Grockit Blog

Grockit’s New CEO!!

farbood nivi September 1, 2010

If your next-door neighbor didn’t come running in your front door this morning to tell you, and you didn’t read it in Techcrunch because you live under a rock, let me be the first to say, we’ve got a new CEO and we are super friggin’ excited!

Roy Gilbert is his name and operational bad-ass is his game. Recently he worked at a local bay-area business called Google. They do cool things on the internet. Before that he drove a nuclear submarine around the planet. While Roy was scaling Google’s India operations from 20 to 1000 in a country he had never been in that spoke a language he didn’t know, he took some time to help his wife start a school in one of the most underprivileged areas of Hyderabad. This might sound impressive but it’s just part of being a Boy Scout, which he is. #great_success

Personally, I’m really geeked about running Grockit with Roy and I wish it meant less work for me but it really just means we’ll get way more done. My roles as president and chairman of the board are still in full effect and because we like chiefs at Grockit, I’ll also be our Chief Product Officer.

Roy, welcome to Grockit!!

Roy on Submarine

Rainbow Primary School in Hyderabad

The CAT Is Out Of The Bag!

david marino August 28, 2010

We’re happy to announce that we’ve just introduced one of the most-requested, most-anticipated features for Grockit GMAT members: full-length Computer Adaptive Tests (CATs). Every Grockit GMAT Member who purchased a Standard Membership, a Tutoring Package, or a Course will have access to 5 CATs, complete with a GMAT score projection based on your performance.

Grockit models its CAT on the official GMAC(R) literature and its score projections on the collected item response data from all Grockit users and score-reporting graduates. We recommend that you complete CATs periodically throughout the course of your studies leading up to your test date to get experience with a Computer Adaptive Test and to give you feedback on your performance and progress over time. In conjunction with Diagnostics (abbreviated CATs of 10 to 12 questions), Challenges, and an extensive library of practice questions, students on Grockit have access to the most comprehensive, personal platform for GMAT prep.

Full-length GMAT CATs now appear in the “Solo Practice” section for Grockit Premium Members:

After completing a CAT, you’ll see your test results and score projection based on your performance:

Thank you, Dan!

Ari Bader-Natal August 6, 2010

We were lucky to have Daniel Furr join us this summer for the Grockit Graduate Research Internship program. Dan is a Ph.D. student in the University of California Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education, with a focus on Quantitative Methods and Evaluation.

At Grockit, Dan has been working on a variety of assessment-oriented projects, such as: on understanding how much data is needed to make use of an item response theory model in a Grockit network, on longitudinal models that help us refine our understanding of student improvement over time, and on extending our current models to incorporate the effect of collaboration, discussion, and repetition on a student’s probability of response accuracy. Understanding the effect of factors like these allows us to better select appropriate challenges for students in Grockit games.

About this internship, Dan writes:

Over the summer I focused on comparing approaches to estimating IRT models and experimenting with longitudinal models to measure user improvement over time. I compared estimations conducted with different R packages, with varying subsets of data, and ways of incorporating information on social interactions that occur alongside item responses. I used random item models to assess learning over time–time as calendar time, as item presentation order, and as discrete “sittings”. The people of Grockit are welcoming and innovative, and I feel fortunate to have had the chance to work with them and grapple with many interesting complexities.

I enjoyed working with Dan over the past few months, and wish him well on his return to academia in the Fall. Keep an eye on this blog for announcements of new assessment-oriented features on Grockit, several of which have benefited from Dan’s hard work this summer.

You CAN Get Some Satisfaction!

david marino July 27, 2010

When the Rolling Stones sang, “I can’t get no satisfaction” they had never met the Customer Support team at Grockit. In an effort to provide world class customer support to our customers, we’ve added the Get Satisfaction feedback widget to Grockit. There is a new HELP button at the top of grockit.com which links to the widget. When you click HELP the widget prompts you to leave feedback in four different ways. You can leave an idea, ask a question, report a problem or give praise. Your feedback will be posted to Grockit’s knowledge base where other users can leave feedback and search similar problems. If you don’t want your feedback to be public, you can simply click “Post Privately” and it will be emailed to the Customer Support team. If you are a registered Grockit user you can leave feedback instantly. If you dont have an account with Grockit, you will be required to create a Get Satisfaction account before you can post your feedback. Want to see some feedback that other customers have left? Click here to go to our knowledge base page.

Grockit Adds Instructional Videos to Solo Practice

david marino July 26, 2010

We found another way to get you addicted to studying in Grockit. We’ve embedded instructional videos into Solo Practice questions. The content in the videos is sources from over 1,000 YouTube Edu videos and matches the skills being practiced in each question. There is a video for almost every skill tested in Grockit all the way from the Academy Math and English through our test prep products. To access a video users simply click the You Tube icon next to the skill tag in a question. We think these videos will really improve the learning outcomes of students. Check out the screenshot below.

Grockit and The Magic Johnson Foundation Partner to Provide Summer Study Programs for Students across the U.S.

david marino July 26, 2010

Grockit, a social network for studying and the Magic Johnson Foundation (www.magicjohnson.org), a 501(c)3 nonprofit public charity that develops programs and supports community-based organizations that address the educational, health and social needs of ethnically diverse, urban communities, announced today that they are working together to provide summer education opportunities to students. To ensure that each student has the opportunity to learn and get ahead, Grockit is donating 1,000 online scholarships to its Summer Enrichment Academy, an online learning program for students in grades 8-12. Additionally, students will have unlimited access to Grockit’s adaptive online learning platform including test prep. Students may apply for the scholarships now through the Magic Johnson Foundation Community Empowerment Centers and the Magic Johnson Foundation will determine which children are eligible.

Students experience a serious degradation of knowledge called “summer learning loss” when they do not engage in educational activities during the break between the school year, and the Summer Enrichment Academy helps students avoid this. Through the application of social networking and online learning technology, the Summer Enrichment Academy helps make studying fun and creates an engaging way for students to master academic skills. The program is aligned to national and state education standards and allows students to study subjects such as English Language Arts, pre-Algebra, Algebra I and II, Geometry, Calculus, Probability and Statistics, Trigonometry and Pre-Calculus. Grockit also provides test prep programs for standardized tests such as the SAT, ACT, GRE and GMAT, with more to come.

“There is no question that students in low income areas are most significantly impacted by the summer learning loss and are at the greatest educational disadvantage,” said Farb Nivi, CEO, Grockit. “We believe that every student has the right to a good education and that this is the best way to set a young person on a path to a productive future, which is why we are pleased and honored to work with the Magic Johnson Foundation. We applaud the work they do on a daily basis to help bring education opportunities to the communities they serve.”

The Magic Johnson Foundation, a nonprofit public charity that develops programs and supports community-based organizations that address the educational, health and social needs of ethnically diverse, urban communities, created Community Empowerment Centers to provide ethnically diverse urban communities access to resources and programming that educate, empower and strengthen individuals though the innovative use of technology. The first technology center was launched in Los Angeles in 2001. There are currently 18 Community Empowerment Centers located in 15 urban markets and the rural market of South Carolina.

“Education is the key to a successful future and we strive to impart the importance of learning in every child we serve,” said Towalame Austin, President, Magic Johnson Foundation. “Grockit’s Summer Enrichment Academy is an important tool in helping to combat the uphill battle that students in low income communities already face in education. We are grateful for the scholarships they are providing and look forward to giving our students a way to continue to learn and grow over the summer.”

About Grockit

Grockit was founded in 2007 to leverage the social benefits of the Internet, improve academic achievement and to extend learning outside of the classroom. Through the application of social networking and online gaming technology, the Grockit learning platform offers students a fun and engaging way to master academic skills and to prepare for standardized tests. The diagnostic, prescriptive and adaptive nature of the platform ensures that each student receives an individualized learning experience. Grockit was founded by Farb Nivi, a former Princeton Review Teacher of the Year and academic director at Kaplan. Headquartered in San Francisco, Grockit is funded by Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital and Integral Capital Partners and angel investors including Reid Hoffman (founder, LinkedIn) and Mark Pincus (founder and CEO, Zynga). For more information, please visit www.grockit.com.

About The Magic Johnson Foundation

The Magic Johnson Foundation was established in 1991 as a single-disease organization that worked to raise funds for community-based organizations dealing with HIV/AIDS education and prevention programs. The Foundation since expanded the mission to focus on developing programs and supporting community-based organizations that address broader educational, health and social needs of ethnically diverse, urban communities. Learn more at www.magicjohnson.org.

“How would you describe Grockit to a friend?”

farbood nivi July 14, 2010

We asked a group of our users to tell us how they would describe Grockit to a friend. We read each comment in detail and then our Chief Scientist, Dr. Ari Bader-Natal thought it might be interesting to enter all the student responses into Wordle (typos included, but that’s ok, these were Algebra students). Wordle is helpful because ‘The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text’. It was cool to see ‘Fun’, ‘Math’ and ‘Helps’ as some of the biggest words.

Do you feel the need…the need for speed?

david marino June 23, 2010

Who doesn’t like a little healthy competition amongst friends? Grockit has added a new way to play our game that we think you’re going to love. It’s called Speed Challenge. In speed challenge you will compete in head to head action over 10 rounds of questions with a timer counting down. The rules are simple. The first person to answer quickest and get it right wins the round. If you guess first and you’re wrong, your challenger will be alerted to your incorrect guess and have the remaining time to answer the question. If you guess first and you’re right, you get all the points and go on to the next question. Should the 10 round game end in a tie, the competitor with the fastest fingers wins! The Grockit team has been playing it all weekend and we’re hooked. Speed challenge is not only fun, but also addictive!

Being intelligent about supporting learning

Ari Bader-Natal June 22, 2010

As you probably know, Grockit offers learners the choice of three different modes of study: individual practice, peer study groups, and instructor-led lessons. What you might not know (unless you’ve read about Research at Grockit) is that these three modes of learning draws on ongoing research in three corresponding subfields of study. Last week, I got up-to-speed on the state of the art in one of these areas, individual study, at the Tenth International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. I wanted to share a few highlights from the conference here.

On Day 1, I started by co-organizing a workshop with Erin Walker and Carolyn Penstein Rosé (both of Carnegie Mellon University) on Opportunities for intelligent and adaptive behavior in collaborative learning systems. It was a great opportunity to bring together a group of people actively pursuing research at the intersection of intelligent systems and collaborative learning. Here is a snippet from the workshop website.

Intelligent tutoring systems are generally designed to tailor instruction to the individual student, but this does not mean that ITS-guided learning must necessarily be a solitary activity. A variety of recent systems have demonstrated ways in which an adaptive learning environment can incorporate and benefit from the presence of multiple learners. Similarly, students using computer-supported collaborative learning systems have been shown to benefit from the introduction of adaptive support that targets the collaboration. In this workshop, we invite discussion and seek to explore ways in which the combination of collaborative and intelligent aspects of a system can benefit the learner by creating a more productive learning environment.

If you’re interested in learning more about this workshop, you can find the presenter list, rapid-fire slides, and full proceedings on the workshop website.

As the week continued, I got a chance to hear presentations on a wide variety of research projects. A few of the talks that I found interesting this year touched on these topics: deciding if and when to provide hints, identifying the moment of learning from patterns in data, incorporating teachers into the process of designing a system, automatically generating hints from patterns in past data, understanding the ways in which human tutors are adaptive, incorporating dialogue agents in peer collaborations, and modeling learning gains over time. You can see the full spectrum of work presented in the conference proceedings index.

Grockit was proud to be one of the sponsors of this year’s Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference.

Games+Learning+Society+Grockit

Ari Bader-Natal June 21, 2010

Two weeks ago, Grockit participated in the Games+Learning+Society conference. On the second day of the conference, I joined Jeramy Gatza, Curriculum Innovation Specialist on the Research and Discovery Team at Florida Virtual School, to discuss a recent project in which eight Algebra I classes at Florida Virtual School piloted the use of Grockit as a supplement to their standard course curriculum. The presentation, entitled Collaborative Learning Games in the Virtual Classroom: Piloting Grockit at Florida Virtual School, took an interactive form. Each participant had a laptop, which allowed us to ground our discussion of the social, motivational, and collaborative aspects of the platform in first-hand experience. Here’s a bit more about the discussion, taken from the presentation abstract:

A virtual school can offer a student the ability to complete a course on their own schedule, from any location. The challenge in providing a flexible, individualized learning environment is that students may feel disconnected from each other, and can miss the opportunity to learn from interactions with their peers. Multi-player online learning games may hold a solution. By providing a venue for learners to connect and interact, these games can extend the benefits of collaborative learning opportunities to the geographically-dispersed students in a virtual school.

…Our goal for this workshop is to share with participants both an intuitive sense and data-grounded evidence about how multi-player learning games, like those in Grockit, can help connect, motivate, and engage students who are geographically and socially isolated. The workshop will conclude with a group-wide discussion of other experiences with, and opportunities for, using game-based collaborations as a way to connect learners across the web.

Two days later, Jeramy and I again presented together, this time to discuss our work with a group of educators as part of the GLS Educator Symposium. This presentation was nominally grounded in work that I’ve published on how we go about deciding between synchronous and asynchronous interactions for the various components of Grockit’s collaborative learning activities (for more info, see the source paper and the asynchronous discussion thread on this work). The real heart of the session, however, was devoted to a series of interesting questions raised by participating educators about the real-world task of incorporating Grockit (or a system like it) into the classroom setting. Jeramy Gatza provided a very interesting perspective, responding to several questions based on his experiences using Grockit at Florida Virtual School.

While I was at the Games+Learning+Society conference, I saw/heard/participated in a number of excellent talks, tutorials, demos, and keynotes. It was exciting to see the incredible variety of ways in which researchers and educators have been incorporating games into learning and learning into games. I’m excited to bring these ideas back to Grockit, and use them as inspiration for our own internal brainstorming sessions on games and learning. Stay tuned for new announcements on this front…