Your child's very own A.I. math-tutor

Frequently Asked Questions

1. 1. How do I get my kids set up on Grokkoli?
   Start by creating a family account with your email address. Once completed, you can add a profile for every learner. That way your family will be on a single account, and you'll be able to log your kids into the service yourself if need be.
2. 2. How will Grokkoli know what to teach my kids? Do I need to select what my kids should learn on Grokkoli?
   Grokkoli actually takes care of this for you. It quickly assesses what your child has already mastered, what skills they are currently learning, and what should come next. It does this by tracking the consistency and speed of every answer, building a complex model of how well every child has mastered the web of skills and concepts required for higher level math. And because it maps out conceptual dependencies (i.e. what the building blocks are for a given type of question), it knows in what order to teach new concepts.
3. 3. What kind of work will my kids do? Is there a weekly schedule or specific curriculum kids need to get through?
   Grokkoli moves learners along at an optimal pace for them, rather than trying to race them through the curriculum or to hold them back. When you set up learning profiles for your kids on Grokkoli, you set a target number of math-sessions per week for them (we recommend at least 3 sessions per week, and no more than 10). How much time you want your kids to spend (and how quickly you want them to progress) is entirely up to you and your family. But you can rest assured that the program will always keep them moving forward, learning what they need to in order to succeed at higher level math in the future.
4. 4. What kind of reading level do kids need in order to answer questions on Grokkoli?
   Reading isn't required to answer questions on Grokkoli ➔ only an ability to follow objects on a screen.
   
   All questions on Grokkoli are supported by a voice feature that is synchronized with light animations signaling which part of the question appearing on the screen is being read out loud. (This has the added benefit of helping learners associate hearing a math-symbol spoken out loud with its visual representation on the screen, and several parents have told us they believe Grokkoli is helping their kids get better at reading math-questions.)
5. 5. Is Grokkoli suitable for special-needs learners?
   Yes. Numerous special-needs learners are using Grokkoli to significantly accelerate their math learning, and we've even seen it work for children dealing with multiple concurrent difficulties. Almost ¾ of all learners on Grokkoli report having at least one learning-difference, and almost ½ of all learners report a combination of 2 or more learning-differences. Depending on the severity of these challenges, parents may find it beneficial to offer a bit more support to their child while using Grokkoli, especially if assistance with focus is needed. In most cases however, this level of involvement is not necessary. Learn more about how Grokkoli can be particularly beneficial for kids with special needs.
6. 6. What is required of a parent? Will I still need to teach my kids on the side?
   Grokkoli knows how to troubleshoot a learner's challenges, and knows what topic a learner is ready for, so the vast majority of learners can work with Grokkoli by themselves.
   
   Grokkoli also provides session recaps, as either a summary (that lets you know their achievements and where they've been challenged), or a detailed recap of all questions asked and answers given. Thus everything is available for a parent or teacher to quickly review a learner's progress. As such, a parent or teacher can be involved as much or as little as they want to be.
   
   That said, there are a few main things parents or teachers can do:

   • Help your kids get started on Grokkoli and continue encouraging and supporting them as they learn
   • Avoid giving them the answers to questions they get wrong (light hints are fine, but remember they are the ones that need to do the learning - and discovering the answer for themselves is key to building confidence and forming lasting memories)
   • And maybe most importantly, make time for Grokkoli in your child's busy week. As an automated tutor, it doesn't matter when that time is, or how often it changes at the last minute. But just like any endeavor, it is important to do it regularly.
7. 7. How many questions does Grokkoli have?
   The number of unique math-questions is too high to count. More importantly, it's well beyond the limits of what any person would ever answer (they'd be masters long before they ran out of questions). Math-questions are generated spontaneously from the "question blue-prints" (or "question factories") of our learning-objectives, rather than pulled from a static list. For example, "adding single-digit whole numbers" can generate the question 2 + 4 and 6 + 6 and 5 + 3 and so on, generating 81 unique questions. This jumps to 8100 for "adding double-digit whole numbers", and 808,201 for "adding positive rational numbers to 3 decimals".
   
   So it may be more useful to think in terms of learning-objectives covered by Grokkoli. At present, we have 235 learning-objectives spanning K-5.
8. 8. How do you keep kids engaged? Is this another math game?
   Grokkoli doesn't rely on heavy, sensory-stimulating gamification or any other extrinsic motivator to coax kids into doing math ➔ here's why:

   • While the science isn't fully in yet, we're concerned about near-ubiquitous gamification in education-apps overloading kids with high-dopamine experiences (and what this might be doing to kid's resiliency, perseverance, and general ability to push through challenging situations).
   • We want kids to understand and remember their math - not that they got to defeat the evil rabbit at the end of the multiplication tunnel.
   • Long term learning-recall and scholastic performance are not significantly improved by heavily gamified learning apps.
   • There's a risk of confusing edutainment for real learning when thinking about where kids are spending time. (Nothing wrong with video games so long as they are played in moderation, and heavily gamified learning apps should really count towards your kid's video game time as well.)

   Luckily, math itself can be experienced as a kind of game if kids encounter just the right amount of challenge and recognize their own legitimate progress.
   
   Great game designers will tell you this is the most important aspect of the games people love to play. Despite a simple interface with no flashing lights or gimmicks, we've had kids as young as 7 answer over 300 questions in a single day.
   
   We believe this is thanks to our:

   • Wide variety of visual question formats
     (draws the attention of learners + helps them form strong connections between the abstract math-symbols appearing in questions, and the concrete objects they can represent in the real world)
   • Frequent variation-training
     (keeps things interesting, where learners never quite know what's coming next + helps them commit what they're learning to long-term memory)
   • Speeding up & slowing down wherever needed
     (fast-forwards learners through the skills they've clearly mastered, while helping them figure out why they got a question wrong and how to get it right the next time, so that they always experience just the right amount of challenge and never become blocked)
   • Text-to-voice on all questions
     (synchronized with light animations of the elements appearing on the screen - particularly helpful for young learners & those experiencing learning-challenges such as dyslexia, dyscalculia, and ADHD)
   • Rich progress feedback
     (such as displaying the total number of correct answers a learner has accumulated in their learning-session)
   • A simple, one-question-at-a-time interface
     (reduces cognitive fatigue, and ensures learners never get discouraged by long worksheets featuring the same kind of question being repeated over and over)
9. 9. How is Grokkoli able to do all this?
   Grokkoli is powered by our proprietary AI system, and does NOT use generative AI (such as Midjourney or ChatGPT). As such, it isn't prone to "hallucinations", and it doesn't do all the thinking for the learner. Instead, Grokkoli continually assesses the most pedagogically relevant next question or learning activity for each learner given the entirety of their answer-history, emphasizing a "receptive" approach over a "generative" one.
10. 10. Does Grokkoli follow any specific educational theories?
    Grokkoli draws inspiration from a variety of educational sources, including Variation Theory, CRA (Concrete/Representational/Abstract), Mastery Learning, and even the Socratic Method, to teach math.
    
    If there's anything that might set Grokkoli's “theory” of teaching math apart from other programs, it would be its emphasis on students forming their own connections, and fully integrating what they are learning, so that their understanding of math remains unified and internally consistent (see more on why we think this is so important).
    
    But perhaps most importantly, we are constantly analyzing how well learners are understanding the math-content we present them. And we continually adjust until it works very well for a broad range of learners. For us, real teaching efficacy trumps educational theories every time.
    
    Lastly, it's worth reiterating that a far better lever, and one that consistently brings major gains in the speed and efficacy of learning, is access to dedicated 1:1 instruction (as families that can afford private tutors well know).
    
    This is the real challenge in education. Teachers know the importance of attending to students individually, so they do everything they can to provide it ➔ even just a few minutes each day can be enormously helpful for a student that's struggling. The problem is that there's simply no way one teacher can attend to every student in this way.
    
    Grokkoli can provide this to every learner, all day long.
11. 11. Why the name Grokkoli?
    It's a combination of the word "grok" (coined by American writer Robert A. Heinlein in his science fiction novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", meaning to fully understand something in its totality) and "broccoli" (a super-healthy cruciferous vegetable that's exceedingly good for you). Kids seem to love it :)
12. Still have questions? Contact us here