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Posts Tagged research

Machine Learning for Student Achievement

By posted November 29, 2011

We at Grockit have just posted a new educational machine learning competition focused on analyzing student performance: http://www.kaggle.com/c/WhatDoYouKnow. The competition is hosted on Kaggle, which has rapidly become an excellent site for hosting data mining and forecasting competitions.  Our sponsored competition revolves around analyzing students’ past study habits and predicting whether they can correctly answer future practice questions.  Like Netflix did for movies, we’re trying to improve on education industry standards for adaptive learning algorithms.

I’m very excited that we’re reaching out to the machine learning community, because I’m tremendously excited about the potential for technology to change education. I think leveraging the data we can collect is a huge part of that. I honestly believe that by improving assessment, we can improve the way people learn. By knowing what areas you’re strong and weak in, you can better know when you’re at a suitable level and how to direct your future studying. We want to be able to help students direct their studying — and eventually, improve student testing itself. There’s a lot more to knowing your level than simply what questions you got right or wrong, and we want to take advantage of that as much as possible.

This is a manifestation of the Grockit value of putting the learner first. We’re doing this purely to try and improve the way we help students study. We’re putting our money where are mouth is, too, with cash prizes will also be awarded to the top three finishers. The competition runs through February. Details on the data set, the prizes, and the competition are all available at:

http://www.kaggle.com/c/WhatDoYouKnow

Thanks for reading, and we hope you check it out!

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Announcing Grockit's Summer 2009 Graduate Research Internship

By posted March 2, 2009

Update (3 Feb 2010): Our 2010 internship program has been posted.

Grockit from above I’m happy to announce that Grockit is offering a paid summer internship for a doctoral student pursuing research in an area related to our own. We’ve just posted details about this program (and the application form) on the 2009 Summer Research Internship page on our blog. I wanted to share a few thoughts on why we’re offering this, what we have in mind for the program, and why you (or perhaps someone you know) should consider applying.

Grockit, as you may know, is a San Francisco-based web startup building a platform for — and a community around — live collaborative learning games. We strive to provide our growing global network of learners with a smart platform informed by educational research, peer assistance, and data analysis. Towards this end, we’re constantly exploring ways to better support collaborative learning online, and we’re frequently examining and applying techniques for analyzing the learning data that we’ve been collecting. One reason that we’re offering this program is to expand on the ways in which we pursue these goals.

Two of the challenges in studying computational systems for peer learning — both of which I faced in completing my own graduate research — is that these systems can take quite some time to build, and it can often take even longer to cultivate a sufficiently large community of participating learners. As a result, the time required to get from hypothesis to data analysis can be (or at least can feel) quite long. At Grockit, we’ve been making good progress with regards to both challenges, and hope that this internship will provide an enterprising graduate student with the opportunity to speed up this process for their own research questions.

For hypotheses that can be tested within our existing system, experiments can be set up easily, and analysis can begin quickly. For hypotheses that require additional application features or data collection facilities, the intern would have the opportunity to pair with Grockit developers (as part of our agile development process) to code and test the necessary changes. Ideally, the ten-week duration of the internship will offer enough time to do a bit of both types of studies. At the end of the summer, the completed work will be presented to the team. Depending on the nature of the projects, jointly-authored publications may follow.

In addition to the research opportunity, we’re offering a stipend for the program. Several other perks are included: accommodations are provided in one of our nice lofts in the Mission, breakfast and lunch is provided on weekdays, and San Francisco is a fun spot to spend a summer. So if you are a doctoral student attending or publishing at conferences like AIED, CSCL, or EDM and interested in a summer research position with us, I encourage you to apply today.

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