StudyTag Answers

There is hope for educational software. That hope entails using technology for what it is really amazingly good at, that is:

1. Its ability to remember massive amounts of minute detail about massive numbers of students.
2. Its ability to be endlessly patient.
3. Its ability to customize a unique experience for each individual student.

StudyTag is focused on leveraging these abilities in a manner that engages and educates the students without needlessly boring them.

It is possible for StudyTag to quickly test each individual students knowledge about a subject and then provide a customized review plan to fill in the gaps of that students knowledge. However, for this to work teachers must first answer the question "What should the student actually know to have mastered this material?" and "How much of this material should the student really remember for the rest of their life?"

If a history teacher is convinced that it is valuable for a student to know the names of each American President and their time in office, then that can be entered into the StudyTag system and each student can learn those facts at a comfortable pace for them. In fact, that Group has already been entered into StudyTag, so all the teacher has to do is assign the lessons to the students and StudyTag does the rest.

Computers can have endless patience in helping each individual student learn the next President. Computers don't get impatient. Computers have no need to move on to the next topic. Time to leverage that ability. Time to start using StudyTag. Do you know the American Presidents?

Programming the Brain II

So why are our current education techniques so incredibly inefficient? Why do we spend 50 minutes to an hour in math class, five days a week, for 12 years of school and still graduate people who can't do algebra.

The reason is really quite simple. Every brain is different. Every brain learns at its own pace. Every brain is not ready to learn what is currently being presented in class. And, as a result, most of the class time, and most of the homework time, is wasted.

If I am trying to teach the brain 600 concepts, and if I may need to reinforce the information 120,000 times to get those concepts, what do you think the odds are that in any given class there is even 1 student is a good position to learn the material the instructor is presenting today.

To make it even worst - the brain leaks! Information it knew yesterday it may not be able to recall today. Old information needs to be continually reinforced. But which old information? Each brain is not leaking the same things, and what needs to be reinforced for one student may not need to be reinforced for the next.

Do you see the magnitude of the problem.

I submit, there is a great way to address it. That way, I'll cover in my next post, but if you haven't already guessed it involves StudyTag.

Programming the Brain I

In addition to being a teacher I am also a computer engineer. In fact, I've been creating software products and companies for over 25 years and I'm here to let you in on a little secret, its not all that difficult. In fact, teaching a computer to do advanced mathematics is trivial compared to teaching a person.

So, after all these years of education you would think we would have a complete set of proven methods fully in place to get everyone fully up to speed on what they need to know. I propose that almost every graduate from High School should be able to do advanced calculus. They have certainly spend enought time in school to have mastered advanced calculus by the time they graduate. The reason most don't know calculus has nothing to do with their intelligence, it has everything to do with their education.

You see you don't program a human brain the same way you do a computer. With a computer you set down step by step instructions and the computer simply follows those instructions perfectly (yes I mean perfectly, those bugs are almost always an error in the instructions not an error in the computer).

A human is different. Human intelligence is based not on following step by step instructions, rather it is based on pattern matching. Do you want to make the human smarter, expose the human brain to more information and let the brain do what it does naturally.

Do you want to make the human brain better at mathematics, expose the brain to more and more math patterns before trying to explain all of the steps. The brain uses the patterns to understand the steps, not the other way around.

Now, here is the amazing thing. If you wanted everyone who graduated from High School to be very good at math, how many minutes a day do you think they should drill starting in first grade. Have you guessed it? Did you guess 5 minutes?

Recently I posted the following, 10 reinforcements a minute x 5 minutes a day x 200 days per year x 12 years = 120,000 reinforcements

Over a 12 year school period I can reinforce 120,000 pieces of information in five minutes a day. I can teach even the most stubborn brain 600 key concepts in that time. We can teach that brain calculus, and make it really good at it!

Of course, currently our educational system does not do this. But it can.

StudyTag Key Concepts

StudyTag is based on some key concepts. The first is simple, we believe it is possible in just five minutes a day (5MAD) to significantly augment and supplement a student's education on any topic.

We have created StudyTag:

• So parents may fully understand and track their children's progress.
  
  
• So students may quickly and effectively master important facts.
  
  
• So teachers may live up to the promise of no child left behind.
  

StudtyTag believes it is possible to create a learning system that tutors, tracks, and educates without grades, judgment, and fear. We also believe it is time to change the focus away from grades and back to mastery.

The secret to our success in contained in the following three equations:

1. 10 reinforcements a minute x 5 minutes a day x 200 days per year x 12 years = 120,000 reinforcements

2. 120,000 reinforcements / 200 reinforcements per concepts = 600 concepts

3. 600 concepts = mastery

I'll expand further on these equations to see how they are central to education, yet simple to implement.

The Origins of StudyTag

StudyTag developed out of a practical need. For health reasons my wife and I found ourselves home schooling our twelve year old daughter and as a part of our home school curriculum my daughter and I were reading a series of books and biographies on US history. For each chapter we read we would both write a series of facts we thought we should know after reading that chapter. She would quiz me on her facts and I would quiz her on mine. It was always interesting to see what the other thought was a fact worthy of remembering. After a while we had developed quite a large collection of facts and it became a bit of a problem reviewing old material, it was also taking too much time.

Being a Computer Engineer I thought it would be great to have a computer system where both my daughter and I could write and share the facts we had learned.

I didn’t find anything already out there that did what I wanted it to do at a price I as a parent wanted to pay - free being the preferred price. Since I couldn't find it, I decided to build it. Welcome to StudyTag.