We built Wren because the problem is solvable.

Every teacher knows what it looks like when a lesson clicks, when students stop looking for the right answer and start thinking. That moment shouldn't be rare.

The conversation about math education has long focused on curriculum. Better textbooks. More rigorous standards. Aligned assessments. But the research is unambiguous: what happens between the teacher and the students matters more than any of that.

The knowledge of how to teach math well exists. It lives in the practices of expert teachers who spent careers figuring out what moves make students think. It lives in decades of research in cognitive science, math ed, and teacher ed. The challenge has always been consistently putting that knowledge to work in daily classroom practice, not because teachers don't care, but because a two-day workshop in August, disconnected from what teachers are actually teaching, is not how behavior change works.

Wren was born in the summer of 2025, but the idea had been taking shape in Bob's head for a long time. Decades of working with educators, students, and learning scientists had made the problem vivid and the solution increasingly clear. What was missing was a way to build it. Then the tools arrived. Bob started writing code, something he hadn't done before, and got the first version of the Activity Builder working. Mel joined as his thought partner and to build the company infrastructure and figure out how to get to teachers. Then Jörg came on board and rebuilt the Activity Builder from the ground up. Here we are.

We're not out to create more content for teachers to sort through. We're building a system to surface high-leverage instructional moves in the context of whatever teachers are already teaching, aligned to their curriculum, ready to use, with the research and facilitation guidance built in. Our goal: with in-context support and repetition, something shifts. The moves that felt unfamiliar become natural. The structure becomes invisible. What's left is the teaching. Frankly, we'd love it if one day teachers don't need us anymore, because the moves have become so thoroughly their own that Wren is just where they started.

Bob Regan, Co-Founder and CEO

Bob started where Wren is aimed: in a classroom. He taught math and chaired the mathematics department at a school in New York City, where he also led the school's technology integration effort, building the network, developing staff training, and redesigning the math curriculum around NCTM standards. He left teaching not because he was done with education, but because he wanted to work on the problem at scale.

That led him to Pearson, then Adobe, then the Gates Foundation, where he built one of the largest teacher professional learning communities in the country. The OER Project reached over a million students and more than 10% of U.S. secondary history teachers across all 50 states. At XQ Institute, he led the design of a new Algebra I course built around project-based learning and portfolio assessment.

Bob's conviction that lasting learning comes from teachers who know what works and have the support to do it consistently is the foundation Wren is built on. He designed the instructional framework, the routines, and the professional learning system, wrote the first version of the Activity Builder in the summer of 2025, and leads all curriculum and instructional content development at Wren.

Mel Stoll, Co-Founder, COO and CMO

Mel is a tech person who found her mission in education. She started her career in software engineering and product management at SaaS and network infrastructure companies, then Macromedia and Adobe, spending years thinking about how technology products reach users and earn their trust. Those instincts followed her when she moved into ed-tech.

Working with teachers changed everything. Teachers are doing some of the most important work there is, not just teaching students how to learn, but preparing them to solve big problems and take the lead. They show up for that work every day with a purpose and dedication that Mel finds endlessly motivating. She has never been more energized by her work than when she gets to do it for teachers.

At the Big History Project and the OER Project, she built and ran the teacher professional learning communities and support programs that helped tens of thousands of history and social studies teachers bring inquiry-based, discussion-driven instruction into their classrooms. At XQ Institute, she supported the development of a new project-based Algebra I course and the teacher resources and professional learning designed to make it work in real classrooms. At Wren, she leads operations, marketing and the teacher community built on the belief that educators get better together.

Jörg Meyer, Engineering, Co-Founder

Jörg spent 17 years as a software engineer and engineering leader at Google, working on search, storage, and large-scale log analysis. Before Google, he built contextual intelligence systems at Yahoo and worked on web data analysis and indexing at IBM Research.

When Bob showed him what he'd cobbled together, Jörg saw both the potential and what it would take to make it real. He rebuilt the Activity Builder from the ground up. It's the system that takes a teacher's description of what they're teaching and produces a classroom-ready activity, standards-aligned and pedagogically grounded, in minutes. At Wren, getting the technical infrastructure right is what makes everything else possible.

Wren Education | June 2026