Grockit has integrated with Facebook to help you ace your next exam with your friends. In the coming weeks, Grockit will make it easier for students to create online study groups within Grockit and solve problems with friends. What this means is that you’ll be able to find friends to study with, create permanent Grockit study rooms, and share your team’s progress on your Facebook profile.

We’re excited about this for a couple of reasons. First, this solves a big problem for people that use Grockit. Many people want to study with friends they interact with in other parts of their lives, and we haven’t had a great way of doing that within Grockit. Now, with our new Facebook integration, students can quickly select-and-add study partners from among their friends, even if their friends aren’t using Grockit today.

Second, this was a result of amazingly fast design and engineering work. Thanks to the fine folks at Facebook who delivered this API, we’ve been able to build something we think will be beneficial for our users in just a couple of short weeks.

The result is something that we think will make online social learning a lot easier to use. And this cross-team work matches up with our Grockit core value of Collaborteam — our made-up word to describe the transparent, selfless way we work together.

Here’s the press release from F8, the Facebook Conference.

Grockit Announces Facebook Integration to Make Studying More Social

SAN FRANCISCO – September 22, 2011 – Today at f8, Facebook’s developer conference, Grockit, a social learning company, announced a new integration with Facebook that will make it even easier for students around the world to create Grockit study groups with their friends. Now people using Grockit can quickly create “Study Rooms”, invite their Facebook friends and prepare together for college entrance examinations, such as the SAT, ACT, LSATs, GMATs, GREs, and more. Students can also track and share academic progress and milestone achievements towards their academic goals on their Facebook profiles.

“Millions of students are on Facebook, but they aren’t just socializing. They are helping each other with homework, sharing school resources, and in general hacking together a social learning experience online,” said Farbood Nivi, founder and Chief Product Officer, Grockit. “The cool thing about our new Facebook integration is that students can create, control, and access Grockit Study Rooms right from their Facebook profiles. Study Rooms include tons of content to help with studying, from practice questions, to video lessons, and even personal tutoring.”

Earlier this year, Grockit released research showing that students who study together on Grockit do twice as much work — and get answers correct more often — as students who study alone.

In addition to creating new study groups, people using Grockit can share the total number of hours spent studying, the total number of questions attempted, and their progress studying within Grockit via their Facebook profiles. People can control how their activity is shared with friends on Facebook from their Facebook privacy settings.

To learn more about Grockit’s Facebook integration, please visit: Grockit.com/social

Rusty Greiff is Grockit’s Chief Strategy and Corporate Development Officer and a resident of the greater Washington DC area.  Rusty has an extensive background in politics and education.

My 8-year old son is a LEGO junky.  He goes through three basic steps to LEGO greatness:

1) he shuts the door to his room

2) he pours the 500 pieces of LEGOs on the floor

3) he lets it rip.

Skyscrapers, spaceships, laser-rovers; massive and intricate structures are built – most of the time with his brother and best buddy next door.  Often, I will peer through the crack in the door to assess their progress.  Rarely do they know where their LEGO journey will take them, but they are comfortable in leaping ahead together, adjusting the pieces, and brainstorming until the creation is complete, often ending in a multi-player “high five”.

Last week, I played and learned with my own set of LEGOs along with some of the most talented educators in the country at the KIPP Charter School’s Annual Summit in Nashville, TN.  Every year, KIPP brings its teachers, directors, funders, experts in the field and students together to discuss best practices.  Alongside KIPP’s finest teachers, administrators and students, I led a 90-minute session, LEGOs in hand, on collaborative and social learning.  The LEGO exercise and talk was meant to help participants better understand the impact of Grockit’s adaptive and collaborative platform as it is applied to KIPP schools.  Currently, Grockit and KIPP are partnering to connect California KIPP students in peer-peer SAT/ACT test prep, with the goal of mastering test prep content and improving scores through social learning.

Not surprisingly, bringing people together (with a massive box of LEGOs) with different learning styles, specific skill sets and expertise, can create a dynamic experience that translates into some beautiful results.

By way of examples, Grace, a KIPP teacher from Washington DC preferred working in a team of 2 to build the foundation while her colleague Jennifer created a three-story roof garden to attach to Grace’s structure.  A KIPP teacher from Newark encouraged her team to strategize first, drawing elaborate plans before finding color-coordinated LEGOs to complete the building.  One AP teacher demanded of his team, “Just have fun” and attacked the LEGOs, building a killer “car-house” that of course could fly.

The LEGO exercise and session was an easy demonstration of existing academic research suggesting that by engaging learners through social games, collaborative problem solving and peer-to-peer studying, companies like Grockit are helping learners master subjects and achieve higher test scores.  Literally, this is what we do at Grockit every day for our hundreds-of-thousands of students.

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…

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!

We’re excited to announce the release of the Grockit GRE game!  The GRE game offers Grockit’s full range of learning features including analytics, custom games, and access to expert tutors.  The GRE measures verbal, quantitative, and analytical writing skills.  It is a computer-based exam designed to assess the qualification of applicants into many graduate programs including engineering, education, psychology, and even some of the top business schools now.  Jump into a GRE Game now and help welcome it to the Grockit lineup!

I’m blogging today from a plane, on my way home from the 14th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education. The conference — a biennial meeting of researchers who build and study software systems that help students learn — began with a number of sessions organized around specific topics, including a great workshop on Intelligent Educational Games. At this workshop, I introduced Grockit to an international group of scholars researching various uses of games in learning.

I spoke about how we leverage various game mechanics (think: XP, GP, badges, quests, leader-boards, etc) in order to help motivate and engage students in learning-conducive activities (such as helping each other!) One particularly interesting finding that I reported was on the effect of varying if and when students had access to Quests (a tailored, student-specific sequence of questions informed by our Item Response Theory model.) We found that students who could only access a Quest by “unlocking” it — by answering a specified number of questions during collaborative practice games — rated measurably higher with regards to several of the outcomes that we strive to maximize. (Perhaps the presence of an attainable goal to work towards served as a motivator for students to continue to engage?) More details are included in the short paper included in the workshop proceedings.

(While this is the first experimental outcome that we’ve published, it is only one of many randomized controlled experiments that we have run in our system. For the past several months, we’ve been relying on a custom-built split testing infrastructure to (near-effortlessly) run and evaluate small-scale experiments in any part of our system. The topic merits its own discussion, so I’ll save the details for a future blog entry…)

One of my favorite parts of a conference like this one is the opportunity to talk — face-to-face — with other people who are thinking deeply about similar issues in very different ways. In addition to the conversations in and around the Games workshop, I found myself caught up in discussions on a number of other key issues that we think about at Grockit: designing learning environments for out-of-school use, the promises and challenges inherent to peer collaboration, the scalability and adoption issues specific to educational software, striking a balance (or mix) between AI-assisted learning and peer-assisted learning, and how to use the learning data collected about students today to improve our systems for students tomorrow (both figuratively and literally.)

It’s been a full week and I’ll be happy to get off the plane. But it’s satisfying to know that on Monday morning, I have a notebook to open that is now filled with new insights and ideas about how we can better foster learning among our Grockiteers.

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!

In answering these frequently-asked questions, I’ll aim to share a few of the ideas behind the learning platform that we’re building.

Experience Points (XP) and Grockit Points (GP) are two different types of rewards available in Grockit games. Try playing for a little while, and you’re likely to earn some of each. A cursory explanation is that XP is awarded by the system based on your response accuracy, while GP is awarded by your peers when they find that you’ve been particularly helpful.¹ The idea here is to reward players both for learning and for teaching. In motivating collaborative learning among peers, our two reward systems were designed to play complementary roles.

What I find particularly interesting about the XP and GP metrics are the way in which they reflect our two-part approach to facilitating learning: Grockit is peer-powered and data-driven.

The value of collaborating with others cannot be under-estimated. In an upcoming blog post, I’ll discuss in more detail research on the beneficial effects of well-structured peer collaborations on learning. For now, I’ll just mention a few aspects of peer-powered learning that we’d be hard-pressed to replicate with a purely data-driven approach: Your Grockit peers can provide encouragement and moral support, they can offer immediate feedback to your various questions, and they share your interest in a common learning goal. Grockit collaborations often span the globe, giving you the opportunity to learn and incorporate different problem-solving techniques and approaches. Please feel free to share in a comment your own experience with peer-powered learning in Grockit.

While the GP system reflects our valuing the power of learning with peers, the XP system reflects our value for data-driven approaches towards understanding and improving systems. Experience points are awarded for performance, and takes into account both response accuracy and problem difficulty. We’re using Item Response Theory to distill our growing database of information down to a probabilistic model of response accuracy for each Grockit question. Our first step towards incorporating this into the learning experience is in determining the XP value of each question based on the parameters of the Item Response Theory model that we’ve constructed based on single-player game response data. We’re looking forward to introducing several interesting new features based on the IRT modeling work in the upcoming months. Subscribe to this blog to guarantee that you’ll catch our upcoming announcements…

These are a few of the ways that the scoring systems in Grockit give a glimpse of the bigger picture here at Grockit, where we believe that a learning environment can be both data-driven and peer-powered.

Kare Anderson’s blog, Say It Better, featured us in a post about attracting employees.

Massively, a news site that covers the MMO market, gave us a short write up.

SeedWatcher, a blog about early stage start-ups by one of our angel investors, interviewed  me in connection with our latest financing.

Here is some food for thought.

1. Let’s go to our standby, Russell Ackoff. Thoughts?

Ackoff’s take on learning from computers is that it’s sort of insulting to the student. The idea that you don’t deserve to learn from another person and instead should learn from a semi-animate object seems unlikely to be a solution to education’s problems. But then again, maybe students have given up on class and are more available to their gaming consoles than their teachers.

2. A large number of the millions that take the SAT can’t afford a Nintendo DS. This only serves to further solidify the one consistent correlation in the SAT market. The more money your family makes, the better you do on the SAT.

We’ll see how many students buy the game and what they get out of it. My guess is that it has more to do with getting in on the Brain Age money than applying relevant solutions to the massive problems in education and the social inequity existing in the test prep space. But, what would you expect from an educational company?