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Vern here. Last week there was a competition where, if a small business got a certain number of votes, they had a chance to get a “Mission Main Street Grant” for, I think, $100K, and I wanted you all to vote for EduCAD, a very laudable project of our sometime contributor J.M. Ivler. He explained to some of us at the time that what he would spend HIS award on if he got it was a PUBLICITY FIRM, to let people know about this great program that is offered free to veterans and families of veterans, and nearly for free to students and families from low-income districts.
Well, JM’s program did get the votes it needed, but I thought we should still let you know about it… if what he needs is a publicist, we can at least do our little bit. So here’s JM…
It’s summer. No more school work. But what about a student that wants to stay fresh on what they learned last year, so that they don’t lose that knowledge over summer and have to spend time in revue? Is there a tool that can help a student stay fresh? This process, in the education community is called “summer bridge” work and it is used by parents that want their kids to have a jump on the new school year. It doesn’t take lots of time to stay fresh over summer, and it’s much easier if you do a small amount of the review work every week over summer than attempting to catch up in the beginning of the school year. Well for math in high school, there is a product. It wasn’t designed for that purpose, but it can be used that way.
A Los Alamitos company released a product that was designed for SAT/ACT math help. The product was released for free to every high school student in the United States attending a public highs school for either the SAT or ACT, and 100% free for any military family that has a .mil address. The products are available at http://www.hscetp.com/ (High Schools) and http://www.milcetp.com/ (Military).
The product uses the Official SAT and ACT Practice Books practice tests to adapt a matrix of over400 Problem Types to just those Problem Types a student needs to work on based on how they did on the practice test.
In addition, coaches (tutors, parents or teachers) can create Coaching accounts, provide the student with a code, and the student can attach to the coach. The coach can then see the students work, and recommend Problem Types that the student should be working on to the student, which the student can access via a Coaching Queue.
Finally, the student can create a hotlist of Problem Types that they have worked on that they may wish to return to, so they can access and re-work the problems.
But what if the student is not preparing for the SAT or ACT math portion, can they still make use of this free too? Yes, the product can be used for summer bridge, and it doesn’t cost one penny to a student, parent or school.
The key to the product is two parts. The first part is called CETP for “College Entrance Test Prep”. This includes the scorecard system that students use with either of the official books, and the portion of the system that adapts a matrix of over 400 Problem Types to allow the student to focus on just what they need to for the standardized tests based on the practice test results.
The power in the summer bridge is that the matrix of Problem Types is broken out by math subject type by row and difficulty across the columns. The difficulty are three levels, from easy to hard. But for summer bridge the key is that subject types that make up the individual rows. Each row is broken into subject areas; pre-algebra, algebra I, algebra II, plane and coordinate geometry, trigonometry and data analysis, statistics and probability
So, a ninth grade student who just completed a year of pre-algebra can register in the application and once registered, go into the application and start working on problems from pre-algebra that are in any of the three levels of difficulty. All at no charge.
When the student selects a cell, for instance “pre-algebra/easy” they will see a list of the various Problem Types that are in this cell. The student can look and review the different Problem Types and then they can elect to run a Problem Type from this cell in something called EduCAD-ST. This is the second part of the application, and it is very powerful. EduCAD-ST is a patented web-based Socratic tutor of math. Once a Problem Type has been loaded into EduCAD-ST the application can generate hundreds of different math problems of that Problem Type. When the problem is generated the student can answer it, or they can elect to “show next step”. If the student decides to “show next step” the application will start a Socratic dialog of questions and answers with the student on the left side of the application. Once the student thinks they know the answer, they can enter the answer. If they answer correctly they will be told that they did, but if they answer incorrectly the entire Socratic dialog is exposed so they can learn how to do that Problem Type. They can then elect to run another problem of that Problem Type and go through the whole thing again with a new problem or exit the application and return to the selection window.
If a student was doing summer bridge for pre-algebra and just did one Problem Type per day, they could start using the product today and not complete all the Problem Types by the time school restarts. But they would be fully up to speed to move on to Algebra I with almost all of the pre-algebra fully reviewed during summer bridge study giving them a major jump on being fully prepared to start algebra I in the new school year.
If all this is free, there must be a catch. But there isn’t. For the military it is 100% free, and for public high school students in the US it’s about 95% free. The company, EduCAD Learning Solutions, is able to do this because they have sponsors (up to three of them per school) who sponsor the student’s access to the product so that parents, students and schools can access the product at no charge. Yes, there is an upgrade fee for those students in high schools that want to have access to both the SAT and the ACT scorecards, but access to the patented Socratic tutor is 100% free. As they said in a public grant application “Every Student Should Achieve Their Potential. hscetp.com and milcetp.com offer a free way for every student to do so in math with an adaptive patented Socratic tutor covering over 400 concepts from pre-algebra to trig and stats. All at no charge to the student, parents or schools.” The ability to use the product for summer bridge was documented in a public post to a Linkedin group to teachers.
The product has been approved for distribution in the Los Alamitos Unified High School district. It is under consideration in both the Long Beach Unified School District and the Huntington Beach Unified High School District. But the company wanted to get the product out into the hands of students as fast as it could, so during the registration process, if your school has not provided a school code for access, the company allows you to look up your High School on your own and get your high school’s school code so that the students don’t have to wait for the bureaucratic process of the school to complete before they start getting the math help they want or need.
GREAT Idea! – Have forwarded this to some ( I hope!) receptive ears to spread the word!
I wish this had been available for my daughter. She didn’t get the math instruction she needed in home school and tried to study on her own for the GED but was unable to pass the math portions and therefore never got the GED. She is doing fine now and has a nice career but an assist like this would have gone a long way to helping her I think.