1. Steffen Rendle, who identified useful features for users and questions, then used factorization machines to automatically develop a factorization model from those features.
2. Alexander d’Yakonov, who used traditional machine learning approaches to solve the challenge as a classification problem.
3. Pankaj Mishra, who blended an ensemble of results from collaborative filtering and a variety of IRT models, based on models used in the Netflix prize and the 2010 KDD cup.

We learned a number of interesting things by hosting this competition:

1. A sense of how good our existing approach was.  We posted benchmark results from the IRT algorithm at the heart of our internal prediction model.  While it didn’t win the competition (and we’d have been disappointed if it had), it was a difficult benchmark to beat — improving on it was a serious challenge for the competitors.  Before the competition, though, we didn’t really know whether we could feel confident in the strength of our model, or is there was something much better we could be doing.  Knowing that the problem has been looked at by hundreds of world-class data scientists gives us a lot of confidence that there isn’t a lot of room for improvement on the results.
2. Collaborative filtering/factorization methods for organizing and clustering our questions.  While we’ve relied on manual categorization, this is a promising way of identifying the actual knowledge areas used by each questions, so that we can get a sense for what questions actually use a common set of skills.  This should help us give students a more accurate picture of the areas they really understand and which questions they’ll actually get right.
3. Stefan’s libFM tool.  This proved to be a very powerful way of developing those factorization models.

We’re glad to have some new tools in our search for better ways to understand what people are learning and to help them learn better.  All the data (training and test) from the competition is now publicly available in the data section of the kaggle page.  We hope that it will continue to be useful for understanding student knowledge and predicting performance.

Grockit’s CEO explains how startup life is like navigating an attack submarine in Fast Company’s Fast Talk and talks about tackling big economic issues in USNews & World Report.

Catch up on all of the Grockit news right now:

San Francisco Chronicle: Hires and promotions notes that Grockit has hired Chris Henley.
Wired: The 6 Facebook Timeline Apps to Check Out First
Fast Company: Poke! You Need To Study More. What Facebook’s Open Graph Means For Online Study Groups
Onlineschools.com: The future of online social learning with Grockit

For today, the full list of Grockit activities that can be shared on your Timeline include:
● Total Questions Answered: To show off how much work you’ve done.
● Creating and joining a Study Room: So your friends can join and you can study together.
● Earning an Achievement: Showing off your accomplishments.
● Playing a Game: To show off how often you study.

We think it’s cool that Facebook is bringing various corners of the web into one place where people can share, interact, and discover a variety of content they wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to. Grockit’s app for Facebook Timeline makes it easier for you to study with your friends, and show the world the hard work you’ve put into learning.

Startup Weekend Receives $250,000 Grant from The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for EDU Events

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – November 2, 2011 – Startup Weekend, a non-profit organization, powered by the Kauffman Foundation, and Grockit, a social-learning Internet start-up, today announced that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation issued a grant in support of Startup Weekend EDU, a dedicated education (EDU) vertical within Startup Weekend that is designed to attract and assist the education community working to bring new solutions to the industry. With a grant of $250,000, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is backing educators, developers, designers, marketers, product managers, and startup enthusiasts, all of whom share a common goal – to bring new innovations to education.

“The Kauffman Foundation is excited to have the Gates Foundation support this important initiative that will help entrepreneurs with innovative education business solutions learn how to execute their ideas,” said Nick Seguin, manager of entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation. “Startup Weekend EDU builds upon the Kauffman Foundation’s interest in teaching entrepreneurs how to build successful education ventures that have the potential to be some of the next great high-growth companies of the future.”

Startup Weekends are 54-hour events where startup enthusiasts come together to share ideas, form teams, build products, and launch startups with the ultimate goal of bringing new innovations to education. October has already seen three successful Startup Weekend EDU events in Seattle, San Francisco and Washington. The first London Startup Weekend EDU event is slated for November, and the series will announce additional events around the world taking place over the next 12 months.

“Given its dedication to education reform and extensive networks in the space, the Gates Foundation is the ideal partner for us to scale the Startup Weekend EDU initiative,” said Farb Nivi, founder of Grockit.

To register for the London Startup Weekend EDU event please visit edu.startupweekend.org. To learn more about becoming a Startup Weekend organizer please visit startupweekend.org/about/event.

There’s a wealth of educational videos available online, but the primary mode of interaction among viewers — short-form commenting — doesn’t do much to enhance or facilitate learning. When you’re trying to grok a challenging lecture from an AI course at Stanford or an open talk at MIT, you need more than comments. You need a way to ask a question about a particular point that confused you, or ask for a clarification or maybe a useful reference on something mentioned in the video. You really need a Q&A site, and you need to be able to attach each of your questions to a particular time in the video. You need Grockit Answers. Here’s a quick video clip (live Q&A discussion here). Feel free to ask questions about this video on Grockit Answers.

Built on Popcorn.js, a fantastic new HTML5 media framework for better connecting web videos to web pages, Grockit Answers displays each question and its answers at the exact point in the video that they are most relevant. As a viewer, some of the things that confuse you are are likely to be the same as what confused others before you. In a time-anchored Q&A on Grockit Answers, just as the question begins to form in your mind, it may magically pop up on the screen, along with a few great answers.

For the educators out there, I’m happy to say that we developed a number of additional features with you in mind. You can create a Q&A page on a video that only you and your students have access to, and you can moderate the conversation to get additional controls and deeper insight into what’s happening. Finally, and most exciting, you can add these Q&A pages to your own course websites (example), easily replacing links to YouTube or Vimeo videos with your moderated discussions. Feel free to contact us at answers@grockit.com with any questions about this.

Start a Question & Answer page for any video on YouTube. Share it with your classroom or share it with your friends. And please, let us know what you think.

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

Today at Grockit we are proud to announce a fundamental shift in our business model, a shift that we believe is one more step in this necessary human movement towards increased access for everyone, including and especially those who are less privileged.

From today forward, Grockit will be a one-for-one business. For every Grockit account purchased, we will provide one year of free access to Grockit Academy to an under-served student. To do this we have partnered with the very organizations that work tirelessly everyday to reach and support these students. Organizations like Higher Achievement, KIPP, Level Playing Field Institute, Magic Johnson Foundation, the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, and TLABs are just some of the amazing groups that Grockit customers can direct their one-for-one purchase towards.

Our desire to create Grockit for Good was motivated by the same reason I founded Grockit in the first place.

After teaching for over a decade I was unsatisfied with the progress of education, especially in light of rapidly advancing technologies that were not reaching students. I was also unsatisfied with the high costs that limited access and scale.

With that, we started Grockit to bring adaptive, social-learning to hundreds of thousands of students all over the world and we believe that our shift to a one-for-one business model is another step forward in our mission to bring effective, engaging education to everyone. We’re calling this new model, Grockit For Good, and if you know an organization that you think would be a good partner, we want to know. Grockit has always been about social-learning, and with Grockit For Good our customers are doing even more to help the world learn.

Farb Nivi
Founder Grockit

Make sure to read all three parts at:

Excerpt from Part 2:

TLAB subsequently made the fortuitous connection with Grockit and will offer the ACT preparatory tools through individual 11th-grade student computers as well as in its dedicated area computer labs. Although the majority of TLAB’s students are Michiganians, students have also hailed from Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Ohio, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina and Louisiana.

“Grockit is one of the few providers with keen insight and a solution for educating people in the 21st Century,” said TLAB Founder Dr. Clarence Nixon, Jr. in a press release. “Grockit is leveraging the power of the web in helping students get the tools and the guidance they need to perform at exceptional levels academically and especially on standardized tests. We’re excited to be working with them in helping our students prepare, master the ACT, and do so in a way that’s more effective and more affordable than the other methods out there.”

TLAB Adopts Grockit’s Social Learning Technologies for Test Prep

Detroit-based organization to provide students with access to Grockit’s online ACT prep tools

DETROIT – August 17, 2011 – The Technology Laboratory and Professional Development Center (TLAB), a Detroit-based non-profit accelerated learning program, today announced an agreement with Grockit that will enable the organization to offer Grockit tools to students preparing for the ACT, which is a mandatory test for all 11th-grade students in Michigan. Students will be able to access Grockit’s ACT preparatory tools from their own computer or at one of TLAB’s dedicated computer labs.

“Grockit is one of the few providers with keen insight and a solution for educating people in the 21st Century. Grockit is leveraging the power of the web in helping students get the tools and the guidance they need to perform at exceptional levels academically and especially on standardized tests,” said Dr. Clarence Nixon, Jr., founder of the TLAB program. “We’re excited to be working with them in helping our students prepare academically, master the ACT, and do so in a way that’s more effective and more affordable than the other methods out there.”

With Grockit, students work online with other students and with tutors to learn key concepts, solve practice problems, and develop test-taking strategies. More than 1 million users have used Grockit to date, and the service’s highly interactive and collaborative social learning model has proven to engage students: Compared to Grockit’s average independent studier, the average Grockit group studier spends three times as much time solving problems per study session; solves more than twice as many problems per study session; and is 10 percent more likely to answer questions correctly.

“Grockit helped me connect and learn with other students my own age, and with that help I improved my score on the ACT from 18 to 30 in less than three months,” said Jayleon Davis, a TLAB student in Dearborn Heights, Mich. “Grockit makes studying fun, and it’s helping me gain confidence as I work to achieve my dream score of a perfect 36 on the ACT.”

TLAB centers use data-driven software applications and the support of experienced tutors to help accelerate learning for students ranging from kindergarten to college. Their core academic programs are ACT prep, math, reading, vocabulary, writing, language, public speaking, research and development and leadership development.

About TLAB

TLAB is a faith-based, nonprofit, accelerated learning center founded in Detroit in 2007. It is focused on creating extraordinary academic achievement, among any and all  students, to prepare them to assume leadership roles in careers as entrepreneurs, physicians, nurses, research scientists, and other professions. The majority of TLAB’s 300 students come from Michigan, but we have attracted students from Atlanta; Phoenix; Jacksonville, Florida; Ohio, Minnesota, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, and Lake Providence, Louisiana.

About Grockit

Grockit was created to improve academic achievement and extend learning outside of the classroom. By applying adaptive learning algorithms and innovative social networking and online gaming technologies, students experience a fun and engaging way to master academic skills and achieve personal best scores on standardized tests. The diagnostic, prescriptive and adaptive nature of the underlying Grockit platform ensures that each student receives a personalized learning experience, designed to help them overcome areas of academic weakness. Founded in 2007 by Farb Nivi, a former Teacher of the Year for The Princeton Review and academic director at Kaplan, Grockit is headquartered in San Francisco and has received funding from Atlas Venture, Benchmark Capital, Integral Capital Partners and prominent angel investors including Reid Hoffman (founder, LinkedIn) and Mark Pincus (founder and CEO, Zynga). For more information, please visit www.grockit.com.

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.