Interview With Educator, Former Fortune 50 CEO, & Author Carrol Titus

  

 

1.      What is your book, Unicorn Blue and the Caradoodle Quest, about?

Unicorn Blue has just been born and is clueless. How will she learn to be an epic unicorn let alone find her Caradoodle? Mahoo's top-notch instructors will guide her on her quest to become the unicorn she was meant to be and find her kindred-spirit child. Jay and Luk will charm readers as they prepare Unicorn Blue for her encounters with devious leprechauns, mischievous donkeys and elusive Caradoodle.  With double crosses and double trouble at every turn, will Unicorn Blue discern her true blue Caradoodle? Or will she reveal herself to the wrong child and cease to exist? Caradoodle Quest is an engaging coming-of-age tale that whisks readers off on a fantastic flight of fancy through the majestic granite peaks, cascading waterfalls, and celestial sunsets of Yosemite Valley.

 

2.      What inspired its writing?

Two years after the release of our first mixed-reality game, the Mysterious Disappearance of Unicorn Blue, we received feedback from hundreds of children who told us they longed to know how their favorite Unicorn from Unitopia came to be. Research from the National Association of School Boards found it’s important not to focus on skill-based subjects like reading and math, shorn of any connections to history, science, and literature. This approach inherently lacks deeper purpose. Caradoodle Quest gives our mobile STEM games a deeper sense of purpose. Knowing my children’s favorite fairy tales like My Father’s Dragon, The Last Unicorn and The Firebird and my own love of English literature by Donne, Tolkien, Rowling, and American folk tales by Irving, MacGillivray, Kellogg makes it heartfelt.

 

3.      The main character, Unicorn Blue, straddles two worlds and is on a quest to find her Caradoodle. What is a Caradoodle – and how does she go about her journey?

Cara means friend in Celtic, and doodling is every child’s playful imagination calling.  So, a Caradoodle is the kindred-spirit child of a unicorn. Mahoo, Unicorn Blue’s mentor, informs her she will cease to exist if she reveals herself to the wrong child, and that she must discover her own discernment on what makes a true-blue Caradoodle.  Before she can encounter any potential Caradoodles she must first learn to fly, find magic gold dust, and disguise herself.   Top-notch flight instructor Jay teaches her to fly.   Illusionist Luk teaches her how to outwit a leprechaun, find magic gold dust and apply it to disguise herself. At first, Unicorn Blue, gets fooled by some potential Caradoodles, but not for long.  She soon learns to focus on character and substance.

 

4.      Unicorn Blue is on a quest and others try to help her become the unicorn she was meant to be and to find her kindred spirit child. How do young people often struggle or fall short in trying to live up to their intentions or goals?

Young people are often strangers to themselves, making decisions based on feelings they don’t understand. This ignorance leaves them susceptible to emotional overload. Mapping out long-term goals where you want to go and purpose, who you are serving and why it matters, develops self-awareness.  Children often skip breaking down long-term goals into smaller steps when they lack a broader sense of purpose in their education. Purpose nurtures deeper focus, exploration and students' agency, and ownership of their learning.  With vision, purpose and focus in-hand, children gain the persistence to work through difficulties and not give up if they do not see immediate results. Purpose gives them rigor to pursue bigger problems and sets them up for lifelong success and responsible citizenship.

 

5.      Throughout your story, you share little nuggets of wisdom, such as “Nothing worth doing ever came easy, because if it did, everyone would do it.” How do we get kids to understand the advice and support that parents and teachers try to give them?

Caring adults can help kids feel supported by giving them a framework to achieve their goals.  Writing down a vision statement where they want to go long term and a mission statement, stating who they are serving and why it matters, nurtures self-awareness, motivation, and focus.  With a vision and mission statement in place, the next step is giving kids a tool to divide long-term goals into tiny, daily actions.  Writing down specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals provide a clear, trackable, realistic, actionable plan for success.  When setbacks occur, encourage them to discuss it with caring peers and adults. Setting regular check-ins, to celebrate incremental successes, lessons learned, and next steps builds trust and is shown to have significant impacts on outcomes.

 

6.      What is a forever technology executive of a Fortune 50 company doing writing books for elementary school children?

Two years after the release of our first mobile mixed-reality game, the Mysterious Disappearance of Unicorn Blue, we received feedback from hundreds of elementary school children who told us they longed to know how their favorite Unicorn in the land of Unitopia came to be. Research from the National Association of School Boards found that high achieving countries don’t relentlessly focus on rote skills like reading and math shorn of any connections to history, science, and literature.   This approach inherently lacks deeper purpose.  Purpose nurtures deeper focus, exploration and a students' agency, and ownership of their learning.   Purpose gives students rigor to pursue bigger problems and sets them up for lifelong success.  Caradoodle Quest deepens connections from history and literature to our science curriculum. It accelerates understanding, outcomes and supports teacher practice.

 

7.      You founded Golden Poppy to address the acute national need to nurture a child’s love of STEM, especially girls. What obstacles are you finding in your quest?

After 5 years of rigorous development, we’ve had to adjust our focus time and time again, with many pivots - to our front facing interface, cloud architecture, and back facing integrations.  And, we’ve had many late nights debugging -- not knowing how we’d get it to work.   However, all our hard work paid off.  We are proud to say that it has led to three-sigma improvements in students across the U.S. The pilots at Pride Elementary validate our platform's capability to raise the rate of student achievement to 100% proficient and distinguished on national standardized tests. With that said, we still need to slay the Goliath of current policy emphasizing skill-based math and reading over a holistic integrated science, history and literature approach. So, the saga continues.

 

8.      Your organization is working with a woman who was voted Kentucky’s Best State Elementary Teacher (2023) to increase performance levels. How is that going?

Kelli used our teacher’s guide to teach her 3^rd grade students how to make a plot line of Unicorn Blue’s adventures to find her BFF Caradoodle. She then had them compare and contrast the plot line in Because of Win Dixie from a child’s perspective. Kelli’s colleague, Kendall, used Caradoodle Quest to teach her 4^th grade students how to analyze Yosemite’s topography.  She then blended the learning into our virtual world environment, Unitopia, to identify patterns in earth’s systems. Using our STEM software, both Kelli and Kendall’s classes saw significant improvements in achievement across the course of the program.  Kendall commented, “after 7 years of teaching science with traditional resources, this has been the only program that has shown triple-sigma outcomes:  100% of my students scored proficient and distinguished on their 2025 national assessment”.

 

9.      How can these results be expanded upon, so that anyone in America has access to your learning tools?

81% of parents are concerned with declining test scores and widening achievement gaps.  It's not surprising the top reasons parents choose to homeschool are the misalignment with one-size-fits all traditional approaches and lack of purpose. Validated for triple-sigma improvement, Adventures in Unitopia, provides a purposeful, flexible, and customizable learning experience for homeschooling families.  The application is Next Gen Science Standard compliant for grades K - 8 so it works with multiple grade levels.  The text-to-speech capability promotes reading independence and mixed-age collaboration.  The interface notifies students of progress based on real-time analytics of student assessment data.  This empowers students to focus on immediate learning gaps that each student faces.  The student dashboard gives a cumulative summary of all activities completed making parental verbal check-ins a breeze.

 

10.  How will AI impact classrooms and the learning experience?

We know that teachers are a core source of STEM learning, but they lack quality curriculum and implementation support. We know  1:1 teaching is the best, but it isn’t feasible in the classroom because 1:1 pathways, assessment and feedback are over burdensome to the teacher. We fix this. We intentionally built Unicorn Blue School to identify gaps in learning and bridge those gaps with personalized learning pathways so teachers can spend more meaningful 1:1 time with their kids. Our AI environment augments cognition: the mental process of learning, thinking, and understanding and notifies students of progress. Real-time diagnostics give teachers individualized gap analysis with data-driven recommendations.  Our evidence-based AI software helps students reach triple sigma gains in STEM and have fun doing it.

 

About The Author: Carrol Titus, president of Golden Poppy Inc., is a wife, mother of three and former Fortune 50 tech executive with $2B of product shipped worldwide. Titus, who taught herself to code, is a big advocate for encouraging girls to study STEM and to pursue careers in technology, science, engineering, and math. Golden Poppy is an American educational multi-media production studio with offices in Delaware and Silicon Valley.  It is an internationally recognized thought leader for championing the power of play through technology. Golden Poppy's mission is to utilize mixed-reality learning and social play to drive a measurable increase in student outcomes.  After five years of rigorous testing of our fused AV/AI software, it has led to three-sigma improvements in students across the U.S. Golden Poppy was featured in the news media, including Mamahood, ToyInsider, and GoodAppGuide. For more information, please see: www.goldenpoppy.net.

 

 

 

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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 5,800,000 page views. With 5,500+ posts over the past 14 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

For the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.

 

His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs

 

He hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and has spoken at ASJA, BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, Morgan James Publishing, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.

 

His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. His first published book was The Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook.  It was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.

 

Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.

 

You can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum