CoTeach

Our solution is Zoe, a world-class teacher in your pocket. Zoe is every student's AI co-teacher currently specializing in math. Students engage with Zoe via our CoTeach web app, currently in the form of tutoring sessions with Zoe anytime, anywhere, on their phone, tablet, or computer.

Here’s how it works: Students start a session with Zoe by: (1) sending a picture of their math problem; (2) simply asking Zoe for help with a concept or; (3) or doing drills with Zoe. 

How Zoe helps:
(1) & (2) Tutoring session for specific math problems and help with concepts:
During the session Zoe breaks down math problems step by step at the student's grade-level and state-level curriculum, guiding them through the solution - without revealing the answer. Zoe leverage's socratic method and active listening to engage the student's critical thinking to help them arrive to the solution.

(3) Drills: 
Zoe generates practice problems at the students grade-level and state level curriculum, typically generating practice problems that are similar to what the student has been assigned from their teacher at school. For example, if a student is learning a new topic like circumference and isn't feeling very confident in the topic despite completing some of their homework questions with Zoe, Zoe will generate a set of similar circumference math problems that the student can review with Zoe hand-in-hand. Through the process of doing these drills, the student can recognize errors that they're making as Zoe points them out, and even ask Zoe for some harder problems if they want to challenge themselves.

Our AI math co-teacher solution, Zoe, will create an immense positive impact on students in Grades 5 to 8, their parents and their teachers, aligning closely with the mission of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to ensure all students receive the math education they deserve. A quote from Carrie, middle-school science teacher, and the grandmother of students in 5th and 6th grade participating in our limited pilot release: "when this hits the market, I'll be out there waving my flag, telling schools to purchase it because our kids need it and because the teachers don't have the time, the individual one-on-one time. And unlike other programs, It's not just a rinse and repeat."

For underserved learners, Zoe offers personalized math tutoring, acting as a co-teacher to students, catering to the students individual misconceptions and gaps in understanding - specifically when applying their understanding in new math concepts. This tailored approach addresses the barriers these students face, such as lack of parental support, oversized classes, and math anxiety, fostering a supportive learning environment where students feel confident and engaged.

Through Zoe's guidance, students participating in our pilot have experienced a 36% improvement in math test scores, demonstrating tangible progress in their mathematical abilities. And what's even more wonderful, is that their confidence visibly improves. This improvement is particularly significant for neurodivergent students, who struggle in traditional classroom settings but thrive with personalized support.

CoTeach's solution also addresses the broader challenges facing K-12 education, including teacher shortages and access to high-quality math instruction. By supplementing classroom learning with Zoe's tutoring sessions, schools can provide consistent support to students, even in the face of workforce shortages and oversized classes.

Moreover, Zoe democratizes access to high-quality math tutoring, offering an affordable alternative to traditional private tutoring. For families who can afford it, they pay up to $9,000 / year for private tuition. Only 2% of families in the U.S. can afford access to such high quality math tutors (Rapaport & Silver, 2023). This accessibility is crucial for students from low-income families who don't have access, ensuring that all students have the opportunity to excel in math regardless of their economic background.

With Zoe as a companion in the math classroom, students can develop the skills, confidence, and agency needed to thrive academically and pursue their aspirations in the workforce.

In partnership with the foundation's initiatives to improve K-12 teaching and learning, CoTeach is committed to bridging the gap in math proficiency and creating a more equitable and inclusive education system where every student has the opportunity to succeed. Through personalized tutoring, innovative technology, and a focus on student empowerment. 

Our team is uniquely positioned to deliver the educational AI solution, Zoe, due to our deep personal connections to the issues it aims to address and our direct experience with being part of underserved communities.

Both my cofounder Rachiket and I come from small towns in Thailand and India, respectively, placing us in close proximity to the challenges faced by students in similar under-resourced communities. This inspires our commitment to transformative education through technology.

For instance, my parents' own struggles with education led them to create a homeschool because the quality of local public schools and their teachers was not acceptable to them. They sacrificed everything to ensure I could finish my education at a private school and attend university abroad. Similarly, my cofounder Rachiket realized the extent of educational disparities upon moving to Singapore after being among the top 0.02% of students in India to receive a full scholarship to study in Singapore. Our firsthand experiences with educational disparity inform our understanding of the need that Zoe aims to address. Our families made significant sacrifices to provide us with opportunities enabled by high-quality education, so we could succeed in life. Our mission is to extend these opportunities to future generations.

Our development process for Zoe has been deeply collaborative, guided by continuous input, ideas, and feedback from teachers, students, and parents across the U.S. This has allowed us to tailor Zoe not just as a tool, but as a dynamic co-teacher that addresses specific needs such as simplifying complex math problems and reinforcing learning through practice.

Moreover, our prior work automating teacher workflows and enhancing their capacity with AI provides us with unique insights into the educational sector, the day-to-day challenges of teachers and the importance of their roles in students lives and in society. This experience ensures that Zoe is not just another educational tool or an AI that threatens the role of teachers, but a well-integrated solution that enhances teaching methodologies and extends the reach of the high-quality education from the amazing teachers we had the chance to learn from at some point in our lives.

In summary, our team’s deep-connection to our target communities and our strategic use of technology based on real-world feedback make us the right people to bring Zoe to life, ensuring it is both impactful and accessible.

Our AI and web-application interface are fully functional and are being actively used and tested in a real-world environment with more than 10+ users/direct beneficiaries.

We have a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 90 from students and parents, demonstrating high satisfaction and product endorsement during the pilot. This score is a considerable increase from our initial NPS of 50 at the start of the beta testing phase in Q1 2024, indicative of our product's success in terms of growing satisfaction and user acceptance with each version we've released over time. 

North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Idaho, Florida, Arizona and California. 

Our solution is pioneering, as we collaborate with top-tier math teachers to decode and replicate their effective teaching methods using advanced AI techniques. Through this innovative approach we distill and automate key educational tasks leveraging AI agents. By focusing on human-centric design Zoe embodies the nurturing qualities of excellent teachers—active listening, critical thinking, positive reinforcement, and encouragement.

We’re working on delivering a more mathematically and logically accurate AI combined with developing the EQ of a teacher, addressing the gaps presented by existing solutions in the market. When compared with existing math solving apps or adaptive testing software currently available online, a number of challenges emerge from the status quo solutions: (1) math accuracy (2) just giving the answer to students as opposed to tutoring (3) give one-size fits all solution explanations for questions answered incorrectly and (4) discouraging when students get stuck with one-way content/information. 

This is how we're addressing all 5 points: 
1) Proprietary infrastructure leveraging state of the art research in improving math accuracy when using LLMs 
2) Proprietary flow emulating a real teacher's process when tutoring 
3) Explanations based on the student's level of understanding generated in real-time that students can prompt and interact with if they need more help
4) Encouraging and nurturing, inspiring a student's math confidence even when they make mistakes or errors. 

Our solution will change the landscape of private tutoring as it will make high-quality private tutoring both affordable and widely accessible, expanding the market significantly. Today, only about 2% of families can afford such services; what if 100% of students could get affordable high quality tutoring that's in sync with their classroom. 

We leverage LLMs and AI Agents: 

- the LLMs we use are third-party; 

- the AI agents perform automated tasks and assist in decision-making processes. The agents interact with both the system and the users. 

Lastly, our user interface is currently progressive web-app. 

Zoe incorporates a number of approaches and methods which effective teachers leverage: socratic method, adaptive approach to generating examples and explanations, real-time feedback loops, productive struggle, learning through practice and error recognition. There is evidence the effectiveness such approaches incorporated in AI-driven tutoring technologies:

1. Adaptive Learning Systems: Research has shown that adaptive learning systems, which adjust the difficulty of tasks based on the learner's performance, significantly enhance learning. For instance, systems like DreamBox Learning, which uses AI to adapt in real-time to a student's responses, have been shown to improve student achievement in mathematics. 
2. Real-Time Feedback: AI tutors that provide real-time feedback help students understand their mistakes and learn from them immediately, which is crucial for effective learning. Studies have indicated that immediate feedback can significantly improve the acquisition of skills and knowledge in mathematics.

Several academic papers have explored the impact of AI in education, particularly in mathematics:

1. "The role of productive struggle in teaching and learning middle school mathematics" by Warshauer, which discusses the importance of AI tutors in facilitating productive struggle, a key component in deep mathematical understanding and problem-solving skills. 
2. "Using AI to Provide Efficient Feedback in Math Education" discusses how AI tools like ASSISTments provide efficient and personalized feedback, enhancing students' understanding and performance in mathematics.
3. "A Multimedia Adaptive Tutoring System for Mathematics" published in a peer-reviewed journal, highlights how adaptive tutoring systems have successfully improved students' performance and engagement in mathematics.

We ensure equity involves a comprehensive understanding of the diverse backgrounds and needs of our learners. This understanding is achieved through: collaboration with educators and experts. We work closely with top-tier math teachers, math teachers from Title 1 schools and charters schools, parents and students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds across the U.S. to understand the specific challenges and learning styles of learners in 5th-8th grade that also includes black and latino learners and neurodivergent learners. This collaboration helps us tailor our AI solutions to be more inclusive and responsive to the needs of these groups.

We currently have a process to ensure that our product is designed to avoid bias and discrimination. One such method includes participatory design by involving educators, students, and parents in the design process ensures our solutions are developed with a deep understanding of the needs and challenges of our priority learners.

To combat algorithmic bias, we want to implement several strategies in the future:
(1) diverse datasets to ensure our data and validation models are trained are based on diverse real-world data that represent the demographics of our priority learners; and
(2) testing for algorithmic bias using both technical and human oversight mechanisms. 

1. Co-founder & CEO: full-time

2. Co-founder & CTO: full-time

3. AI Scientist: full-time 

4. Full-stack engineer: full-time 

5. Product marketing: part-time

We're on track to pilot our AI-driven math tutoring solution in middle schools by Q4 of 2024. Our progress and key milestones in product development during our pilot include:

1. A pilot program where students in grades 5-8 are actively using our product lasting between 26-45 minutes per session. This ongoing pilot is crucial for gathering real-time feedback and iteratively improving our solution based on user interactions and outcomes.
2. Our solution has achieved an NPS of 90, indicating extremely high satisfaction and likelihood of recommending our service compared to the education industry average of ~42.
3. We've developed our AI to achieve math accuracy rates for middle school math that exceed current market offerings. This has been validated through rigorous testing and in-house validation models based on math data-sets we have manually developed and quality checked.

Our development process is structured to meet the Q4 2024 rollout. We have allocated specific phases for further development, testing, and refinement based on feedback from our ongoing pilot program. We are collaborating with top-tier math educators to ensure that our content and teaching strategies are effective and culturally responsive. This collaboration also helps tailor our solution to meet the diverse needs of our priority learners. Additionally, we'll be working on a self-serve solution for educators to leverage existing school curricula so that Zoe can plug straight into their existing lesson plans and content. 

To achieve accessibility and affordability at scale, we plan to leverage a mixed approach of fine-tuning open-source models on our data, reducing reliance on costly third-party LLMs. This strategy will lower operational costs whilst maintaining the quality of interactions, making Zoe more affordable. Additionally, we'll ensure Zoe is adaptable to various curriculums and lesson plans, enhancing its availability across different educational settings. To increase accessibility, we'll need to enable translation into multiple languages, addressing the common issue of lower literacy abilities among students which effects their math proficiency. 

This partnership would be pivotal for enabling us to scale and enhance our solution for schools, while ensuring it is equitable. Access to the foundation's network is an opportunity to receive early feedback from a potentially diverse network of schools, ensuring our solution meets the holistic needs of students, teachers, administrators and an equitable education agenda. This feedback loop is critical for refining our product development and distribution, aligning our solution with the market and making high-quality tutoring accessible to all students, particularly those in underserved communities.