternative Learning Places

We're proposing to re-design and replace school with what we are calling Alternative Learning Places (ALP). What will the alternative look like? Kids working in teams on projects that they're interested in, with goals they care about (building a robot that does something, building a toothpick bridge that can hold weight, building a car that will win a race, telling another kid about where they live, forming a friendship with a kid in another country…) Kids practicing the skills they need for lifelong success in the real world- such as teamwork, goal conflict resolution, judgment, persuasion, management, and communication. The Alternative Learning Places will give parents and their children an alternative to our broken education system. Visit the Alternative Learning Places website for more information.

May, 2011

The Reminding Machine

The Reminding Machine is not just an idea. We have recently built our first prototype for a major drug company. We collected about 2000 expert stories on video for their system. Independently, we have collected expert stories from various sources (Subject Matter Experts, friends and colleagues, YouTube, etc.). We have built demos around these collected stories. One is an updated ASK system that allows a user to navigate from story to story by how the stories connect conceptually (rather than by key words say.) (We originally built ASK systems at ILS at Northwestern in the 90’s.)

The second is the Reminding Machine itself. This allows a user to find a story either by saying what you are working on in a well-defined process, or by simply allowing the machine to find stories relevant to your work because it "knows" what you are working on. Each story reminds the system of new stories and one can navigate through stories that have the same principles behind them even though they may be from a different context in the company’s processes. It does this by use of proverbs (as outlined in Dynamic Memory and Explanation Patterns.)

Learn more about our Reminding Machine, EXTRA. These demos are available on all computer platforms and most recently on the iPhone.