Whew. What a year! 2009 will be remembered by us as the year Grockit went from a basic practice tool for the GMAT to full-feature learning environment that supports many types of curriculum including GMAT, SAT, ACT, and GRE test prep. We are quite pleased with the growth in the product, customers, and team this year. There is much work left to do, we know. But let’s take a moment to celebrate our progress in 2009.
It was only February when Grockit came out of private beta and into the public with the GMAT group. With that came the launch of leaderboards. Leaderboards show off the top players and added a new layer of competitiveness within the community. Of course, students are always most interested in their own performance. With that in mind we created diagnostics which provide students an initial ability estimate. In addition to diagnostics, skill specific perfomance analytics were added to provide students with precise knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses.
Skill specific analytics opened the door for other features. We were able to add custom games and custom review sessions so that students could focus their study time on areas of most need. Games were also made adaptive to the students. This was significant because it allowed us to show the questions to students based on their ability level that would benefit them most at that time.
Tutors were also introduced to the Grockit learning environment in 2009. With this addition students are now able to study in the three ways they naturally study; alone, with peers, and experts. Tutors were a welcome addition to the Grockit community and students will have more ways to study with them in the coming months. Towards the end of the year we added more achievement badges to games. Badges are symbolic rewards for accomplishments in Grockit. Students see them as a fun way to share their activity with friends.
Such progress would not be possible without the hard work of a talented team. In fact, the Grockit team doubled in size this year and is up to 23 full-time employees. Feel free to get to know us a little better from our Facebook office photos.
By the way, did I mention that 1.7 Million questions were answered in Grockit in 2009! This activity level by our early users has been very encouraging. And we’re thrilled to help them achieve their educational goals.
Now it’s time to look to the future and we’re excited to do so. 2010 will be a big year as we release Grockit 2.0 and expand beyond test prep into K-12 curriculum. Stay tuned, the journey has just begun.
Happy New Year!
