Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
AI + No-Code: How Thunkable Supercharges Student Creativity and Problem-Solving with Arun Saigal
Arun Saigal is the Co-Founder and CEO of Thunkable, the no-code platform where anyone — from students to startups to enterprise teams — can build powerful, native mobile apps. With an intuitive drag-and-drop interface and integrated Gen AI tools, Thunkable empowers creators to go from idea to real, publishable app without writing a single line of code. Arun has an S.B. and M.Eng. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT and has held various leading roles at technology companies, including Quizlet, Khan Academy, Aspiring Minds, and Google.
💡 5 Things You’ll Learn in This Episode
- How Thunkable evolved from an MIT project into a global no-code platform.
- The unique cycle between educational and enterprise use of Thunkable.
- Ways students are building professional portfolios by publishing real apps.
- The role of generative AI in accelerating creativity and problem-solving.
- Why meeting learners “where they are” drives deeper engagement in EdTech.
✨ Episode Highlights
[00:02:27] The origins of Thunkable: from Scratch-inspired tools to no-code apps.
[00:05:23] How a platform for students became popular with Fortune 500 companies.
[00:10:15] Real classroom stories: from Spanish teachers to student entrepreneurs.
[00:18:31] The leap from “idea to real” and why mobile is the perfect entry point.
[00:23:39] Seeing your own app on your phone: the paradigm shift for students.
[00:31:43] Teachers building custom AI-powered apps for their classrooms.
[00:34:43] Combining AI features—speech, vision, LLMs—into powerful student tools.
[00:42:57] Lessons from Arun’s career at Quizlet, Khan Academy, and Google.
[00:50:12] The next wave of EdTech: custom learning, AI co-pilots, and empowerment.
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[00:00:00] Arun Saigal: It is so powerful to see that on your device, to actually see an icon on your phone that you created, and now it lives on your home screen, right next to YouTube and your email app, and your social media apps, and it's all right there. Is incredibly powerful because you realize, to your point that this is not something that I had to wait for the big guys with the billions of dollars to create.
I too can create it and I can make an equal sized icon on my screen right next to them, and it. Equally as powerful and useful, an app.
[00:00:38] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar and to go deeper.
Check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
We have an exciting episode of EdTech Insiders this week. We are here with Arun Saigal. He's the co-founder and CEO of. Thunkable a no-code platform where anyone from students to startups and enterprise teams can build powerful native mobile apps with an intuitive drag and drop interface and integrated generative AI tooling.
Thunk empowers creators to go from idea to real publishable app without writing a single line of code, thereby no code. Arun has degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT, and he has held various leading roles at technology companies, including Quizlet. Khan Academy, aspiring Minds, and Google.
So great to have you here. Arun. Welcome to EdTech Insiders. Alex, it's such a treat to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks so much for being here. I've been really looking forward to this conversation. I had a long walk at A-S-U-G-S-V with Amit Patel, and he just would not stop talking about how amazing Thunk is and how amazing you are.
And I am so excited to get into this because you do something I think nobody else in EdTech does. You create a tool that is an EdTech tool and a professional coding tool. It is literally both. Tell us how you do that. It's amazing.
[00:02:27] Arun Saigal: Absolutely. It is so cool to be able to do what we do, right? So Thunk, as you said, we're a no-code platform to build native mobile apps, which means you can come in without knowing how to code and build iOS apps, Android apps, and web apps, and you can do it all at once.
And what's really cool is when we started. It was actually out of a lab at MIT where we were working on building products like Scratch, which was one of the first things that I worked on actually my freshman year at MIT. And then from there, iterating on a number of blocks based programming tools all the way up to what became thunk.
And when we started we said, Hey, we just wanna be a tool for kids to learn how to code. But what was really cool is a lot of businesses started using us and we said, Hey, why are you all using us? They said, well. We don't know how to code and we need to build mobile apps. We need to build iOS apps, Android apps.
And if you think about, especially late two thousands, early 2010s when people were just getting into mobile app development, a lot of people didn't know how to actually be mobile app developers. Even those who were web developers. And so we saw a lot of usage of the platform, buy. Non-education users, people who were trying to build real things.
And so we said, wow, well, we should go really make this platform really robust for businesses. So we did that. We ended up seeing an incredible number of Fortune five hundreds use us, and we were used across the board from very small companies to the biggest, to the big. And then what happened is by making our tool better for businesses.
More education institutions started using this because they started saying, wow, this is amazing. I'm not just building a toy, I'm not building something fun in class that doesn't actually translate. I'm building a real app here. I can then publish it to the app stores and put it on my resume, put it in my portfolio, go to businesses and say, Hey.
You want me to be your mobile app developer? No problem. Here are three apps that I've already built, and you can go to the play store and the app store and download them. And that ended up becoming a vicious cycle. That was really incredible. Where by making tools for educators and schools, students now had skills on fundable they could take into the workplace.
And then by making it better for the workplace, making it so that you can make. Money off of your apps and put in ads and put in high quality business power logic capabilities, plug into databases, all that stuff. It made it more powerful and made businesses excited to use it, which then made schools say, wow, these businesses keep using this.
I definitely have to teach this tool because my students aren't just getting a toy. They're getting something that they can take. Directly into the workforce. And when you think about things like technical education, et cetera, as that's been expanding over a number of years, more and more folks are saying, how do my high school students, how do my community college students leave school and have real skills they can use in the workplace?
Real high paying skills, and turns out being an app developer. Totally fits that bill. And so that's been a real incredible journey for us and it's been a real blessing to be able to make a tool that high schools and colleges across the country use as well as a tool that 40 plus percent of the Fortune 500 is using.
[00:05:23] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And you know, it's interesting the way you just told this story, right? You started in EdTech and then they call this sometimes like the cut corner effect, right? You made a tool that was. Sort of had its roots in some of the block-based thinking of scratch. That's super simple to use because thinking about the educational use case and then realized that adult enterprise customers also want something super simple to use by making it available and usable for young users, it made it available and usable for enterprises.
And then I love this sort of cycle effect that you're talking about. It also stands out to me, as you mentioned, it's not a toy. This is what gets me most excited. I mean, when you look at companies like Adobe or Canva or Figma or Google that have educational components, they sort of have educational versions of some of their software.
They're not toys either, but they're sort of adapted versions. They're coming from an enterprise landscape and then saying, oh, what would it look like to do a for education version? You are the only company I I have ever come across. That went the other way. That started as an ed tech company and then actually became a professional enterprise.
And then as you mentioned, you adding all of this functionality has benefits from both sides of the marketplace. Not only does it make it more usable and valuable for your enterprise customers, but it makes it so much more robust and real that it allows your students and educational users to be able to do more and more and more.
So let me ask you this. I think this is a key question for me of the classrooms you are in, but high school and college classrooms. I imagine that the early adopters, at least of Thunkable tended to be more of the sort of technical side people who are already like. What would it mean if we could allow our kids to create mobile apps?
Wouldn't that be cool? But as you've grown, I imagine that's expanded beyond that sort of early adopter, and you have a variety of different types of classrooms. Tell us about how that has worked.
[00:07:05] Arun Saigal: Absolutely. So when we started, you're completely right, it was these cutting edge folks, these really innovative teachers who said, Hey, I want my students to be building for the world they live in today.
I want them to actually learn useful skills. Mobile app development absolutely fits that bill. Let's go do it. What's ended up happening is you realize. That technology is part of our lives everywhere, right? In the early days, I remember when I was a kid in school dating myself, you're looking in dictionaries and books and things like that, and then all of a sudden you say, oh, I can google this.
I can now look up these things online. And that was technology coming into the classroom. I could all of a sudden email my teachers my reports instead of printing out these long reports, right? That's technology coming into my English class, right? And so what's happened is in the early days, a lot of the adopters were absolutely technology.
Teachers saying, Hey, I need to bring this skill into my class. But what's happened is because these skills have come into classrooms, you see folks like history teachers saying, Hey, you know what would be really cool is if my students could actually not just research a certain person in history, but actually have a conversation with them and, oh, what if we could make an app where the app was actually trained on pick a person, whether it's Socrates or Martin Luther King, or somebody in history, and say, Hey.
Let's have a conversation with Socrates, and now what we can do is actually we can use one of these voice generating tools to make a voice that sounds like Socrates. We can use one of these LLMs to actually speak and say the things that Socrates would say, and now my student can build a simple app, or I, as the teacher can build a simple app to say, Hey, I want to have a conversation.
With Socrates and my student can come in and say, okay, cool. Here's what I'm thinking, and actually here, Socrates respond. How powerful is that to learn about a certain historical figure where you can actually have a conversation with that figure? Similarly, you see there's a Spanish teacher who said, Hey, I wanted to make an app for my students to learn Spanish, and I really just wanted it to be customized.
My vocabulary, my words. My things that I was building, I wanted to use our images from our classroom and sure there are tools out there, but what if I could just build my own app for my own classroom? And so the Spanish teacher went about and did that. All of his students have this app and now they're able to use the Spanish app made by their teacher in the classroom.
And so by bringing these mobile app development skills. Two schools. You see teachers now saying, Hey, I actually want my students to make apps for history, make apps for Spanish, make apps for other things, and see students in these other classrooms using bunk. And then also seeing the teachers saying, I actually take this to empower me to make my classroom more effective.
Which is so cool to see, again, these history teachers, English teachers, social sciences, teachers in the sciences saying, Hey, I wanna do experiments, but I might not actually have all the equipment to do the experiment. What if we can make the experiment virtually cool. We're A-B-Y-O-D classroom. I want an iOS app, an Android app, and a web app.
Cool. I can just build it all. Inable. Even better I can use my students to build it inable, right? And now see the power that this technology can bring to. Any aspect of learning.
[00:10:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I wanna ask you about the AI aspect of it. You mentioned the LLMs totally and voice. That is a huge part of this story, especially right now that I'm so excited to get into.
But before we do, you mentioned in the first answer about how students can go and apply to jobs and say, I already built three apps and you know, there's something so intriguing about the ability to give professional level tools to students in terms of. Their ability to create a portfolio that is meaningful for college applications.
It's meaningful for career applications. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that before we get back into the ai, even though I'm very excited to hear more about it. But when you started Thinkable, were you envisioning it as something that was sort of a way to bridge. The educational environment to the career environment or has that sort of evolved over time and do you have stories?
I'd love to hear a story about any of these students who had that journey built that history app in their history class, or built something in their, their math class or their computer class, and then go out and go into the world. And what they've done in Thunkable has just springboarded them in their career.
[00:11:14] Arun Saigal: Absolutely. I think we have such a cool platform, as you've said, because you get to see this evolution and there are folks who have been using us now 5, 6, 7, 8 years, and you've seen them go from high school student to college, graduate to professional in the workforce. And their thread is all really, Hey, I started with funk bowl and that opened my eyes to this new world, and I'm still a fun user, a fun developer, et cetera.
Right. So, and I can give you, yeah, I mean, there's so many cool stories of this. I think we've seen so many folks who have come in and really started from us and expanded, and I can give you a couple examples. In the early days, I'd say one of the first things we saw in Oregon, there were the state of Oregon.
There were these. Two cousins who were in a class together and they wanted to build a dice game, and their thing was, Hey, we like to play lots of different dice games, but we need to carry around too many dice and too many, and when we're in school, it's hard to keep them all and then we lose them on the playground, whatever.
So we wanted to make a virtual game. Okay, great. Well, how did you start making this game? Well, we were learning thunk in school and figured this would be a good application of it. Okay, cool. So they started learning thunk. They then applied and built this game, and then it was what they used with their friends decided to put it on the app store.
They made it for Android only. They put it on the Play store 'cause they had Android devices. Said, oh, cool. Well, we can put some ads and other things in here to make some revenue, start making $4,000 a month off of this app that they've built right now. Right? You're 14 making that money and. What happened there was you all of a sudden saw that was so motivating to say, oh, other people are downloading and they're asking me for more features.
Well, great, I'll build these more features. You end up having this lifelong passion being formed to create solutions to problems you have. Right? And this is just a great local problem of, hey, whereas some high school kids who like to play games, it's hard to carry our stuff around, so we're just gonna put it on our phone.
And what ends up translating there is a game that goes, becomes wildly popular, it gets written up in the local newspaper, et cetera. They become these local celebrities, entrepreneurs end up going to college and becoming lifelong creators of apps of ideas that they have. And it's just so powerful to see that translate, and I think that's so exciting.
Similarly, we saw another student in India who was building an app, had an idea. Built a really cool app for his community about energy conservation. Ends up being picked up, decides that he loves this, invests in it very heavily. A lot of time, becomes very popular. Applies to college, goes to Cambridge University in the uk and becomes a software and law guy.
He studies software and law and decides, Hey, I like software, but I like solving my community problems. I think law is the way to do that, and now I'm gonna apply software. To my legal work. And so it wasn't just even, I'm gonna go be a software engineer. I like these community problems. I think being a lawyer is the right way to solve them, but software enables me to make a lot of these problems go away or make a lot of these better in my community.
And so he studies both software and law and now is applying software to solving legal problems. And I think that's so cool where it's not just, Hey, I'm building software to build software. It's, I'm building software to solve the problems that I'm excited about and passionate about. And I think that's so incredibly exciting and powerful.
[00:14:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:14:34] Arun Saigal: And then to your question of did we actually build this to bridge the education piece to the careers? I think the answer is absolutely. Our goal was always we want people to be not just passive consumers of technology, but actually active creator. If you're an active creator of technology, you can apply that to the professional world, to the personal world, wherever you are, you should be able to solve problems if you're in the workplace and there's an issue.
Software can solve that problem. We wanna make sure you have those skills. If you are in your community and there are natural disasters around you that you can help build apps to solve problems for, which we've seen a number of folks do over the last number of years, you should be able to do that. If there's a simple app that exists in one language and you want it in another language, you should be able to build that app, right?
These are the things that we wanna make sure that you're enabled and empowered to do, whether it's to solve a complicated business problem or to solve a local community problem. And so for us, it was always about, it wasn't even about bridging education to the real world. It was just, Hey, if there are problems, you should be able to solve them and we should give you the tools to do that.
Right? When I teach you how to speak or how to write, I'm not teaching you. English writing to bridge education to the real world. It's just, it's a skill you need across the board, right? And I think computer science and software development skills is a basic literacy that you need to have to live in this modern society.
And so for us, it's really about empowering and enabling. Anyone and everyone to be a builder to apply that. Whether you are a full-time software engineer or you're a marketing person, a writer, a musician who uses software, which at the end of the day, we all do. You need to be able to use and understand the tools that you have and not just be a passive consumer of these tools.
But if you're not an actual active creator, then you're gonna be relying on. Whoever else has the skills to build the solution for you rather than for your creativity and your own ideas. And that's what we really wanted and do with unbel is unlock creativity, is give those who have the ideas, the ability to also be the creators and bring those ideas to life.
[00:16:38] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean. You're mentioning the sort of entrepreneurial mindset, the passion, the solving problems in your community, and sort of finding problems that matter to you, and then solving them for others as well. There's so many aspects of it. It reminds me a little, you know, project-based learning has this concept of having a public artifact as one of the core outputs, and when you talk about your cousins in Oregon and to create this dice game.
They put it out there and it's in the app store, and they're getting feedback, and they're getting ratings, and they're getting requests for features, and they're getting people buying it. And the value of a public artifact, especially right now, it just immediately moves things out of this provincial, oh, we're doing this in this.
Toy environment and this play safe space to, we're part of the world. We're doing something that matters. We're getting feedback from people. We're actually, we're getting rewarded for it. And I just think it's so exciting on so many levels, it feels like a direction of where education should go. And it feels so exciting that it's so enabled by technology.
When you talk about this sort of creator mindset, this idea of instead of being passive consumers of technology, young people should be creators. And then, you know, we didn't mention this, but it probably goes without saying that apps are how students. Live these days, right? It's like the app is sort of like the core unit.
This is the ability of giving students the ability to create their own apps that can do anything they'd like. Is obviously now getting turbocharged with generative ai. The capacity to create anything you can dream of from a coding standpoint, from a creativity standpoint, even from a sort of brainstorming solution standpoint.
There's so many new tools and new ways of thinking because of generative ai and you, you already mentioned this sort of historical figure app, but I. I'm sure you think very broadly, after years of fundable and seeing generative AI explode about what role generative AI will play in the fundable platform and what it will do to support the creator mindset in students.
And I'd love to hear how you're thinking about it. To your first point,
[00:18:29] Arun Saigal: apps are where students live.
[00:18:31] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
[00:18:31] Arun Saigal: And when we started Thunk, we really thought about, okay, if we wanna enable people to learn to build, where should we invest? And the reason we started with mobile apps is, was because you saw students.
Had access to mobile devices before they had access to laptops and other devices, and two, globally. If you look, the mobile revolution leapfrog many other thing, right? You can go to the most rural, remote places all over the globe and you might not even have paved roads and running water, but you'll.
Often be able to find somebody with a smartphone, right? And I think that's so incredible. And so for us, we really said, okay, we wanna be where the students are. Why? Because we wanna make sure that they're building something that actually matters to them. I remember when I started learning to code, I started learning.
Java and I spent probably three or four days installing a bunch of software on my computer. This was part of my intro to Java class. And then at the end I did all of this stuff and wrote a bunch of words that didn't make sense to me, and then it said, hello world at the bottom of the screen. And I said, cool.
And the teacher said, yeah, isn't this awesome? I said, okay, what can I do with this? They were like. Well, nothing really, but like now you've learned a bunch of stuff and installed a bunch of software that eventually will let you do something, right? I ended the class by building this really cool Java swing game, so in swing, and I said, cool, what am I gonna do with this?
And the answer was, well, no one really uses this stuff. Like it's kind of not really what people are using, but now you have these skills and you can go apply them somewhere else. You have to be really motivated to go through all of that, to then get to the end with something that no one really cared about.
To then go say, okay, I'm gonna keep learning to get somewhere. So when we started with mobile devices, we said, okay, we want you to come into Thunkable and build something and the first day be able to have something on your phone, which is where you live. Look at it. Play with it. Yeah. Go to your. Parents and show them, Hey, I built this.
Show your friends, Hey, I built a real thing. And it should really be something that's on your phone, which means it's gotta plug into your camera and your hardware and it's gotta be a really cool thing that you can touch and feel and see and share immediately. And that was really important to us. And what you see is when you give students access to a tool like that and you say, Hey, go ahead.
I'm not gonna make you install a whole bunch of things. Just go to fun com, start building, click a couple buttons, drag a button onto the screen and say, when I click the button, open my camera. And when I take the photo, add a funny hat to me. Yep. I can do that in three or four blocks. And all of a sudden I have this really cool app that I built in five minutes that I can share with my friends.
Well now that's gonna get a student extremely motivated Yes. To continue to build because they can see that their idea that was in their head became a reality in a short amount of time. The really exciting thing about generative AI is that is turbocharging all of this, right? So now you can come in and say, Hey, I have this cool idea.
And rather than for sending five minutes and get a small bit of it done, you can spend five minutes and prompt your way and say, I want an, that's Uber for, that's purple in color. You can get that app spit out in five minutes and now your idea didn't just come to life in a small format. You got it 80% of the way there in a few minutes.
And that is so incredibly powerful because it's getting students started faster. And what it also does is it really opens up computer science to students who didn't think it was their path because they can see in just a matter of a few minutes. This is a tool for them that they can come in and they can see their ideas coming to life and it doesn't matter.
Do you have the right money or did your parents have the right degree or did you get the right intro? If you have an idea, and you can write it down in a couple of sentences, you can see that app come to life so quickly. And if in five minutes I can see my idea, come to. You bet that I'm gonna be hooked on it.
Oh yeah. And I think that's the power of what you're seeing with fun and NOCO tools in general. And now turbocharge all of that with Gen ai. And you can say, Hey, I have this idea, this complicated idea that isn't necessarily. I don't think of it as a gen AI idea. I think of it as a mechanic's idea. I think of it as a writing idea, but I can useable no code gen AI altogether and see that idea come to life.
That is so incredibly powerful, and I think that's why I'm so excited about. The future of No-Code and Gen ai.
[00:23:00] Alex Sarlin: Oh yeah. I mean this concept of moving from idea to real in the shortest amount of time to build that excitement and motivation and momentum. And I'm sure for students, the idea of being like, wait, I just made something that is now an app on my phone, probably feels like magic.
Right, because I mean, they think absolutely. Apps, it's like YouTube, right? They think of apps as this sort of like the water. They swim in these huge things and the fact that you can just break in and do it, I bet it is just literally like a paradigm shift moment for people. I'm sure it changes literally.
I could imagine it changes lives. To be able to just have that moment of I just made this thing happen in the world that I didn't think I could ever make. I thought I was a passive consumer of it.
[00:23:39] Arun Saigal: Absolutely. When you are able to see what you've created on your device and then see somebody else interact with that, right?
Right. Then you share it with a parent or with a friend and they use it, and now your idea in your head, somebody else is interacting with. It is so powerful to see that on your device, to actually see an icon on your phone that you created, right? And now it lives on your home screen right next to YouTube and your email app, and your social media apps, and it's all right there.
So incredibly powerful because you realize, to your point that this is not something that I had to wait for the big guys with the billions of dollars to create. I too can create it and I can make an equal sized icon on my screen right next to them, and it's equally as powerful and useful an app that is such an incredible experience when you realize.
Oh, it's not these people on a pedestal somewhere in Silicon Valley who are doing this. Right. It's me and you and everybody else who has an idea and access to a computer and a phone that can now see these ideas come to life.
[00:24:44] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I'm excited about. You mentioned sort of the role of generative AI in turbocharging.
It's that early moment, that moment where instead of having to have this sort of uphill, I love your example about the hello world, right? The classic first assignment in every coding class and even the installations. I think that's really important. I remember taking my coding classes in in graduate school, and I'm not a coder at all, and it literally being like, maybe not hours, but.
A long time just to get the environment set up just to download the different packages. And I was just like, if you don't know why you're doing it, if you have gotten any of the thrill or the excitement of actually accomplishing anything, that stuff just feels like, you know, it's like going up the rollercoaster, like it's so slow.
It's this rickety experience and I think generative AI could have that role. So many aspects of education. Absolutely taking, absolutely. Think about it in English, right? Instead of having to be like, well, someday maybe I'll be able to write well enough to write my fantasy story in my head. Well, maybe you start by just helping write the fantasy story with an AI copilot, and then you work backwards and say, how do I make these characters more interesting?
How do I work on the dialogue here? How can I improve my descriptions of. Places and instead of the other way around where it's like, oh, let's think about all the different elements that would have to come together someday if you keep at it and you can actually get to do something you want. It's just, it feels like the future of education to me.
I mean, it's what gets me most excited about ai. And I hear the enthusiasm for you as well, but you were doing this way before ai, so how did you, I mean, I didn't even know no Code Tools existed what you said six, seven years ago for Thunkable. How did you get that? Yeah, idea.
[00:26:13] Arun Saigal: We were doing a lot of research on what's the easiest way for people to learn to build.
So as we talked about, we started with a lot of this idea of block space programming and we said, okay, it's actually, you know, it's well under 1% of people will ever learn how to code or write a line of code. And so we said, well, how do you then enable people if software. Is the future If turning your ideas into reality is the future and the vast majority of people will never have the skills to actually see that future through, then we need to make the tools easier to give a lot more people access to these skills and capabilities.
And so we did a lot of research on what's the easiest way for people to understand these complicated logic concepts and break them down into something. That's understandable. And the idea that we came to was visual blocks based coating. This idea of kind of, you put some Lego blocks together where you give any kid a box of Legos and they can kind of figure out how to put it together.
Right. And so there was a very similar idea of if we give you these visual blocks and like Legos, they have little affordances. If I have one carrot that fits into another carrot, I know that that works together. Just like my Lego blocks. If they fit together, I know that okay, they're gonna connect. And if the shapes don't connect, then okay, great.
That probably doesn't work. And so. We said, okay, we should take inspiration from this idea of physical blocks that people understand and make these kind of visual programming blocks. We did that and we started it as, in essence, a research project, put it out in the world and started seeing people really used it, liked it.
We were able to write a lot of papers and show that people actually liked this and they cared and they were learning from this, and that was very. Exciting. Then when we said, okay, well let's take that idea and apply it to something in the real world, IE mobile apps, and now see you not just learn to build, but actually build in the environment that you live in.
Well, that got even more reception and more power. People were even more excited, and so when we saw that happen, we said. Wow, this is really powerful. And that's when, like I said, businesses started saying, Hey, I wanna use this too. And so we said, okay, well this is not then just for educators and education.
This is learning how to build so you can apply your learnings to actually build. And so we launched Thunkable for businesses and said, okay, businesses come in, use us, learn from us, et cetera. That ended up really kind of taking off like wildfire. 'cause all of a sudden folks who just didn't have access to tools that allowed them to build and met them where they were all of a sudden had access to real tools and they were met.
Where they were and they were able to build what they needed because they all of a sudden had tools that they never had before. And we really lowered that barrier to entry. And so for us it was always about how can we consistently lower the barrier to entry to give as many people access to software development to be these active creators as we could.
And every time we hit kind of. One level will say, okay, cool. How do we make this even easier? How do we make this even easier? And at the same time, how do we make this even more powerful? Right? So how can you get to the most sophisticated app that you want from your business while also making the barrier to entry?
Even easier, so more people can come in the fold and have access to technologies that allow them to be the active creators that they've always wanted to be.
[00:29:34] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, I mean, it's an amazing journey. We've had the pleasure of interviewing some of the scratch people. We talked to Mitch Resnick a couple of years ago.
We talked to Margaret Honey, that the new CEO of the Scratch Foundation a couple months ago, and I'm always so. Amazed at how you know these, sometimes these core ideas. And you can trace this back to Seymour Pepe and these ideas are created in a certain environment and then they grow and scratch has been, you know, huge all over the world.
And then they sort of morph to meet the needs of the moment. So the idea of taking block-based programming and applying it to mobile app development, something that is not only a very valuable skillset, but also incredibly exciting skillset for young people and important for businesses. That marriage of those two.
Concept feels very inspired to me and I feel like it's a good model for bringing together these educational ideas and continuing to revisit them and update them for the modern era. And then of course, ai, you know, we, we've been talking about a lot here, but AI can be used in so many piece capacities here.
It could be used as a copilot for building, it could be used for brainstorming, it could be used to, for a additional functionality in their voice recognition or translation. It boggles the mind. But one thing I wanted to circle back on, 'cause you mentioned it in passing, but I think it's really important in this moment.
We just saw, you know, this week. Open AI and Microsoft put, you know, millions of dollars into AI education. We put, saw Microsoft this week devote $4 billion to AI in education with 60 companies. Basically, you know, people are trying to say, okay, we start to understand that this is really coming. When you mentioned that teachers can build their own applications for, in the classroom using Thunkable and that they can instill AI into them, I'm curious, you know, how you see the pieces coming together of this very rapidly growing movement to sort of bring AI into the classroom and empower.
Educators to be able to use it in all kinds of ways. And then the ability to give them tools like you can build applications for your class. You could ask your students to build applications, but you yourself can build an application. You can, you can make a walled garden like you mentioned. It can be about the content in your class.
It could translate for, for different types of students. Like there's so much interesting capabilities there when you combine mobile app development and AI and teacher training in ai. I'm curious how you see this moment and what role Thunkable might play.
[00:31:43] Arun Saigal: This is an incredibly interesting time to be alive and to be in the world of education.
The first time many teachers used chat, GBT was after their students had already used chat, GBT, right? Yep. And so many teachers who are coming to teach with ai. Have been using the various tools as long as their students, which is such an interesting place to be versus, you know, any English teacher I ever had who was older than me, had been speaking English longer than me.
Right, exactly. And and had more experience. They had written more, et cetera. And in this AI world, that's not necessarily the case, which is a very interesting thing. So I think in terms of. One. What we can do is we enable anyone to build mobile apps, which has been really powerful as we talked about, to allow teachers to actually build apps and tools and websites that they want, that they think will be right for their students' needs.
I think that's been really good and really powerful. I think what's been cool Withable is that you can use. AI in a number of different ways, and I think you talked about some of them. So one is you can actually build an app using the no-code platform and then use AI within it. So generation image recognition, speech to text, text, speech, things like that.
And that's been I think, really powerful and cool to see people getting hands-on. Okay, I don't need to understand how an API works to understand how. Image recognition works. And that's really cool because people are actually able to get hands on and built. And so that's, I think, you know, the first piece of it.
The second is actually allowing folks to create their own ais using no-code. And so by that I mean take various pieces that already exist and combine them. I'll give you an example. There was a gentleman in the UK who does work on. High quality scientific machines, think like microscopes, things like that.
Mm. And he is a repair technician who goes out to the field and will repair these kind of high quality, expensive pieces of, of equipment. He used thunk to build a bunch of apps. He learned thunk in school and then at some point he said, Hey, AI should be able to be my assistant. So he built an app Withable, where the app.
Would one you take a photo of, of the, you know, broken part. It would do image recognition. It would say, okay, here's what the part is I'm looking at. Then it would do speech to text. It would take his voice notes that he would then record and say, Hey, here's what I'm seeing, et cetera. Then train a custom GPT on the PDF manuals in essence of these repair manuals.
Yep. Say, okay, here's the machine, here's the problem, here's the photo. What should I do? It speaks back to him after doing this and says, Hey, here's what I've learned. Here's what I'm seeing. Here's what I think you should try. And he said it took. A week long repair project and turned it into about a three hour repair project.
[00:34:43] Alex Sarlin: Yeah,
[00:34:43] Arun Saigal: right. And what he was doing was saying, Hey, there's all these tools out there, speech to text, text to speech image recognition. Obviously these LLMs and I should be able to combine them to create a solution that I need. And he was able to do that. And has completely transformed his workflows and the way his company operates now.
Now the the, you know, brought it back to the company. Other people are using his tools and it's so incredibly powerful that he's able to come in and actually take these various ais and put them together to come up with his own new ai. That's the solution that he needs. The last piece is. Of course what you think of kind of as the holy grail here, which is using AI to actually generate your app.
So coming in and prompting your way and saying, Hey, I want an app that does this, that the other, and you know, a, well, we'll spit out the app that does this, that the other, and then you can go in under the hood, which I think is really important that not only do we spit it out, but then you actually get to go under the hood and look at the blocks and the designs and manipulate them yourself.
So to your point on writing a story, you're saying, Hey, write me this vanity story, but then I actually need to go in and make it. Finalize it, tweak it, make it my own. And that's I think a really important thing in fun is we say, Hey, we'll spit out the app for you, but then go into the tool and actually tweak it, understand what's going on, et cetera.
Right? There's this whole world of vibe coding right now where people will say, oh, I'll just prompt my way to an app. Very cool. There are a lot of amazing tools out there. The problem is if you don't know how to code, you go under the hood. You have no idea what's happening, what's going wrong, and no idea how to debug it.
I don't think that's great for the future for people to be building all these apps that they don't know what's going on in the hood. What's the security practices? What actual code is being executed? Versus with fundable, you can actually hop in and even if you're not a software trained engineer, you can go in and say, oh, cool.
When this button is clicked, this color is going to change. It's gonna pull, open my camera, and it's gonna take this photo. Great. I see that here. I understand that. And so now I know what's going on. If I wanna make changes, I can go in, I can keep prompting my way, or I can actually go under the hood and make those changes.
I think that's really important that you should be able to go under the hood and see what's going on. And with funk, you can use AI to generate your apps, and then you can actually go under the hood, see what's going on in there, and make those edits either in the blocks or the designer itself, or by continuing to prompt your way through.
And I think that's so incredibly powerful and enabling. Students, teachers, anyone who's trying to learn to build, to create in the modern day with Gen ai. I think that approach of being able to use these tools within your apps. Combine these tools, use these tools to make your apps, but then being able to go under the hood and actually seeing what's going on, I think that's incredibly powerful and I think that's what we need in the future of learning and building and that's what we're so excited to be creating.
[00:37:32] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. It reminds me of Ethan Mo's concept of co intelligence, right? The future of learning and working is being able to work alongside these incredibly powerful tools. It's not about outsourcing and just saying, Hey, do this for me. Great. Ship it. It's about saying, I have an idea. Draft this for me, then let me make sense of it then let me think about ideas about to how to change it.
Then we ask you to do a new version and let me go back and forth. And I think, you know, your point is really key here, and I think this is something I think the whole field is wrestling with, is how much deep knowledge do you have to have to be able to do this back and forth, co intelligent co-creation practice.
And I You mentioned it, I think in that answer really well, it's like, well if you're a trained engineer, you're gonna be great at it. But if only trained engineers can do it, then you're back to barriers to entry, right? Yep. So there's this incredibly interesting cycle here of, I think what's so powerful about it is that these tools as they're built, can actually create that scaffolding, that sort of graduated release of scaffolding.
It could be, if you're, it's your first time using Fable, as you said. You're making your, your camera a funny hat app. It's gonna make it easy for you. It's gonna make it fun and and exciting. And it's not gonna expect you to know how to debug it or know the underlying concepts. But if you're making your 10th lable app, then you've had some experience with those cycles and the expectations can get a little higher.
I mean, that's what learning should look like. I don't know. I'm What's so exciting about hearing your vision of how this already works and where it should be going? Is that this is a way to incorporate AI and cutting edge professional technology into the K 12 and high school classrooms and college classrooms in a way that just feels very natural.
It doesn't feel like it's this, everything's pushed together in this tricky way where it's like, oh, you have to make sure it matches the curriculum, but it also has to be a project that can be turned into a portfolio aspect. It sort of smooths that. I think of it almost like a Wrinkle in time, right? It's like instead of being in eighth grade and doing a toy project that someday might turn into a.
Something that you have to remember and turn into something skill that you'll use in your career. It's like you're doing something right now that is directly connected to it. You can see right to the future, I'm gonna be doing this and versions of this. In my career and the things you're doing now are actually gonna give you that career.
And the things you're doing now are actually gonna build the skills in a very visible, clear way that are going to give you opportunities in the future. And I think AI being then built into that, the idea of that your microscope example is such an amazing one because that is what the future of work is gonna look like.
We're gonna be able to, every individual will be able to build customized tools to make their work. More efficient, more fun, more interesting. And you could just see it laid out right there. It feels very obvious, but these things are not obvious. Everybody in the whole world is wrestling with this right now.
And the way you describe it, I feel like it just makes it seem like, oh yeah, that's how it'll work. That that's how, you know, you could put the pieces together, put the different AI elements with the different mobile application, you know, interface elements, the camera, the, the gyroscope, put it all together, and then you suddenly created a customized tool that you can use and sell.
I mean, wow, it's quite a vision.
[00:40:25] Arun Saigal: It's a big vision, but it's exciting. I think this is where the world is going and we have so many things. Like for example, if you get stuck on something and you need to debug it, we have an a i debugger that actually you can talk to and say, Hey, what's wrong? I know this is where my issue is, but I can't find it.
And we'll guide you and we'll say, Hey, well here's what you can do. And we can give you, literally, you can say, Hey, just gimme the answer, gimme the right blocks, et cetera. But we can also guide you to figure it out. And so what what's can mean is you can take the tool and say, okay, this is where I'm stuck.
Okay, great. This is it. You wanna go ahead and recreate those blocks and you can now go recreate them and understand what's going on, and we can get you all the way to great. And now the problem is fixed. And so it's not just about. Having the tool that allows you to generate the apps, but it's also making sure that we have the right AI support for debugging and the chat bots to help answer your questions, understand where things have gone wrong, how do you need to fix them?
Why did something work like this? Make sure that at every stage. There are tools that can help you understand what's gone on, what's working, what's not working, so that to your point, maybe the first time you build an app, you don't exactly know what's happened on the hood, but by the time you're on app number 10, you understand how it works and you have this natural, as you said, a natural really.
Copilot assistant, you're co-creating things with the AI and it is your assistant, just like no one, you know, was mad about having a spellchecker in your Word document. That's great. It's, oh yeah, now I have a spellchecker, and by consistently, you know, spelling something wrong and then having spellchecker correct it, ideally, eventually I'm like, oh, I'm spelling this wrong and I need to fix it.
Fix, and you'll make those mental updates. And that's, you know, very early days, AI supporting you, right? If you're writing an email and, and the email editor helps you fill in a couple of words, no one's mad about that. They're saying, oh, great, like, you're just helping make me faster. You still need to learn these skills and you can't, you know, gloss over that.
But these are tools now that can help you and give you cues and make you faster at learning these skills so you can get to a really nice point where you understand what you're doing. And then these AI tools are just supports, they're really these virtual assistants that are just helping you.
Accelerate, do what you are already doing.
[00:42:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. And do what you actually wanna be doing instead of giving up, instead of saying, you know, I wish I could create a, you know, in your Java example, you know, I wish I could create a really cool Java Dungeons Dragons game, but I can't because all I can do so far is do a swing game or do TicTacToe.
It's like, let's turn that around and say. Build that game and, and you're gonna learn a whole lot on the way. It's funny, the spell check example is such a great one because I actually bet that when spell check came out, there were lots of people who are annoyed at it
[00:42:57] Arun Saigal: totally.
[00:42:57] Alex Sarlin: For exactly the reasons why people are annoyed at AI right now.
Because they're saying they probably think kids will never learn to spell on their own. If you could, if it just says, you know, change it for you automatically, and I feel like that's a fantastic, I had not thought of that one as a really good analogy for this moment, but I think it's a great one because.
Yes. Spell check. We all take it for granted. Now, spell check. Some people might disagree. I don't think spell check or the like technological assistance in real time in that way makes us dumber as a society. I think it takes something out of the way that keeps us from being able to do what we actually want, right?
Like. Create a story or a readable, you know, a readable essay and it doesn't keep you from ever learning how to spell. I, I don't think it does. Again, there may be some research on this, I'm curious, but I would definitely agree that the idea that technology can assist you along the way, and if you keep your momentum up, if you're still excited about what you're doing and what you're learning, then the skills, you know, come into play as needed.
You know, just give up on, on the spelling forever. But before spell check, people did give up on spelling forever. People who were gay had a hundred red circles on their papers. We're like, I'm never gonna write anything again. And so I think it's a really interesting example. We're coming to the end of our time.
I have, I have just two more quick questions for you. One is, we mentioned some of your background, which is really interesting. You've been in a bunch of very big ed tech companies, a Quizlet, Khan Academy, aspiring Minds, and Google. My colleague Ben, always says Google is the biggest ed tech company in the world.
It doesn't, even though it doesn't call itself that, I'm curious, and you mentioned you've worked in Scratch too with With Scratch too. I'm curious, you know, if you look at that ed tech career sort of leading up to creating thinkable, what are some of the lessons that you've learned along the way that you applied here that you think, you know, the listeners here might find valuable?
[00:44:34] Arun Saigal: In the early days, everyone is very afraid of change, right? Uh, I think it is a high risk if you change things because you figured out something that works. You figured out a way to educate students, and now if you change something, there is a world where things can be way better. There is a world where it could be worse.
And we know if we mess up at certain times in students' careers, they're gonna be set back in their communication ability and their writing ability and their math ability. And you really don't wanna mess it up. But the trade off is you end up having a lot of folks who are so afraid to make changes that you end up holding your students back because of the fact that you didn't make changes.
Right? If you say, Hey, I'm gonna ban AI in the classroom right now. AI is happening, the world is moving forward. That's not going to help set your kids up for success in the future, because at the end of the day, the future is ai. This is like saying in the industrial revolution, Hey, I'm not gonna use automated tools.
I'm gonna keep my, you know, working on the farm and plucking my peaches. Great. Totally fine, but what's gonna happen is that the folks who are gonna have these tools are gonna move a lot faster, are gonna be able to scale more, et cetera. And so do you wanna be left behind or do you wanna move forward?
Right. And so I think one is change is scary, but it's also necessary. And this is the joys of being able to do research. You test things out, you figure out what's going on, and you're able to make a difference. I think thing number two that I've really gathered is actually. Working directly with students and teachers is so important and you'll very quickly see what the results are.
When I was at Quizlet, we would go to classrooms. Every week and just watch students use our tools and we said, Hey, this is a tool for students. Teachers are welcome to use it, but we really said, let's start with the student and see how the student interacts, how the student wants to learn, and let's make sure that we're building tools that allow them to learn in the way that's natural to them, because.
I think the best thing you can do for a student is find where their creativity and motivation is and tap into that and double down on that. And that's something that I think is so important and that all these tools did right. Khan Academy started. It wasn't preaching pedagogy or anything. It was hey. My, you know, Sal would talk about, Sal com would say, Hey, my niece needs to learn to do math, and I would just make videos for her because that was what was convenient for her and for me, right?
It wasn't based on, Hey, I'm gonna do this crazy district sale this, it was like, Hey, a student needed to learn, so I made a thing that was convenient for her to learn. And turns out other people found this useful too. And I think when you go with that simple approach of. Where are we in time and what is the best way for this student to learn?
And every student has their own approach. There is no one size fit all, but if you can say, Hey, this is where we are at this moment in time, these are the skills that are necessary and this is how the student. Wants to learn, well then let me build the tools in the format that's needed for those students.
You will end up seeing that students will thrive and become wildly created and motivated because they're now able to be engaged with in the ways that they wanna be. And I think all of these companies have done. And each of these companies you mentioned, some are doing the teaching, some are doing the practicing, some are doing the assessment.
Right. All the companies you mentioned that I've worked at, they've done every part of the. But what they've consistently done is build products that people really love and that meets the students where they are. And when you're able to do that. You will find that you'll thrive because then it's not about how good is your sales team.
It's about the desire to u use the product. We get calls all the time from teachers saying, Hey, I don't know how to buy you, but I've been already using you. I need in my classroom, can you help me work with my security IT team, whatever they make it happen and we'll say, sure, no problem. I need tools to help me, you know, work with my students.
Great. We've got a teacher dashboard that you can work with your students. When you have the tools that teachers and students need, and they have this yearning that they need this, then it becomes much more straightforward to build a business around it because you can actually then say, Hey, I'm providing value.
And when you're providing value. You're able to build a business. That's the whole point of business is create something that provides value. And I think that in all of these cases, even when I was at companies that was focused on assessment, you think assessment so bad. If you're able to make assessments that assess folks on their devices in the way they wanna be assessed, that is an adaptive assessment that helps, you know.
Target where they are. People aren't mad about it. It was so cool to see so many of these things that we built that if you made them in the way students and teachers wanted to be teaching and learning. People were really happy about it. And I think that was the biggest thing for me was meet people where they are.
[00:49:27] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking as I heard you say that, meet people where they are and they'll, they'll grab on and they'll be excited and you'll add value right away rather than conceiving of a solution and then trying to drag people to your solution. And it makes a lot of sense. And then final question for you.
I'm curious about your answer here. 'cause you, you obviously have, you think about these things from a very broad lens, from your particular perspective. You've built, built fungible for years and you've. Put it into these two totally different, really different ecosystems with the enterprise software and ed tech.
What do you see coming in the education technology landscape that you think others might wanna keep an eye on? Something that, that you feel like is the shadow around the corner something coming that we aren't yet, you know, all aware of? I'm curious how you would answer that question.
[00:50:12] Arun Saigal: There's a couple things going on right now.
I think the big thing, especially if you wanna talk about AI, is that it's still so early and so nascent that people don't even know what they can do. What they can know. I think you're gonna have a lot of interesting kind of battles between. Folks on the cutting edge were saying, I need to have my, and you already see that.
You already see this happening in schools. There's some teachers who are saying, let's use every AI tool we can to make our students ready for the future. And you're seeing some schools and teachers saying, AI is cheating. Ban it all. Right? Right. And you're seeing this bifurcation, I think. What's gonna happen is there's gonna be a lot of these interesting battles and philosophical questions around what do we wanna see in education, but also like, who are we and what does it mean to be human?
What are the jobs that are actually to be done? Again, when I talked about the industrial revolution, you know, until that a lot of people were, you know, farmers and food gatherers and we said, oh no, the industrial revolution, it's gonna take away. Machines are gonna take away jobs. And you know what ended up happening?
It did take away jobs and it made humans be able to focus on a lot, what I would call higher level thinking and application of their human skills. And they had to really think, does, you know, is picking fruit really what it means to be human? Mm-hmm. No, that's a thing that we need to do to survive, but being able to be creative and make music and experience emotion and have connection, like those are human things.
Okay, cool. Well let's focus more on that. And you saw then a lot more creativity happened and a lot more music and art and all that stuff. And that is, I think that's really cool. So I think one, the world is gonna shift with ai. We're again, have to again, ask these questions of what does it mean to be human?
And what are the things that actually matter? I think there's gonna be a lot of focus on that. And then in the AI world, I think you're gonna see a lot of people being empowered, as we've talked about with Gen AI tools to actually create. Solutions that you've never seen before for the first time, you're gonna have people in industries and fields and backgrounds that never had access to software development tools that are now all of a sudden gonna be able to create, and that's going to unleash a whole new set of solutions that we didn't imagine was going to exist in the world, which is going to make for new behaviors from people who are on devices and so on.
And so I think that's gonna be very interesting seeing solutions pop up that. We never imagined because it wasn't solutions that those who had the skills, right. There are 10 different food delivery apps in San Francisco because that was what people needed and those were the problems they were solving.
But there are, you know, rural areas across the globe that don't have any software solutions that now all of a sudden will have those. And then lastly, I think as we talked about meeting the student where they are, you're gonna see a lot of custom learning solutions and all of a sudden it's gonna matter less what zip code you're in or who this specific, you know, which teacher you got on this form, because you're gonna be able to actually have solutions that meet you where you are and allow you to realize your full potential if you're motivated and excited and you have.
Some access to these tools, you're gonna be able to thrive in a way that you weren't before. And so I think these are all really interesting trends right now globally, around what does it mean to be human and in the classroom of giving folks solutions that are gonna allow them to build where they weren't able to build before and to learn in ways they weren't able to learn.
[00:53:28] Alex Sarlin: That is such an interesting answer. I think you're focusing on so many important things there, and I, it strikes me when I hear your emphasis on solutions, custom solutions, and how AI will accelerate our ability to solve problems. Just like with your Industrial Revolution example, it strikes me as maybe what we are gonna be more and more invested in as humans is figuring out which problems to solve.
That might be what we spend a lot more time on in the future than we have in the past, because suddenly we actually have the power to solve problems we've never been able to tackle before. And I think your example of the delivery services in San Francisco is a perfect example of something with, you know, more solutions than problems.
But there's many problems in the world, especially, you know, young people have lots of concerns about climate change or about the future of work, or about mental health, or there's a lot of things that people care about that they don't feel empowered to solve. And maybe with AI they actually will. It's a really exciting world.
This has been an amazing interview. I really appreciated my favorite interview in quite a while. Arun Saigal is the co-founder and CEO of Thunkable no-code platform where anyone from students to startups to enterprise teams. That is a very wide range of important folks there can build powerful native mobile apps.
Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[00:54:39] Arun Saigal: Such a treat to be here. Thanks, Alex, and to the whole EdTech Insiders team. Such a treat to be here today.
[00:54:45] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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