For better or for worse, tech is being forced into classrooms by textbook companies. At least this project emphasizes students working on good old complete assignments, rather than tiny bite-sized activities. It is also free, rather than $100 per student per year/semester.

Computers are okay at deciding if an answer is correct, but they are not good tutors. Teachers can use Free Math to find the gems in their students work that demonstrate their misunderstanding. Currently there is no way for them to process all of the data and work produced by their students every day and have access to this granularity of information.

I considered having an app that would take pictures of student work, but OCR just seemed unrealistic for math. Bad handwriting and symbol ambiguity are almost guaranteed to make any automated transcription of math work buggy. Unlike with natural language, which you can produce on your approximate mobile keyboard, there is no way to auto-correct a symbol or number based on the context.