Features of Our Product
Varied Question Types and Tools: Our bank of questions will not be restricted to multiple choice, unlike most of our competitors. This is because maths exams usually require students to come up with the answer themselves. We also feel that multiple choice questions are not the best way for a student to truly understand a topic. To engage students better, we are trying to use data from real life situations wherever possible. Currently, we have created statistics questions based on real historical cricket statistics. To supplement regular form-based questions, we are also creating HTML5/Javascript apps which will allow for novel question types and give students an experience with the tools they use in class. We have already created a drawing app which will give students access to a compass, straight edge and protractor in order for them to answer geometry based questions such as bisecting a line segment. Step by Step Explanations: As we mentioned above, when a student is continuously getting a problem wrong, we don’t feel repeating the same question type again and again is necessarily the best way forward. Instead, we offer the student a step-by-step explanation of the problem. If a student is still not understanding the problem, we go through the steps of its prerequisite problems since maths learning is shaped like an upside-down pyramid, and in order to understand a concept the student must understand all the concepts which go into deriving it. For, example, if a student doesn’t understand how to take the HCF
(GCD) of 2 numbers, we first guide him through each step. If the student is still facing issues, we ask him to go through the prerequisite questions, which in this case are Prime Factorization and Multiplication. Learning Algorithms: We are planning to use some of the latest research into how people learn in order for our product to adapt to individuals. We are planning to use the work of people like Pavlik and Anderson, who have backed up their theories with a lot of research. Their work is based on the ACT-R model, developed a few decades ago, but which has seen a revival in the last few years. Using their model, we will calculate the “activation” of the individual student or how well they would do on a problem if it was given to them right now. We will represent this to students in the form of a "SmartScore," which will be a percentage.
