Founded as a web and graphic design company by Curlen Phipps (left) and Damon Thomas (right) Quiq Labs has evolved over the years to provide app-based education tools for teachers. Photo contributed

Founded as a graphic design and web development firm, Black-owned tech firm Quiq Labs (designer of The Business Journal’s website in the mid 2000s) evolved to serve the education field.

Its specialty is after school programs, helping up-and-coming educators build a repertoire of lesson plans by curating and organizing them into one easy-to-use platform.

One of Quiq Labs’ newest tools — rePo, or reSource Portal — acts as a platform for after school program educators to help find appropriate lesson plans for their students.

“Lesson planning is a very challenging thing; it’s very difficult to do and a lot of times it’s overlooked,” said Curlen Phipps, co-founder of Quiq Labs. “Some schools do it this way. Some schools do it that way; oftentimes, even at the same school, they’re doing lesson planning in a different way.”

With a background in software development, Phipps and his partner at Quiq Labs, Damon Thomas, designed an online resource that consolidates lesson plans.

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“Initially we wanted it to be web-based,” Phipps said, adding that the aim was to get the content out and accessible as quickly as possible. “We did a training for Fresno County on Fresno State’s campus and we were training in different ways, and they didn’t bring a computer with them.”

Phipps said that the participants in the training session were able to log into the website on their mobile devices, but having an app-based option became a clear next step.

“That really is the way,” he said. “We wanted to make sure that whenever you felt like lesson planning, you could do it right there in the palm of your hand.”

Now available on an app format as well, the service provides after school teachers — many of whom are fresh out of high school or college students looking for teaching experience — with pre-written lesson plans, helping to ease the burden not only in the creation of plans, but also access.

“All of the content is categorized by topic as well as grade level,” Thomas said. “Everything is searchable by anything that’s in the lesson plan, plus we tag certain lessons…it is very easy to find things quickly.”

Thomas added that a large obstacle plaguing after school programs stems from the inexperience of the instructors.

With many instructors falling in the 17-22 age category, the duo realized that having prepared lesson plans would benefit not only the instructors but the students as well.

“You have 17-year-olds who are responsible for keeping the kids enriched, entertained [and] potentially educated in these after school programs and they don’t know how to write a lesson plan,” Thomas said.

Thomas said that the challenges of allocating time for lesson plans is an obstacle that rePo helps eliminate, providing the instructors with more time to dedicate to creating educational connections with their students as well as their other time responsibilities.

With more than 1,200 lesson plans, the platform helps provide instructors with a centralized space to acquire material.

Currently, the app is only available in English, however, Quiq Labs will launch a multilingual service inclusion in the app in the future.

Quiq Labs is also integrating AI technology to help generate lesson plans, including photo and video content.

Despite the focus being primarily on after school programs, Quiq Labs is exploring options to integrate its plans into day-to-day lesson planning, but said its focus will remain heavily on after school and supplemental learning programs.

As educators at the Phillip J. Patino School of Entrepreneurship, both Phipps and Thomas get to experience firsthand how lesson planning and its integration into the classroom go hand in hand.

“We are literally there during the day teaching web development and online marketing,” Thomas said. “We take on the entire sophomore class as our interns, and they’re learning real-world [skills].”

rePo not only provides lesson plans for teachers. It also assists educators with connecting resources and helps connect parents with the education community.

With a background in online web and software development, Quiq Labs integrates multimedia into their lesson plans and is currently seeking to expand their lesson plans, curating all possible plans into rePo’s database.