Roger Schank. Ph.D., is the Chairman and CEO of Socratic Arts, a company that delivers Story-Centered Curricula to businesses and schools.The main business of Socratic Arts is the design of live simulations for corporations that like to teach their employees in the same physical space We also build online learn by doing courses; tools, knowledge management systems and just in time learning systems.
He is also the Executive Director and Founder of Engines for Education, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to radically change our notions of school. At Engines for Education, they believe that they can replace boring and increasingly irrelevant schools with new exciting learning environments. They are attempting to change both what and how people learn. They seek to avoid traditional lecture-based formats and the usual classroom structures in favor of story-centered curricula that simulate real-life situations with meaningful goals that encourage students to explore their own interests with guidance from skilled mentors.
Previously, Dr. Schank was the Chief Education Officer of Carnegie Mellon’s West Coast campus, where he introduced the idea of master’s degrees that use a Story-Centered Curriculum in lieu of the traditional course-centered approach. He was the founder of the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University where he was John Evans Professor of Computer Science, Education, and Psychology, (now Professor Emeritus).
Prior to coming to Northwestern University, Roger Schank was Professor of Computer Science and Psychology at Yale University and Director of the Yale Artificial Intelligence Project. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Paris VII, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Computer Science at Stanford University, and research fellow at the Institute for Semantics and Cognition in Switzerland.
Dr. Schank is a fellow of the AAAI, the founder of the Cognitive Science Society, and co-founder of the Journal of Cognitive Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Texas. One of the world’s leading Artificial Intelligence researchers, Dr. Schank is the author of more than 125 articles and publications. He has written more than 30 books.