teaching apps for teachers

 teaching apps for teachers

to be better and even help with their students' homework.We can do an awful lot with computers," said Chris O'Connor, who runs the program with his wife and fellow software engineer Jennifer O'Connor, and an assortment of interns.The O'Connors' company, called Eureka Math, makes educational games that are designed for a broad group of users, not just teachers. The first of the company's many games was a math problem solving game called Algebraix, which won a $5,000 prize in a competition sponsored by the California State Assembly.The company started off making business games, a genre that typically focuses on business planning, but has since ventured into other areas, like teaching.I do think that game companies, as a whole, have a lot to offer the educational market," O'Connor said. "We've had a lot of positive responses from people in education. They know it can be a fun, engaging game that can actually improve a child's academic performance. The company's latest venture is a math homework program for schools called Homework Help. It is the product of months of research into effective homework programs. The product has a few features that make it unique. Homework Help uses a proprietary question-answer format to allow for a student to receive instant feedback on answers. It can also automatically grade assignments and, most importantly, offers a live personal assistant, or tutor, through an iPhone app. The homework program was just released this fall for use in California public schools and should be available nationally in a couple years. Eureka Math plans to partner with Apple on its software platform for the device. A version of Homework Help is also currently available for iPad. That version, however, is designed for more experienced students The personal tutors for the Homework Help app use machine learning, in which software learns how to answer questions based on the questions it has answered before. It learns by "watching" users of the application and analyzing their behavior.The O'Connors believe machine learning has the potential to be a major innovation in the education sector. "It's an area of research that has not been done enough in education," O'Connor said. "The technology is moving fast."The O'Connors work closely with the University of Rochester, which sponsors a large research project on machine learning.The company was able to create a very effective tutor for the Homework Help app based on that research. The tutors are also personalized, depending on the child's preferences. For example, a child might tell the program to make a game out of a given lesson, or to make up a fun story about the lesson. I hope it comes off that it's engaging and interesting and that it makes a child want to learn more about the subject," O'Connor said.Even more important than the tools, O'Connor says, is simply changing the way homework is done."I was a really bad doer of homework when I was in school," he said. "I would read it and forget about it, and then it would be three days before I would go back to it. I wanted to change that."The goal of the program is to help children learn and then want to learn more. To that end, the Homework Help program also features video tutorials, lesson plans and interactive quizzes.

It's a way for students to use games, the O'Connors believe, in the same way they might be already using video games. "In all of these things, we're looking at kids as they're being social," O'Connor said.O'Connor said he thinks Eureka Math will be able to make a real impact on education in the coming years."I believe we'll be able to help make the world a better place," he said. "It's hard to say where we're going to take our company, but we think this will be the first real step." https://claraeon.com/