community

Grockit Questions Are Tailored for You!

jake becker January 7, 2010

Here at Grockit, our philosophy is that students learn best when challenged with problems of appropriate difficulty. Each student has a unique toolkit of complex reasoning, quantitative and English language skills, and Grockit’s analytical software provides that student with feedback on their performance, their progress, and their strengths and weaknesses. This feedback enables Grockit students to tailor their practice and allocate their study time more efficiently.

Grockit’s ever-growing bank of unique questions has been written and reviewed by expert instructors and seasoned content writers. We design our questions using College Board, ACT, GMAC® and ETS® released questions from previous exams, along with other specially-selected resources. This allows us to best model actual questions that you will see on your test day. Each question is characterized by its difficulty level and the specific skills that it tests, and we use that information to provide you with fine-grained feedback on your performance and learning. When combined with the data that we’ve collected from your recent performance, this meta-data helps us provide Challenges custom-built for you.

50th and 90th Percentile students alike will benefit from Grockit’s algorithms and incremental learning platform. We aim to challenge you with test-true practice questions to help prepare you for your test day. Good luck with your studies!

Grockit 2009 Year in Review

brian buser January 1, 2010

2009

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!

Happy 1,000,000th!

brian buser November 3, 2009

cake_1000000 This past week we celebrated the 1,000,000th time a question has been answered in Grockit. Sarah from Baltimore who is studying for the SAT was our lucky number one million. She says her favorite part about Grockit is that she gets to study with other people. We would like to take this occasion to thank Sarah and all Grockit students for helping us reach this milestone. Our celebration quickly turned into friendly wagering on how soon we’ll hit the next million and beyond. We look forward to adding more zeros to the cake!

The Final SAT Of The School Year

farbood nivi June 5, 2009

Tomorrow is the last SAT for this school year. The next administration will be in October. We want to wish all our SAT members the best of luck and encourage them to keep on practicing!

Check out this snap-shot of live SAT games

New Top Players List

farbood nivi April 1, 2009

picture-61

We have updated our GMAT top players list to calculate the list on a weekly basis. Until now, the top players list has been calculated over all time. This led to a list that was very static and difficult for a player to get on. By switching to a list calculated over the past 7 days there is much more opportunity for a player to make the list and it also shows a fresher picture of who is working a lot on a particular test within a more relevant time frame. We may add the top players over all time list back as an additional view. Now go get working on your GMAT and get on that list!

Official Grockit Holiday

michael buffington January 16, 2009

On my way to Grockit this morning I had a conversation with my daughter that I’ll cherish forever. As I walked the opportunity to teach my daughter about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was primed. I mentioned that the approaching Monday is an official Grockit holiday, intending to segue into questions that would ultimately lead me into being able to build up to the significant reason for the holiday.

Before I could start, however, she launched into a detailed recount of the life of Dr. King and what he fought for, and took great pains to explain “he didn’t have a dream, he gave us a dream. Not like when I have a dream about toads and dancing, but a dream for us that we made come true.”

She really means it. My daughter is six years old, and is half way through her first year of kindergarten at a public school in San Francisco, in a Spanish language immersion program to boot. She’s speaking Spanish 90% of her time in class. Her classroom is a perfect example of cultural diversity. She’s one of two people in a class of 20+ who in her own words (spoken with intense excitement) “has pink skin and blue eyes! Everyone else has every color skin and eyes you can imagine!”

Being taught by my six year old daughter about civil rights, equality, and the benefits of cultural diversity is more than enough to make my heart burst with pride and admiration. The answer to my question of “where did you learn about this?” is what pushed me over the edge into total stupefied gratitude.

“From my teacher, Mrs. Strong, silly. And she was crying when she told us, and I knew it was a good cry.”

People like Mrs. Strong inspire me. They strengthen my resolve to see Grockit succeed. Grockit increases the ability for people like Mrs. Strong to improve the lives of others (as well as their own). When I think about that potential I get the chills, and hope that I have the emotional capacity to fathom the impact of that improvement.

People, not users

michael buffington January 15, 2009

It’s almost shocking to admit that I’ve been creating web applications for people for close to twenty years now. That’s not to suggest that I don’t love it – I always have. There are a lot of reasons to love building web apps, but the one I love the most is the impact that the things I build have on the people who end up using them.

During those nearly twenty years I’ve been careful to write and speak sentences similar to the one that ends the previous paragraph. Does it standout as carefully written to you? If you’re a software developer you might think it’s a wordy way of just saying a word that I find, frankly, ugly: users.

I think it’s ugly because it totally disconnects the living, breathing, emotional, and real human being sitting in front of your application and turns them into some sort of component in a system. It changes how you design things, how you prioritize features, and how you predict the adoption (or rejection) of both. You need to remember the eccentricities of human behavior, emotions, and rationale (or lack thereof) if you want to make applications for people. It’s ugly because it’s a low resolution word that is used when really high resolution words are required in order to properly think about the problems you’re trying to solve.

Consider the studies done that suggest that people who speak a language that doesn’t have two words for two slightly different colors consider the colors to be identical. For example, in the English language, we have names for the somewhat similar colors magenta, fucsia, and pink – if we didn’t have the word fucsia, there’s a high likelihood that we’d call a swatch of fucsia pink or magenta.

It’s easier to say ‘user’ than it is to say ’someone who is studying for their GMAT test’, and I’m not always as diligent in avoiding the word as I’d like to be, but I catch myself often because I know there’s a difference between ‘an affluent liberal arts undergrad student’ and ‘returning to school after 20 years of putting off their MBA student’. Both are ‘users’, and both students, but their motivations and expectations are likely different enough to warrant consideration. If I do say ‘user’, it’s not without having first put in the effort to think a user as a person.

The rewards of being able to think clearly about the problems and desires of the people you’re creating solutions for far outweigh the extra bit of cognitive effort required to avoid the easy path.

Techcrunch50 2008: Final Thoughts

farbood nivi September 13, 2008

Well, it’s been a few days since TC50 wrapped up and it was quite a ride for Grockit. We placed in the Top 6, winning a Jury Selection honor.

We wanted to share a bit about the experience, and event, from our perspective.

How TC50 Affected Grockit

We didn’t anticipate this, but the deadline and goal of working towards the TC50 demo had a powerful affect on us as an organization. Setting a goal and deadline around sharing what we’ve been up to actually did a lot to the product, beyond just motivating a presentation of it.

The deadline forced us to continue to think about our product in critical ways that helped us tweak, add, and remove features. On paper, it may sound strange that a conference deadline would affect your decisions about your product, but given that after each choice we felt better and more internally satisfied by our decisions, we are excited about the calls we made.

Dealing With The TC50 Team

While we are, of course, super excited to have been chosen as a Jury Selection honoree, this is even more special given that we were all but disqualified from Techcrunch50 about four days before the conference started. We were unable to make either of our scheduled rehearsals and this resulted, understandably, in an unhappy TC50 organizer. After a phone conversation that I highly recommend future presenters do their absolute best to avoid having to have, we were given the opportunity to rehearse our demo the Friday before the event. We managed to get back into the good graces of the TC50 team.

The Event

Techcrunch started as a tech blog, they added things like Crunchbase, a conference (with Calacanis), and now even a Tablet PC. This is a great start-up energy and it permeates the TC50 event. The event is low on pomp and, instead, all about the people. Everyone treated us with serious regard and concern. Dan Kimmerling, especially, made us feel like we were the only presenters there.

We could probably have done without so many F-bombs over the mic though. It’s one thing when a presenter’s demo goes awry and one slips out, but Calacanis and Arrington make Al Pacino sound like your kindergarten teacher. That said, I laughed pretty hard. On a side note, and as a foodie, I was actually pretty impressed by the VIP event food.

The Aftermath

Well, firstly, we saw about a 50x increase in traffic to our homepage and an equal increase in Beta requests. Our marketing director, Borat, had this to say “Niiiiice! High five!” But, more importantly, the feeling around the office was really the best part. We were pumped after our presentation Wednesday morning, and this was hours before the winners were announced. The feeling of group accomplishment and a greater transparency with the public were really worth the hard work. Being honored by a Jury Selection winner made a great feeling even greater. We’ve also had a lot of folks reach out to us with great encouragement and support for what we are developing, some requests for interviews and more than a few blog posts and articles around the web.

Final Thought

Hopefully we’ll have something cool to launch at next year’s Techcrunch50. Hopefully they’ll have us!

Grockit Wins Jury Selection Award At Techcrunch50

farbood nivi September 11, 2008

Michael driving Grockit demo at Techcrunch 50

We are super excited to announce that we were honored as one of Jury Selection winners at the Techcrunch50 conference today. The company Yammer took the top prize and Atmosphir, FitBit, Goodguide, and Swype were also Jury Selection winners.

Congrats, as well, to all the companies presenting at the conference.

We’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting ready for this event and it’s great to see that it connected with foiks judging the event as well as some of the press.

On a personal note, I want to commend the entire Grockit team for their unbelievable commitment and efforts.

Stay tuned for more from us….

Here is our presentation if you missed it!

Grockit at Techcrunch50

farbood nivi September 10, 2008

Today, we are excited to be showing the world some of what we’ve been working on at Grockit!

We are presenting at the Techcrunch50 Conference.

You can watch it live.

Thanks to the Techcrunch50 team and best of luck to all the Finalists!

community

Grockit Questions Are Tailored for You!

Grockit 2009 Year in Review

Happy 1,000,000th!

The Final SAT Of The School Year

New Top Players List

Official Grockit Holiday

People, not users

Techcrunch50 2008: Final Thoughts

Grockit Wins Jury Selection Award At Techcrunch50

Grockit at Techcrunch50

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