Ask HN: What should I with the content of my previous Math Tutoring Startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What should I with the content of my previous Math Tutoring Startup?

6 pointsBrandiATMuhkuh6 comments

Hi HN. My name is Jurgen. I'm the Co-Founder and CTO of amy.app About one year ago we couldn't secure any more funding and had to shut down the company after 7 years. During that time, our content team generated about 25000 math exercises. Each exercise has a step by step solution. Furthermore for each step it includes pedagogically valuable mistakes students might make.

Given that content is pedagogically sound and human curated it might be useful to someone. It could be used for things like AI training (after all it resembles a chat) or for creating individual math exercise to print them on paper.

If anyone has some pointers I would love to hear them - Here is a content explorer: https://curriculum.amy.app/ToM (this does not includes the mistakes part) - That's the landing page: https://www.amy.app (you can try it by click the demo button) - This is an SAT specific version: https://sat.amy.app

Please find my contacts in my HN profile.

Thanks again!

Anecdote time: [Hi from Argentina!] During 2020 everyone and their dog made a similar project with Moodle (not as nice, but easier to implement in a few weeks). At the peak, I had to use at work 4 Moodles and my wife 4 Moodles, and only 2 were in common. A friend has like 5 or 6. Note that all of them were in the same University! And all of them had a slightly diferent configuration so transfering quiz from one to another was sometimes a problem.

I participated actively building questions for one of them before the pandemic, and we copied a lot of the stuff to one or two of the others.

I don't know about selling this stuff, but I think it will be difficult.

Anyway, I have some feedback about the questions. I tried the free ones. In the calculus example, when the computer replaces

  something + 7x + c

with x=-4, it uses

  something + 7 × - 4 + c

We usualy prefer that the students use parenthesis arround the negative values like

  something + 7 × (- 4) + c

In a midterm we will put a warning, but not substract points if they don't use the parenthesis. Most of the times the students don't write the × and the equation is confusing.

Also in the next step

  something + - 28 + c

I strongly preffer

  something + (- 28) + c

Those questions sound really valuable.

Off the top of my head

- Sell them to another educational company or charity. I can think of a dozen maths websites I used while at school that might want to pay for that content.

- Use them to train an ML model that generates new questions, then sell that (btb or btc).

- Sell them to parents and students as exercises.

- Sell them to teachers as exercise

- Sell a service to schools that allows access to them (either a directory or a "click to get a random exercise!" kinda thing).

-Sell a service that produces new mock tests with a single click, and that as a data source.

While I'm British, not American, I saw and used plenty of services that sold questions and worksheets. All were technically hideous.

I finished my A levels (high school) 6 months ago fwiw.

Thanks for the ideas.

We have tried selling it to competitors. But no luck so far. I guess given the market is pretty though after the Chinese market crashed, and the covid bubble burst, and all the new LLM competition they don't have much resources.

Maybe I'm lucky and someone sees this post :)

How generic are they? You might be able to sell to the UK if the topics carry over. Look up the A Level maths curriculum. There are a number of exam boards, but they're broadly similar, with AQA and Edexcel being the main ones.

I believe we cover the A level given we had UK schools use it. And multiple international schools. I'll ask my co-founder.

I just poked through your questions. There's a lot of overlap. Some areas (e.g. imaginary numbers) are only covered in further maths, but the calculus all looks good, for example.

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