Heuri: Fauna
Content Tumbleweed
Heuri, an EdTech app for high schoolers that opposes merchant math, has its own weaknesses. In this article, I’ll share with you how I plan on tackling the most pressing one.
As Heuri stands now, its core weakness is its lack of content. For the past three months, I’ve been working on the core philosophy and mechanics, which is a necessary step in providing the platform as a whole. Since I’m doing this solo, I can’t be churning out truckloads of content at the same time. Even though using tools like GenAI might be tempting, I still stand by the principal design choice: human-created content first, technology second.
With currently near-zero usability for the end user of Heuri, there is also no incentive for the user to pay for subscriptions and their recurrent visits, even if Heuri were free. That’s why I’ve decided to design a fast-paced version of what I’m already building: a Maturita exam cramming tool. I’m going to walk you through why that itself will provide immense value, regardless of the success of the monetized part of Heuri. But first, let’s think about names—again.
Terminology and the introduction of MAMUT
With Heuri expanding to offer two distinct services, I needed a way to cleanly isolate them. Distinct naming is precisely what helps here. The umbrella product is still named Heuri but instead of referring to everything as Heuri all the time, I decided to come up with easier-to-market names. Because I love nature and animals, I’ve decided to use acronyms resembling Czech animals.
The existing long-term math education platform, that I’ve already extensively described here, is KRAB (crab). KRAB stands for KReativní ABstrakce, or creative abstractions. It communicates the core concept perfectly: the student creates their own understanding of mathematics and in the process, creating an interconnected, abstracted way of approaching problem-solving.
Having simple product shortcuts in the form of animal names provides a scalable way of expanding Heuri’s portfolio, if needed. Image source: Picryl
MAMUT (mammoth) is the new Maturita guide I’m now working on. The acronym stands for Mnohostranně Anotované Maturitní Úlohy a Testy, or comprehensive annotated high school graduation exam questions and tests. Let me explain exactly what direct value MAMUT brings, while also making sure it’s not merely a cheap marketing funnel for KRAB.
MAMUT Principles
The quality of online resources specific to Maturita, the high school leaving exam, is suboptimal, to say the least. After a quick research online, here is where I see the most common pitfalls, as a tutor with multi-year experience of working with high schoolers.
A lot of Maturita content is behind a paywall which, from the business perspective, is completely understandable: resources were put into the creation of such content. From the student’s perspective, or the parent who is paying for the material, however, that might be unacceptable.
Why should I pay for something that I can’t reuse? Do I really have to pay this amount of money just to get through an exam I don’t give a damn about?
Even if the content is free, it’s indigestible: a quick Google search on “matematika maturita řešení” returns:
- https://www.statnimaturita-matika.cz: page wallpapered with raster images, completely inaccessible to students with disabilities. The content is also completely unsearchable by text.
- 2-4 hour long videos of solutions: the same issue arises here as well. The student is overburdened with one-shot content that they have to chew through. Admittedly, such format is a step forward as it has many workarounds, one of which is asking and prompting Gemini, which has direct access to YouTube API.
- https://nabla.cz: outdated content, appearing in the top search results. Unacceptable for the nature of how the test changes from year to year.
- CERMAT: an overview of what’s expected alongside a guarantee of correctness, but these solutions remain unhelpful for a student who is completely lost.
Even though at first glance, this raster solution strip might look helpful, it’s only helpful for those who already know the correct answer, not for those who have no idea e.g. what role does a negative coefficient have. Source: author
There are almost no public online resources or communities for students taking Maturita exam, possibly further deepening anxiety about the exam itself if the school itself fails to provide any. There are a few emerging options already that I’ve mentioned in my previous articles, e.g. ČT Edu.
However, interconnectivity is still absent in existing resources, leading to more frustration:
Why were the exercises so different this year? It’s unfair. My older brother, who took the exam, had it for free!
Students have no guide or tutorial on how to fill in the exam, e.g. they have no guidance as to the technicalities. Even though it seems trivial to write down one’s answers on a sheet of paper, it can still be problematic to more neurotic students.
Even though the Maturita exam can be daunting, assignment obscurity shouldn’t be the main source of difficulty. Image source: Picryl
With only a small percentage of students opting for math for their Maturita exam, the trend is clear: students evade math. But is that because the math part is so much more difficult than other alternatives, or because there is no solid resource to help them prepare? I design MAMUT specifically to address this trend by operating on four core principles:
- MAMUT is free of charge. Even though that sounds commendable, this also implies MAMUT’s scope and functionality must be uncompromisingly narrow and specific. You use it for a few days and then go on your merry way.
- MAMUT has bite-sized text content that’s easy to navigate, search and categorize. No eye-balling of walls of images and video playback played at 2x speed.
- MAMUT should be encouraging. That means it should be helpful, unassuming and student-oriented.
- MAMUT links content together and offers different ways of exploration. Just because I prefer solving inequalities graphically does not imply all students do.
To my knowledge, there does not exist an equivalent alternative, at least on the Czech market. The first proof of concept will also be relatively cheap to make. I want this to be as community-driven as possible.
Anatomy
In one of the previous articles, I already established KRAB glossary using ORCA, which is an OOUX methodology based on the idea that humans perceive and process information in objects. Since I liked this approach and it proved to be already useful to me, I created the same glossary for MAMUT using ORCA:
EXAM: A container of exercises. For the first version, this will be the math part of the Maturita leaving exam.
EXERCISE: A single component of an exam. Annotated so that it’s easy to get to it.
TOPIC: Provides hierarchical navigation in the context of an exam. Example: linear function.
SOLUTION: Step-by-step reasoning that leads to the correct answer.
ANNOTATION: Auxiliary notes, questions, memos that help with understanding the exercise or its solution.
With this terminology set, I’m ready to develop the first MAMUT prototype that I will show in the upcoming articles.
While MAMUT’s aim isn’t to show students the beauty of mathematics, I firmly believe it will achieve its purpose and serve as a sneak preview of the underlying power of Heuri.
Happy learning!