4 ms·

This is one of the most interesting companies I've seen posted on HN in a while. Good luck achieving market penetration. I'd put up a pdf of a generated assign

This is one of the most interesting companies I've seen posted on HN in a while. Good luck achieving market penetration. I'd put up a pdf of a generated assignment that can be scan/fax graded online right away in an easy to access fashion. That is what I most wanted to take a look at, and it looks like the demo won't render the document. Do you put a QR code on each assignment to uniquely identify a student? So papers have to be handed out precisely to each student? Or do you have students bubble in names/identification numbers? How are you going to handle the kind of problems that would be created by using this technology in a class of <8th graders? Crumpled/dog eared papers, intentional attempts to make forms hard to computer read. Have you thought about linking to Amazon's Mechanical Turk to have human grading of difficult to parse entries? Is your product going to be crushed by computers/tablets for every student in future classroom environments? If assignments are all digital (i.e some college textbook environments like 'Mastering Physics') the scan to grade edge slips out. Especially when providers can offer prewritten educational material questions/exams/content as part of their platform.

ebzlo 14y ago
Every sheet of paper uniquely identifies the student and assignment. One thing we're going to do to make this less annoying is to remember the order the students' assignments were faxed in and just print it backwards the next time the teacher hits print. Nothing is in place to handle the unfortunate way children choose to transport their homework at the moment; what we do have is that our recognition tech is fairly robust (it handles fax). Further we've discussed methods of inferring who an unreadable assignment might belong to or having the teacher just step in and view the broken images themselves and do that part by hand. It's not something we've invested a whole lot of time in figuring out yet, but something we know we will have to think about in the near future. And in regards to MTurk, yes, we've considered it and romanced the idea of using it for free response type questions. Our mission is to introduce technology into the classroom. We have computer/tablet based solutions now, but the classroom is currently still in a place where paper and pencil are king. But when they evolve, so will we. :)
- jasonhitchcock 14y ago
  You're also a startengine.com company :)

ebzlo 14y ago

Every sheet of paper uniquely identifies the student and assignment. One thing we're going to do to make this less annoying is to remember the order the students' assignments were faxed in and just print it backwards the next time the teacher hits print. Nothing is in place to handle the unfortunate way children choose to transport their homework at the moment; what we do have is that our recognition tech is fairly robust (it handles fax). Further we've discussed methods of inferring who an unreadable assignment might belong to or having the teacher just step in and view the broken images themselves and do that part by hand. It's not something we've invested a whole lot of time in figuring out yet, but something we know we will have to think about in the near future. And in regards to MTurk, yes, we've considered it and romanced the idea of using it for free response type questions. Our mission is to introduce technology into the classroom. We have computer/tablet based solutions now, but the classroom is currently still in a place where paper and pencil are king. But when they evolve, so will we. :)

jasonhitchcock 14y ago
You're also a startengine.com company :)