About Us

Play to the video to see our founders, Freedom and Lucas, introducing inventXR to the world.  
Learn more about Freedom.                    Learn more about Lucas.

What is InventXR all about?

A brief history of InventXR

InventXR was a company born out of need, as a group of students and teachers began discussing the shortcomings of the Learning Management Systems present in today’s schools. 

Students were embracing technology faster than the administration. Some teachers attempted to embrace the administration’s LMS of choice with a tremendous learning curve due to a lack of ergonomic interface.

They came to the conclusion that the systems were frustrating and stuck in past decades. Parents had to login to one system to see information about their child while students logged into another to find lesson plans. Teachers were being forced to waste time learning more than one interface. Teachers, students and even parents spoke out on the inefficiency of these systems in Palo Alto, California. Like most problems in life, someone became frustrated with the requirements, lagging functionality, and problematic technology. All the abilities and progress on the internet made LMS systems very difficult to accept as they remained based on archaic teaching expectations that didn’t allow for innovations in learning. 

Even today, many schools have outdated website pages, misdirected links and broken images.

The project to build a better system had begun, and required seed capital, as well as a beta. Freedom and Lucas turned to a founder at Fiber Internet Center. Our first Beta was the math classes that Freedom taught at Oracle’s Charter high school, dtech.

 
Our 1st International Rack of iStudy Servers was a Beta in Zimbabwe

InventXR then came about after the first version of iStudy began as a lab project at Stanford. Lucas Evans and Freedom Cheteni made that project happen. The Zimbabwe Minister of Education learned about Freedom. When he visited he was shown what iStudy could do. He encouraged those involved to bring technology to Africa as they were stuck with old used textbooks. The minister explained the education system and village limitations. Turns out Silicon Valley makes the world a smaller place. We knew that the minister was truthful. It happens that Lucas’ father, Bob, had installed the internet for the first freely elected president of Malawi about 1996. With past experience on the team, and a plan underway, InventXR decided to install iStudy in Zimbabwe as a beta. It would be a lost cause as far as money goes, however, it would be a place where iStudy would grow and adapt, based on the needs laid out by professors at the NUST University, while at the same time setting an example of how one could bring modern, digital learning to one of the poorest places on earth. A place where almost no one had experience with an LMS system, as many users had no prior experience on how to use a computer, or even what a GUI should look like.

 

Upon arrival back in the USA, we discovered all the shortcomings of lethargic code and routines that made server inquiries that were on other contents. Lucas and Bob fixed bugs and decided there needs to be a complete rewrite in parallel with the GUI experience and feedback we would study from Zimbabweans. The University of Zimbabwe became very interested. NUST became our second beta site as they taught an LMS course for teachers.

Two plus covid years later, today’s complete rewrite still has most of the original look and feel of iStudy together with new features. The new LMS is called iStudyXR. 

 

It was agreed, we would blow our limited resources installing a beta in Zimbabwe. Bob and Lucas would depart with a rack of servers. Within just a few days of arrival it appeared we would be unsuccessful. Many people there knew we were coming as we needed ISP network connectivity. Upon arrival we encountered greed and other ministries wanting a hand and say in how this will work to prevent us. We couldn’t even get our servers out of the import section of the airport. However, we were there, our gear was there and our list of 3 ISP networks. We decided to visit one we felt wanted to be a part of creating an Education movement. With the help of the ISP we were able to get the gear out of the airport and make the system functional.