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- Hacker News
- The focus on mastery learning via adaptive curriculum is a much-needed approach for K-12, especially since the biggest bottleneck in education is often the one-size-fits-all pace. I am curious how you plan to handle the feedback loop between the AI tutor and the student's emotional engagement with the harder subjects. I am working on something similar for adult personal growth at https://mindsolutions.ai/r/hn , where we use personality assessments to tailor the learning experience, but managing the pedagogical side for younger learners is a much more complex challenge.
- Childhood psychologists are warning about giving Ai to children, very similar to social media and generally screen time.
How does this factor into your business?
by verdverm - I just posted something pretty relevant to this in a different comment. Totally agree with the dangers. 2 important points:
1. Not all AI is the same. I see 2 MECE categories in education: AI that does all the thinking/execution for you (the outsourced brain), and AI that is designed to fulfill specific coaching/tutoring roles. If we design AI to ask great questions and find the Socratic thread with students, we can actually make students think harder and learn faster.
2. Social media is full of cheap dopamine. See my comment about 'effortful dopamine' for my perspective on this.
- I'm quite surprised by the difference in HN users' (quite positive) reaction to this product compared to quite negative reactions to Ello, posted here a few days ago. Is there a substantial difference in teaching methodology, or other factor that makes Ello unpalatable?by gurjeet
- Ello is targeted at 5 year olds whereas this is targeted at a broader range. Also the mechanisms are explained much more clearly here.by _matthew_
- One metric I would add is mastery under decreasing assistance. A student who answers correctly after three increasingly specific hints has shown something useful, but it is not the same evidence as solving a fresh version unaided. If both outcomes update the skill score equally, the personalized path can advance the student too early.
For each attempt, I would keep the skill, item variant, number and specificity of hints, revisions, elapsed time, and whether the final reasoning came from the student. Advancement could require an unaided success on a new item plus a delayed check later in the session or on another day. The tutor's own explanation should never count as evidence that the learner mastered the step it just supplied.
This also gives teachers and families a more useful explanation than a single mastery percentage. “Can solve independently, but does not retain it after a day” and “can solve with one conceptual hint” point to different next lessons. That distinction seems especially important when the chat interface is both teaching the skill and measuring it.
- Great points! Agreed on the distinctions. With enough data we should be able to identify lots of cool things about mastery.
- For education, isn't the problem we are trying to solve the one with motivation, values and emotional handling? The tools, play a part, but it is engulfed by the real problem mentioned before. How are you going to deal with it?by orsenthil
- There are many problems to solve within education! To say there’s only 1 aspect would be a massive disservice to the ~2 decades the average person spends going through a school system. Some studies estimate the average American is at a middle school reading level. That’s one problem (of many) we can aim to solve with something like Bloomy.
- When AI can handle the content, teachers get to focus on motivation, values and emotions.
I started my career as a teacher and spent > 8 hrs a day lesson planning, delivering content & grading. If I could have handed that off to a great program like Bloomy, I could have built far better relationships & my students would have been so much better off.
by 2arrs2ells - Alex, thanks for building this. I imagine it will help many children!
Couple comments on this being 'screen' oriented, which are as you say endemic in schools and terrible.
There's a fair amount of research that paper reading and handling and writing gets significantly higher retention than screen reading. Most especially physically writing notes, but generally comprehension is just higher for paper. Interestingly e-ink is in the middle between screens and paper.
VLMs offer the interesting possibility of 'looking over the shoulder' of students as they work examples and problems by hand through a camera. It's a harder lift, and it's more expensive, but it might find much higher buy-in to think about a combo book / workbook / AI tutor business model, not least because if you talk to almost any parent or teacher they will tell you that they are extremely worried about genz/alpha kids' abilities to focus, read with attention for longer periods of time or handwrite.
Many of the exercises can be evaluated through a VLM pretty much as easily as in a chat window -- more expensive inference, but possibly a much better world.
A middle ground here might be experimenting with something like a remarkable tablet - it's relatively easy to vibe code a responsive eink page right now, and you could do away with the camera side. I guess I'd think of pairing it with a phone app to talk that could hook up to the remarkable.
My pet theory on handwriting notes and why they're so much better than typing or just listening - if not in shorthand, they are too slow to capture lectures word for word, and thus force a first summarization/categorization step, meaning stuff has to literally go in to short term memory then get pulled out and processed; this just has to be better than typing in a sort of fast typing haze and trying to read them later. It's also the reason my college notebooks have things like (WTF?? <---) next to notes -- I was trying to synthesize and couldn't in the moment. In addition to all this, I understand brain scans show quite a high percentage of the brain gets involved when drawing/handwriting notes -- you have micro and macro muscle movements plus all the cognitive and visual tasks together.
At any rate, it will be a great service to learners to have a quality AI tutor, and I'd pitch you on looking seriously at e-ink or paper modalities if you want to help students learn even better and faster. The tech is SUUUPER close right now, or even could be there with a little willpower.
by vessenes - Thanks for the thoughtful comment. We’ve actually had a few school districts ask about paper workbooks, so this is already on our radar. Right now, students can move at their own pace and use a notebook alongside Bloomy, but we haven’t figured out how much paper or e-ink should be part of the product itself.
The VLM idea is especially interesting. It could let Bloomy see how a student worked through a problem, not just whether the final answer was right. We’ll definitely take a closer look at this, so I appreciate your recommendation!
- Hey first of all, Congratulations on the launch. I'm a teacher at a Dutch applied university where we use mastery learning to teach students software development, the code for our learning system is open source so feel free to take a look [1].
I personally always followed traditional schooling but programs like flip the classroom or https://www.khanacademy.org/ really helped me and I now also see the same value in my own teaching and your work so thanks for working on this.
At my program we have experimented a lot with teacher bots, AI grading, using AI to generate assignments and other forms of AI but in the end we always came back to 1on1 feedback sessions and ditched the AI to be just an optional tool. In a teacher feedback session a teacher would open the work of the student and grade the work based on how much of the objective was reached. In our experience students will find the tools to not do there homework and that is more than fine as long as they understand what they are doing. We eventually settled on 1 or 2 day exams without AI. Screen recording as proof. Where you get graded on the same objectives and can use any trick you have learned. Assignments typically take 1 day to compleet. Assignments need to be redone if a student scores less than 80%. On the exam often 55% is a passing grade.
So some of the things that pointed out to me where: 90% correct sounds really high. A lot of AI access sounds like a lot of trouble shooting to find the right amount and per student this amount may be different. We for example see that some students do better with AI and others learn less. Students may also ask AI outside of bloomy and I could not find how that is precisely handled. Lastly the course sounds very independent. Are there any group projects or assignments that can be done together. We are for example currently exploring adding tags to assignments to indicate you could pair a programming assignment or that you could pair with AI.
[1]: https://sd42.nl/
by timostrating - These are really thoughtful points. Thanks for sharing them. I'd love to check out your code.
The percentage mastery threshold on Summit may indeed be quite high, but the Summit also comes after the student has proven they are ready for the it by satisfying the BKT threshold on Climb. Still, though, it is worth testing out mastery percentage thresholds to see if lowering it makes any positive difference (e.g., maybe we are not letting students progress fast enough because the bar for quasi-perfection is so high).
On students asking AI outside of Bloomy: that is always likely to be a challenge. One way we mitigate this is by protecting the clipboard so students cannot copy/paste in or out of the platform. This is especially helpful in our Writing Studio tool, where students write long form essays (although clipboard protection is optional and can be disabled by the teacher/parent if they wish -- e.g., if the student typically drafts in Google Docs or Word and wants to easily paste).
- First of all congrats on the launch.
I worked at an edtech startup with adaptive learning platforms in previous decades. One thing that is always difficult to surmount was that at the under K12 level were:
1. B2b it was hard to land large contracts(like getting an entire public school district to jump from large publishers like HMH or Wiley) because it turned out that the teachers themselves did not care about adaptivity when they had a thousand other things to worry about. But teachers are not the ones that make the deals. It's the school district board and The reps at large publishing just said we are also adaptive and no one would care about how you differentiated. Teachers and students really aren't the lot you have to convince in a b2b deal do you :)?
2. If you want the b2c route then the customer acquisition cost was way too high because again like to get teachers and students to actually adopt this to help them was really a hard sell, especially when the public school system has teachers that are so overburdened with other stuff.
I see that you mentioned charter schools for your pilot, which are not exactly public schools but I dunno of they come with the same set of challenges, but I wonder are these above two challenges are Also something you have had to face while scaling your product?
by ghm2199 - OP this is it
Almost all the founders who have tried to go into education have come out with similar thoughts.
Schools are basically legacy companies with low nps products. It might do you better to vertically integrate as hard as that is
by JimsonYang - Congrats on the launch! I'm curious if you're familiar with ED Hirsch's work and if so how you see a "core knowledge" curriculum fitting into AI-enabled tutoring. Your landing page suggests you might be falling into traditional anti-patterns for strengthening reading skills like "finding the main idea" and "close reading" of the text (your ai tutor animation instructs a student to look closely for the answer). These patterns are commonly used in American education and have largely been discredited. They persist due to outdated learning theory taught in American educational schools and are likely responsible for our falling reading scores. I'm bringing this up because my hope is that any ed tech tool regardless of whether it uses AI would start with the right foundational theory.by rhaynes
- Article Title: Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-i...
- So, professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience. If the sample passages and questions on the front page accurately reflect what's inside this, I would not let my kids go anywhere near it.
You've chosen to use the most generic AI-generated prose, when you could have licensed or hired writers to craft thoughtful, rich passages. I doubt you've consulted any serious standardized test item writers in the construction of what is essentially a standardized test item-based curriculum. This is the pedagogical equivalent of a Lunchable--mass produced, wrapped in plastic, and basically nutrition-free.
- Thanks for engaging! Our passages are a mix of public domain passages and in-house authored material which are specced to a long list of requirements. This allows us to create passages spanning a rich variety of characteristics, including genres, contexts, settings, cultures, socioeconomic backgrounds, household family set-ups (e.g., single-parent households, grandparent-led households), etc. We also rigorously vet our content using AI evaluators from Learning Commons, which were created using a golden set of inputs from a panel of experienced educators.
I also have several years' experience writing standardized test preparatory materials. Ultimately the reading comprehension modules serve the end goal of teaching students discrete skills, which roll up into standards. Those standards are (as you point out) the main focus of standardized, summative tests.
We encourage students to read real books! We have an AI writing tool that integrates with schools' novel studies curricula to generate a wide variety of prompts so that students can engage in long form writing about the books they are reading.
- "professional educator here, with fifteen years of high school teaching experience"
You do ACT / SAT prep and tutoring, correct? Just wanted to be clear, because the description here sure makes it sound like you're a high school teacher.
by senordevnyc - 100%
This looks very poorly thought out by the site alone. The quotes are all concerning as well because all three of them have emdashes. Maybe they're paraphrased, but then those aren't the actual quotes from those educators.
Parents and teachers who are willing to put middle schoolers in front of screens more are doing our future a disservice. There are real studies (none that I can find on Bloomy) showcasing how this negatively impacts students [0]. I doubt you'll find a correlation that more screen / compute interaction at younger ages improves long term cognition as it's not how kids develop.
Beyond this every parent should run after a glance at the privacy policy and the sheer number of different backend services required to run this. This is a privacy nightmare, long-term, for kids who have no choice. School districts, and a lot of parents, don't understand any of this. I don't even see how this abides by laws in some states simply because there are no protections of model training by some of the examples provided in the privacy policy. This does not abide by our state laws requiring a provider to be able to remove student data permanently within 90 days. In fact no LLM that doesn't have a "no train" clause abides by this simple requirement and it's unfortunate that districts will get sued over using tools like this in the near future.
My advice to this is: if you want to build a tutor then target parents. When you try to shove this down the throat of every student in a district you're making a lot of assumptions and impacting many negatively long term. This may be great for disadvantaged areas, but this is not how kids need to learn. They need to learn, explore and make mistakes on their own and not be preconditioned to the easy answer.
The iPad generation of parenting is about to get a whole lot darker as more and more of these types of companies are taking shots at easy targets, like school districts, with little to no studies behind impacts.
Finally, very expensive! I ran a simple 5 student cost calculation and it's over $2000 a year for those students. And that cost does not include math which is currently not available which would be another $1400.
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
by windexh8er - I am here to tell you HELL YES and TAKE MY MONEY. I am such a fan of the idea of using AI to help give personalized and structured AI lessons in the hands of students and let them cook!
- It looks like you are gating family access to K-3 for now and I think that's right. I wouldn't really be comfortable giving my first-grader a live chatbot. Maybe I would think about whether there are other non-persona modalities that could still be self-directed (i.e. I am uncomfortable with a chatbot interface on this for a six year old but gamified flash cards with options could be different).
- I think the other issue is with motivation. I have various duct-tape versions of these types of agents and the thing about it is if you're doing the learning right it can be HARD. So I would think about using motivational interviewing or other techniques to help keep the user coming back and motivated.
- I would really think about the assessments here too. Many people are worried about LLMs ruining student evaluations, but if you could bake in reliable, flexible exams that gauge user progress (even for something like a "Did you read this" quiz) I would bet teachers would like it. There is likely so much you could do on student progress observability and e.g. structuring team-based projects or having targeted student working groups to hash out hard concepts in a targeted way, etc.
This is such an interesting market and use case too because the educational system might be very structurally set up to the current pedagogical staffing model (think about the incentives for teacher's unions and administrators). If you think it will be hard to change that system as quickly as you want I would also try to have an offering direct to families / home-schoolers. I think there is also a cottage industry of tutors that might benefit. Maybe partnering with the textbook publishers? I'm sure there are some "Teach your kids better" influencers that would get you into some feeds?
- Other thoughts:
- I think the other mistake I see here is trying to over-engineer a deterministic learner path instead of giving the AI more free reign on best next interaction and a set of goals it needs to accomplish through the session; it can feel more responsive and free-form that way from the learner's POV. - If you had voice here you could also make the screen optional. In my experience typing out long answers to questions can take a while too - so a voice mode might be helpful for learners. It would also be cool if people could take a 'photo of their work' for e.g. math equations done by hand. - To the earlier point on family end-market, an interesting idea is modeling bloomy - have some grown-up oriented courses so you can learn with / side-by-side with your child? Just an idea.
- Thanks for the support!
On motivation: we have something called Bloomy Bucks. Kids earn these for getting questions right, mastering skills, and being consistent. They can then redeem them for privileges that the teacher/school/parent sets (e.g., homework pass, game time, whatever). This is part of the effortful dopamine that I, personally, think is the right approach to motivation. A lot of people will disagree with me on this, but I think that some amount of extrinsic motivation (something we've already been doing for quite a long time with letter grades) can cultivate intrinsic motivation. One specific application of this is that students can earn up to 1 Bloomy Buck for a meaningful interaction with BloomyBot on a given question.
On assessments: imagine if we could get rid of assessments and just have live diagnosis happen all the time? With enough data from practice and mastery, that should be possible.
We have an offering for homeschoolers, indeed. Bloomy is reimbursable in ~15 states right now through ESA-type scholarships. Great ideas!