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Hey everyone, I’m Shreyans, one of the founders of Socratic. We're thrilled to share Socratic with you!
This super short video is probably the easiest way to understand when, why, and how a student would use Socratic:
To help make learning easier for students, we do two new and challenging things:
First, our AI lets you take a picture of a question, reads it, and classifies each question by the underlying concepts required to answer the question. In order to build this, educators had to manually classify hundreds of thousands of questions, and then we trained a computer to do the same thing.
Second, we create our own high-quality mobile-friendly teaching content that we believe is simpler and easier to learn from than most of what exists on the Internet today.
Our hope is that this technology makes learning more accessible for students who don’t have personal tutors or parents that can help with science homework.
We believe this will be hugely valuable for students, and are excited to be at the beginning of this long journey.
I work at a nationally ranked selective enrollment high school and our students often rely on Slader to get their homework done, with the vast majority not seeing anything wrong with just copying down the answers. I think your app seems really promising, in terms of teaching them what they need to learn, but how do you plan to acquire users when many high school students really just want the quick answer.
@erin_alexa_ That’s an excellent question, Erin. Over the course of hundreds of user tests with students, we’ve noticed two things: First, many students just copy down an answer from the web. Second, those same students know that they need to learn the material, but don’t think they can do it in that moment.
If a student doesn’t have a tutor or parents who can help them, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to get unstuck and teach themselves what they need just by using a textbook or by searching the web.
We think this situation in education has a parallel to the entertainment industry in the 2000s. In the early days of digital media, demand for access surpassed the options for easy and cheap purchasing, and piracy boomed. This turned a corner in the 2010s, as services like Pandora and Spotify made it easy for consumers to pay a small amount and listen to lots of great music. An executive at Valve aptly said: “Pirates are underserved customers.”
Students are living in the education equivalent of a pre-Spotify world. The most common tool (by far) that students use when doing homework is Google. And when students Google homework-related questions, the content they find is often hard to understand, unreliable, and not focused on teaching.
Our goal is to instantly provide high-quality learning material that specifically teaches you how to solve your problem. By making it easier to learn, we hope that more students choose to learn the material while doing homework, instead of copying an answer.
Hey @cjpedregal & @5hreyans! Obviously Summize was a huge hit, but perhaps caught too much steam at initial launch. How is Socratic different?
Hey @andrewett, thanks for the question.
Photo-as-input is definitely a similarity (one that we see in other education apps like PhotoMath, MathPix, Yup), and behind the scenes, there’s some AI in both.
Most other things about us are quite different.
Our goal is to teach students how to answer their questions, and to do that we’ve done two (fairly challenging) things.
First, we’ve built our own AI classifier that takes a random question and classifies it by subject and by the specific underlying concepts required to answer that question. Educators categorized hundreds of thousands of questions into their underlying concepts, then we trained a computer to do the same thing. As far as we know, this doesn’t yet exist anywhere else.
Second, we create our own teaching content. We’ve spent quite a while thinking about what style and structure of content is easiest for students to learn from on their phones, and are working with a community of educators to create this content for every relevant concept.
Together, the experience we offer students is quite new, and (we think) hard to replicate.
This is a neat idea, congrats on the launch.
How do you make sure the 'quality' / relevance of the information you provide the students is highly accurate. In other words, how do you make sure you don't accidentally send them off on a tangent with a wrong concept/formula based on AI's interpretation of the question?
Trust is obviously going to be a big factor here. Get a couple of inaccurate responses and trust/credibility will significantly decrease for future use.
Hey @sarthakgrover, that's a great question and fully agree with your point on trust.
For our app to be useful to students, it needs to do 2 things:
* classify a question into the correct topic
* show useful and accurate content for that topic
We are constantly measuring how well our classifier is doing by cross-validating it against the hundreds of thousands of questions our educators have manually labelled. This tells us which topics we do a good job of predicting and which ones need more work. When a topic needs work, we acquire more data (by manually classifying more questions) or do manual feature engineering.
As for the accuracy of the content, that’s something that our community is constantly working to improve. Our Explainers are peer-reviewed by community members before going into the app and the content is iterated upon based on student feedback. We believe there is tremendous potential to better incorporate student feedback in the content creation process.
While we are proud of the quality of our classifier and our content, we appreciate that this is just the beginning.
In the same way that Google is still working on improving their ranking algorithms almost 20 years after launch, we don’t think either of these will ever be solved problems. Nor should they be - we should always strive to do a better job of helping students learn.
The Twenty Minute VC