Making learning way easier — Introducing the Socratic app (2024)

It’s not easy being a teenager. On top of huge biological and social changes, your future depends on doing well at school, and that’s hard. Every day, after 7 hours of school, you’re asked to do 3 hours of homework. Though you get support from teachers during the day, you’re largely unsupported and responsible for your own learning at night.

We’ve spent three years watching students try to learn on the Internet, and have made it our mission to make learning easier for them. Our Q&A community, Socratic.org, has helped over 16 million students, and helps millions more every month. But to truly accomplish our mission, we had to offer a first-class experience on every teen’s primary platform — their phone.

Today we’re thrilled to announce the Socratic app — point the camera at a question, and we’ll teach you how to answer it.

This app is the result of a year of development involving dozens of teachers, hundreds of high-school students, over 150,000 users of our stealth app, and millions of photos of real homework questions.

We’ve learned a lot about what makes learning on the Internet so hard, and it boils down to two broad problems: First, it’s hard to ask the right questions, and second, great mobile-native content is hard to find.

Easier to ask

When a student is stuck on a problem, they often don’t know where to look for help, or what to ask. They end up typing the entire question into Google and land on Yahoo Answers, which rarely has an explanation that helps them learn.

Compare that to showing a tutor the same problem — a tutor will figure out the concepts required to solve the problem, and will focus on teaching those concepts.

For example, given the question — “A balloon has a volume of 2.9 L at 320 Kelvin. If the temperature is raised to 343 Kelvin, what will its volume be?” — a tutor would recognize “Charles’s Law” as the concept, and would teach that.

We wanted to deliver the same kind of teaching, instantly — given a question, we wanted to show students the concepts required to solve it.

To build this, we asked expert teachers and content creators to look at hundreds of thousands of question submitted by students, and to split them up by the core concepts required to answer them. Then, we fed these questions into our machine learning algorithms and spent months training and refining the system until it could look at a new question and accurately predict which concepts were required to solve the question.

The result was this — given a question, our AI predicts which concept the student needs to understand how to solve the problem:

Easier to understand

The second challenge in learning online is finding great content. Most educational content was created before mobile consumption was a priority. We’ve seen students on iPhones hesitantly flip through 20 page pdfs, scan paragraphs that span multiple screens, and wait 30 seconds for pages to load. In addition, a lot of content is designed in the style of textbooks — favoring density and comprehensiveness over simplicity and intuitiveness.

Content designed primarily for phones looks and feels different: short sentences paired with images, GIFs and short videos, the key points up front, and fast even on slow connections.

So, with the help of amazing educators in the Socratic.org community, we’re creating high-quality content designed with simplicity, intuitiveness, and speed in mind. We hope this content sets the standard for how mobile educational content should look and feel.

Available today for iOS

Socratic is available for iOS today. Try it out! If you’re not a student and don’t have homework in front of you, visit https://socratic.org/try to get a feel for the experience. If you use Android, add your email here, and we’ll let you know when the Android app is ready.

This is the beginning of a long journey. We’ve learned a lot about the challenges and potential for education on the phone, and have much more left to learn, design, test, and build.

We know that you — students, teachers, parents, and everyone else that cares about the impact of education — are also thinking hard about these problems, and we’d love to hear from you, talk to you, and have you as a part of our growing community.

Love,
Team Socratic

Thanks to Ahmed Elnaiem, Becca McArthur, Rosie Talcott, and Christopher Pedregal for their help writing this.