Your Seat Number Is Your Fee

As an education design lab, we keep discussing several things around teaching, learning, assessments, scaling quality learning, and all sorts of things. Sometimes we go back to the fundamental level of questioning: are we even needed in a classroom? What happens in a classroom? But at times we also have other discussions which are not at all related to education design, but are definitely a sign of how nerdy our brainstorming conversations get. Here is one example.

We are rolling out Samagra, our AI Crafting Program, and we wanted to come up with a model where most of the students can benefit, especially those who are interested in the programme. After a lot of brainstorming, we came up with the idea that the i-th student pays ₹i. Your seat number is the fee that you pay. The fee rises by one rupee with every seat until it reaches ₹10,000, and stays there. This is our way of benefiting the early birds, the more interested students who are quick at registering.

Now we wanted to write about this, and obviously we went the textbook way first, looking at the economics and the pricing models, and we arrived at the bonding curve. But we were not happy, because we are not just about theory. We are about making it more interesting and fun, right? If our lessons have a hook, why should our pricing model not have one? It should have a story, something to make people curious about what this is.

That's when Prof. Sudarshan asked us to just Google Gauss. "What is he famously known for?" And we found the school story, which is a very popular anecdote.

As the story goes, a teacher asked the class to add every number from 1 to 100, to keep them busy. Young Gauss had the answer almost at once: 5,050. He saw that 1 and 100 make 101, 2 and 99 make 101, and so on, fifty pairs in all. That is the formula n(n + 1)/2.

The sum itself is much older than Gauss. Aryabhata gave rules for adding up such series in the Aryabhatiya, in 499 CE. But the schoolboy story is the one everybody remembers.

Now look at our fee. The first student pays ₹1, the second pays ₹2, the hundredth pays ₹100. When we were trying to calculate what 100 students will pay, and what 1,000 will pay, we realised it is the same addition Gauss did in school. The first 100 seats add up to ₹5,050, about half of what a single seat is worth. So we decided to call it Gauss pricing.

Everybody in the core team was super excited about learning about Gauss, applying it to our own model, and coining the term "Gauss pricing". Samagra is run on a not-for-profit basis, so what excited us was never the money. It was the maths. It sort of indicates the kind of values the lab prioritises. We always prioritise curiosity, and that also explains why our lab meetings sometimes stretch for hours together (very atypical). On one hand, you have a startup-like ecosystem where we are continuously trying to innovate, develop new products and contribute to the open source movement. On the other hand, you have hours of meetings on brainstorming, from the silliest questions to the profound ones, all connected to what we teach and learn and how we teach and learn.

So that way, Vicharanashala stands true to the spirit of vicharana in everything, not just the work that we do.

If you are interested in joining a bunch of nerdy people who geek out about education and innovation, book your seat now, and let us know what price you booked it for.