Epiphanie AI Tutoring

As a tutor with more than 35 years of experience both as a volunteer and professional tutor for math and science, I've seen patterns in the types of mistakes my students make. In most cases, the further along students get, the larger the proportion of mistakes that are with foundational material. Students are often unaware of what problems they're having trouble with - or even what problems they struggled with yesterday!

The cumulative effect of these little mistakes is tremendous. When a student gets an advanced math, chemistry, or physics problem wrong, they rarely wonder if they made a distribution mistake, or an exponent error, or a multiplied 2×4=6. But everybody does it - we're not computers. Every student has their blind spot, and those topics where they did "okay", but still make mistakes sometimes.

Epiphanie helps students learn to catch those mistakes while they're doing their homework, and keeps track of what types of mistakes they make so they can get additional help from teachers, tutors, and other members of their learning community. Rather than throwing up their hands in the belief that they're "just not good at math", they can easily see that they *can* do it - that the mistakes they're making are in material that's within their grasp.

Epiphanie is designed to work on any math problem from any source, using the student's preferred techniques to solve the problem. We provide feedback along the way with little hints while they're doing the work, without solving the problem for them. Our goal is to help students build confidence in their ability to solve advanced problems through their successes. Epiphanie does this by encouraging and supporting students in real time.

Here are a few things our students are saying:
  - "8/10 - I think that there has been a lot of progress made, and as more errors are fixed in the coding and the website continues to advance, it will become a great tool that students will be able to use.”

  -“What I liked most was that “I was able to flag questions for review, and also redo problems if I wanted to.”

  -“[It was useful] having my work saved so I could review it later.”

  -“This website is an amazing tool for when I was studying for my final. It helped me solidify many basic concepts which allowed me to learn more in depth content because I was no longer confused on miniscule errors.”

You can also see a brief demo of Epiphanie here. We have many other demos on our YouTube channel, but most of them are about a year old now - I'm in the process of re-recording them and updating them with our latest capabilities; please check the channel for those new demos soon!

Epiphanie AI Math Tutoring Demo:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_sbrDgpxxo

Getting Started with Epiphanie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kFGgf-DokY

Epiphanie YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@epiphanieAItutoring

Underprivileged and disadvantaged learners often face the greatest challenges keeping up with STEM material. The tutors, parental help, and individualized assistance available to students in more affluent communities develop into an ever-increasing gap in the skills they need to succeed in the modern workplace.

That's where Epiphanie comes in. Epiphanie can help students when they might not have someone there to help them personally - and give the people in their learning community the information they need to help more quickly and efficiently when they do have time.

Priority learners often have foundational challenges that they need to overcome to be successful. Epiphanie will help identify those in a way that these students would otherwise not have accecss to. Teachers don't have time for in the course of regular teaching; parents might not be able to help; and personal tutors are often out of reach for these students.

We also intend to provide 10% of our licesnses to underprivileged and disadvantaged communities at no charge as part of our commitment to helping raise everyone up with Epiphanie's learning technology. This is a multi-faceted issue - use of Epiphanie requires computer or similar technology access, and that is not always available for these students. We hope to partner with other programs that can provide computer and tablet accesss to these students and in these school districts to enable access to Epiphanie.

There's one more topic I want to mention here - Epiphanie is designed to help with more advanced math, from pre-Algebra through Calculus. Within this Challenge, that would include older students in 7th and 8th grade. Our hope is that you'll find this solution compelling for those students - but we also hope you might recognize the value of Epiphanie beyond 8th grade, especialyl for priority learners as they move along to high school, while still facing foundational challenges. If there is a similar challenge that extends to those students, or if you're able to consider the value of this solution to students who are a little bit older too, we welcome that consideration!

I founded Epiphanie based on 35+ years of tutoring and 30 years in technology software and automation systems, including experience with AI systems and machine learning. I want to bring the learning experience that I've been able to provide to my students to a broader audience using the software automation techniques I've learned over my career.

My degree is in computer engineering and physics from Princeton - I moved quickly from engineering to customer-facing roles working with people. All the while, I've been a tutor either as a volunteer or for pay. About eight years ago, I started looking to step away from my technology career and focused more on tutoring, eventually having that as my primary employment and source of income.

I've had hundreds of students and dozens of success stories over the years - students who have gone from Ds and Fs to As and Bs in advanced technical classes ... and those who haven't. I've learned what students need to really learn the material when they're struggling.

In addition to me, I have a leadership team that includes a seasoned superintendent of schools with experience developing and implementing new programs across school districts, and a technology executive with experience in creating software automation solutions. I've led our remote consulting in developing the site and product using my engineering experience with their team.

The combination of my personal experience tutoring, our software automation and AI experience, and our team's education background makes a powerful combination to help get the right feedback and enable Epiphanie to make a difference for students, teachers, and education systems. It's an opportunity to change the way educators think about advanced STEM learning - from a siloed, individualistic approach to a learning community where information is shared to benefit everyone involved.

Epiphanie's initial solution is available and has been used for classwork by more than 20 students and 6 teachers. It's released for Algebra 1, and available in beta test for more advanced math subjects. We've engaged with educators and students both one-on-one and in focus groups to gather feedback about the use model and potential for Epiphanie. 

See our student feedback below!

We have current users in California and New Jersey. We are engaged in teacher discussions with teachers and school districts in California, New Jersey, Texas, and overseas.

Rather than using static material and telling students how to solve problems, Epiphanie is designed to ask questions. We ask students how they appropached a problem to gain insight and provide them better feedback on where they're making mistakes. We ask questions to help them see where they've made mistakes rather than pointing it out and showing them the right way - this steals the opportunity for them to figure it out themselves!

Epiphanie uses a combination of AI techniques, math handwriting recognition, intelligent system design, and math engine analysis to help students see where they're making mistakes and appropriately share that information with their learning community - teachers, tutors, and others who help them learn.

We envision students, teachers, and tutors working together to learn math. Epiphanie helps them understand where they have personal blind spots or foundational issues that they need to work on, either as individuals or entire classrooms or organizations. Imagine if a teacher could walk into class in the morning knowing which homework problems the students had the most trouble with - and which foundational issues were also tripping them up! It could transform the planning and effectiveness of classroom activity.

That's exactly what we're aiming for!

Epiphanie's solutions is a combined AI and expert system that takes advantage of decades of of professional teaching and tutoring knowledge and expertise to help students in real time. The site is based on a Django / Python platform including a variety of other standard web frameworks and technologies. We're integrated with math handwriting recognition, a web / tablet / mobile GUI interface for entering math, and ChatGPT to assist our existing math engine in providing advice once we've assessed the accuracy of the student's math and the nature of their mistake.

Under the hood, Epiphanie uses a math engine called SymPy to determine the accuracy of all student work. This is an essential differenetiator for us - recent news has highlighted the issues that ChatGPT has had in maintaining accuracy in math problems. Modern AI systems are excellent at communication and extracting information from written text, but they are not designed to maintain or understand abstract truth. That's where our math engine comes in - we confirm the accuracy of the students work and use AI to help communicate that with the student, collaborate with teachers and tutors, and optimize students' legitimately-based confidence in their math work. We also track and capture the types of mistakes they're making for future review and human assistance.

One of Epiphanie's strengths is that it's able to work even if we can't figure out the answer. We're designed to handle all math at all levels, but that means that there will be some math problems that we can't handle. Our system is designed to handle the result "we don't know" (or "we don't know yet") if the student is doing the problem correctly.

The overall result is a system where students can do all their math homework and get real-time feedback on where they're making mistakes, along with tracking to allow teachers, tutors, and learning community members to provide additional feedback at a later time.

We have a working system using Django/Python and a variety of supporting technologies. We're excited about the next steps - you can try it yourself at www.epiphanie.com with a free trial, try a limited version of our capabilities on this advertisement page, or watch demo videos on our youtube channel.

The potential for biases to work their way into AI systems is a serious problem. Our first line of defense against this is the fact that our system is based on a math engine to define mathematical correctness. We believe this is essential for any analytic STEM solution that uses AI. 

But the fact that our subject matter is analytic does not prevent us from the impact of bias! Student language barriers show up in different ways, and we need to be conscious of this. Many advanced math issues are caused by a misunderstanding of the definitions of words and phrases - often overlooked by middle school and other math teachers. Benign phrases or descriptions like "increased by 10%" or "garage" may not be understood the same way, even by all English speakers. We'll need to remain diligent both with our advice and in how we analyze material from various sources.

The fact that Epiphanie is designed to work WITH teachers and tutors also helps us remain attuned to any cultural or group-specific issues that may come up. Collaboration among and between members of different groups is essential to avoiding and overcoming these barriers, along with regular checks and feedback to keep an eye out for biases.

In addition to my full-time work as founder of Epiphanie, we have two part-time workers (for various administrative and support functions) and 7 consultants as part of a team of developers.

We are currently seeking pilot classroms for the summer of 2024 and SY24-25, and are engaged with several teachers in discussions about free or paid access to Epiphanie.

We know that we need to make improvements, and that some of our near-term use model may involved some behind the scenes manual activity to ensure student success. We have students actively using Epiphanie - here are some of the comments they've shared:

Here are a few things our students are saying:   - "8/10 - I think that there has been a lot of progress made, and as more errors are fixed in the coding and the website continues to advance, it will become a great tool that students will be able to use.”

  -“What I liked most was that “I was able to flag questions for review, and also redo problems if I wanted to.”

  -“[It was useful] having my work saved so I could review it later.”

  -“This website is an amazing tool for when I was studying for my final. It helped me solidify many basic concepts which allowed me to learn more in depth content because I was no longer confused on miniscule errors.”

We intend to provide 10% of our licesnses to underprivileged and disadvantaged communities at no charge as part of our commitment to helping raise everyone up with Epiphanie's learning technology.

This is a multi-faceted issue - use of Epiphanie requires computer access, and that is not always available for these students. We hope to partner with other programs that can provide computer and tablet accesss to these students and in these school districts to enable access to Epiphanie.

There are three main barriers we hope we can overcome with the funds and resources from this challenge:

1) We need specialized resources to assist in integrating our AI advice algorithms with the Open Source math engine we're using. A large portion of our advice is not integraded yet due to technical issues in connecting these pieces and limitations of the existing open source (or of our understanding of it). We also want to arrange for some UI improvements too.

2) Additional resources to connect with schools and teacher communities. More is always better!

3) Partners to work with in addressing underprivileged learning communities, including groups that can ensure access to computer technology for those who need it.