Show HN: We allow teachers to print out "Scantrons" and scan for results via fax | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: We allow teachers to print out "Scantrons" and scan for results via fax

kiteedu.com

62 pointsebzlo47 comments

Given that "Powerful analytics" tells most teachers "You're on the wrong website", I might have skipped that sentence and gone directly to the problem which they actually care about that you purport to solve.

n.b. I love the idea of launching a new Heroku instance for demo accounts... though one questions why Heroku would let you do that. You should probably rethink that interaction design, though. "Setup Demo" suggests a lot of work -- unify the two steps into one and then give it a call-to-action that suggests a low-friction experience. I don't know, "See It In Action" or something. Similarly, virtually anything beats "Create New Account."

As always, please test confident statements I make regarding relative conversion rates. I do, because I flub guesses all the time.

Agree, the copy on the landing page doesn't seem to read "hey teachers, this is for you!", it comes off a bit more of "hey tech guys check out this SAAS app we made for teachers".

Regardless Kite looks absolutely brilliant and likely will be a real game changer for countless teachers. Awesome work

Thanks! Yeah. Going to rework that. Lots of great feedback here.

Just got an email from Heroku, looks like they're not happy about that.

Not terribly shocking, since you probably just created more apps than their entire customer base this week. From their perspective it looks like a huge resource hit from a very, very costly action by an account which has not given them many reason$ to trust with anomalous behavior yet. Count yourself lucky: a less hacker friendly company would ban first and email later.

I'd suggest apologizing for a somewhat poor architecture choice, turning off that button temporarily, and then round-robinning folks into 10 demo instances which are reset daily with a big Do Not Put Student Data In Here warning at top in red. This may be easier than rearchitecturing the demo to be multi-tenant, though that is a good idea long-term.

Yeah. That button is gone now. Took it down. We'll figure something out later.

Hey patio11! Funny thing, my co-founder and I were just talking about you and methodologies earlier last week (conversion rates and ab testing you do with BCC etc).

We really hadn't thought about the vocabulary in the buttons there at all, so that's really great advice. Thanks!

I ended up showing the website to my wife (a former K-12 Teacher with a special ed/restraint endorsement in the Commonwealth of Kentucky), who is now working on her Doctorate in Education.

Her initial reaction was, "think of how much this is going to save the schools in budget and in time!", followed by "I wonder how much this is going to cost a district." Locally, the schools here are spending less than 10K/year on software for teachers, and that amount gets cut back a little bit each year: Teachers are frequently purchasing (or pirating) software for use in their classroom when they find software that has educational or productive merit. Your biggest hurdle will probably be getting the price points set correctly...but with that said...the wife loves it and went to show it off to a few of her friends who are still in the public educational system here who claimed it was, 'neat' and even a self-admitted technophobe mentioned that it looked better than the system that they're currently using.

Good job and great work -- this has a lot of potential to be a gamechanger for teachers.

Thanks! I guess it's not immediately apparent, the application itself is free.

Our monetization strategy comes from content (we sell third party content in our store similar to Apple's App Store). This is still in the pipeline, however.

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.

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. :)

You know, I saw when this website was posted earlier.

I think it's awesome you provide both faxing and scanning interfaces.

I had two questions: 1. Where are you based? Why don't you have a snail mail address on your website? It's not even clear you are based in the U.S.

2. On a more stat based note: When you analyze the data, are you merely analyzing the students, or are you providing IRT analysis for the test questions themselves? Do you provide support for A/B testing of test types, or dynamic testing in your online interface?

Because to me, those are things your average teacher can't do, but knowing how well each question and each test assesses students modeled as a function of student ability means that your assessments aren't just easier, but can be made better at measuring ability.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Item_response_theory

Hello!

1. Los Angeles, CA. I didn't think snail mail was necessary, but I guess we could throw it on there.

2. We're basically analyzing students. Our content is aligned to the common core standards, so we can figure out what standards students are weak in. These are very, very simple analytics that we're providing right now (that teachers can action upon).

Later on we plan to do more adaptive learning type stuff.

I'm going to read the IRT link, haven't seen that yet.

Thanks!

A physical address and contact info on your site shows that you are a real company and above-board (i.e. not a scam operation).

I don't think your average teacher would have the time to do something like this.

Push the scantron-less grading. That's your biggest selling point, hands down. A pack of 500 forms (see link below) retails for $60; you'd be saving school districts literally tens of thousands of dollars per year.

https://store.scantron.com/OA_HTML/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?sect...

Also, I can't seem to get my PDFs to generate. Anyone else experiencing this?

Checking. Edit: DNS hasn't resolved for our print server. We're going to hotfix it real quick.

That's what I call support. Awesome!

EDIT: Looks to be working!

PDFs should be generating now. Thanks! :)

What are the privacy implications of a teacher giving students' grade information to a third party? I was under the impression the law (in US) required a parent's release. Is it possible for your admins to view grade data?

You're correct. The teachers can not give student data to a third party without a proper contract for data transfer. However, I will give them credit for having a clear, fair and simple terms of service and privacy policy but it doesn't look like a lawyer was involved with their creation (it wouldn't be so simple or clear if a lawyer wrote it) so they probably haven't sought council for the rest of the business either.

This is an aside, but many lawyers view it as their job to protect your company from legal liability to maximum extent possible. But any half-way decent lawyer should be willing to take directions like "limit the privacy policy to the page" and "cut out extraneous legalese."

Neat concept and a well designed site, I hope you guys get some market penetration as I'm sure this would be a huge burden relief for teachers everywhere.

A few suggestions: If I were you I'd make the login button stand out more by having the orange rectangle always visible. Teachers aren't the most tech savvy bunch, and having the login button blend in as much as it does currently will probably confuse/frustrate alot of them.

Also, its probably best to refrain from using the word "Scantron." Its a registered trademark of Scantron Corporation, and as they're technologically WAY behind you guys, their probably going to get pretty trigger-happy with litigation if they see their monopoly threatened.

Thanks!

Yeah, we don't use the word anywhere on our site, but figured it might be okay to use in the title of an HN post.

Just curious: have you actually talked to many teachers? Shown them the site and asked for feedback?

I feel like your landing page is way off from what a teacher would be expecting. Don't get me wrong, _I_ like it, but that doesn't mean it converts well with your target market.

Yeah, we're getting a lot of that from HNers, we're working on a new layout and will talk to some teachers before we push it up. Thanks!

They should probably be a lot more involved than "talk to some teachers before we push it up".

Wow. Two in one week. Just a few days ago I came across: http://www.gradecam.com/ which does something very similar but with document cameras rather than fax machines.

It's great to see tools like these being built for those outside the tech bubble.

This is exciting!

Do you plan to offer API support? I would be very interested in having students fax the exam sheet to Kite, and then pulling the question marks (and image?) from your service.

Also, will educators have to use your exam sheets?

Can you read barcodes?

Educators build the assignment in our application (writing their own questions or using them from a question bank later on). In order for our product to read the fax, it needs to have been created from our application.

Currently no API support, sorry.

Could educators import the question bank? If so, would it work with Moodle's XML format (http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Moodle_XML_format)

That looks like an excellent next feature for us to build. :)

Agree with the previous sentiment-this seems geared towards showcasing a cool tech demo rather than the teachers themselves. Put the scrantron scanning upfront, as that's the main draw and detail the painless process to do it.

Would students in the class be able to login and see their grades? It would be awesome to integrate this with LMS platforms like Blackboard.

Really curious as to how you're implementing the fax feature. Is it an in-house solution, or are you guys using somebody's API?

In house solution--well, bundling together a couple of different open source libs (QR code detection, openCV).

what about the fax communications api? or are you guys interfacing with physical copper lines via some kind of fax server?

The UI on your home page is terrific! So well designed... did you do that in-house or contract it out?

In house! By me, so thanks! :)

Most modern copiers offer scan-and-email functionality. This might be much simpler than faxing.

You are correct! And they can be faxed to us as well. We just don't publicize it (yet).

This is a beautifully designed site. I absolutely love the sliding signup/sign in sheets.

Thanks!

I would suggest changing the behavior of pushing the entire page down to one where just the username and password boxes descend from the top and situate themselves next to a stationary Login button. I don't like when the page moves from underneath my cursor, which happens with homepage takeover ads.

Have you gotten any feedback about the domain name? kite-e-d-u-dot-com could be confused as kite.edu.com

Instead of faxing have you guys thought about OCR via a webcam/mobile phone/scanner?

i looked at the source code, all seems so very nicely done. can u shed some light on the underlying technology? i see you use some twitter bootstrap, but the ui elements look like your own (i like) and backbone right?

Yup! RoR, Backbone, heavily modified bootstrap(v1), Haskell for the scan/print feature.

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