Grokkoli AI Math Tutor

Frequently Asked Questions

1. 1. How do I get my students set up on Grokkoli?
   If your district uses ClassLink, Clever, or SchoolDay, your classroom account can be auto-provisioned by your district.
   
   If not, you can create an account manually using your work email. From there, you'll be able to add a profile for each student. Our system will generate a unique learner PIN for each one — which you can use to log students in yourself if needed.
2. 2. How will Grokkoli know what to teach my students? 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 student 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 approach new concepts.
3. 3. What kind of work will my students 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 students 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 students to spend (and how quickly you want them to progress) is entirely up to you and your school. 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 is required of a teacher? Will I still need to teach my kids on the side?
   Grokkoli is focused on teaching core math (the math upon which all other applied mathematics subjects depend). Grokkoli does not yet cover applied mathematic subjects such as Geometry, Statistics, or Units of Measure (as defined by the US Common Core). As such, you will still need to cover these subjects in class (teaching these subjects should be a lot easier though, since Grokkoli will be catching and remedying learning gaps in your students that might otherwise get in the way). Additionally, from time-to-time, Grokkoli will encounter a learner that does not respond to its remediation efforts - in such cases, Grokkoli will alert teachers to let them know (and the Grokkoli team will investigate to see how the system can be improved to better handle similar cases in the future). Lastly, you will want to spend a little time early on with each student individually (particularly for children under the age of 8) to make sure they are finding their way around the program, and able to get the most out of it.
5. 5. 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”.
6. 6. How do you keep kids engaged? Is this another math game?
   No, Grokkoli is not edutainment. “Gamified learning” is a big trend right now, so many learning apps rely on extrinsic motivators to coax kids into working on math or other subjects. Here's why we don't believe in this approach:

   • 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 these heavily gamified learning apps should count towards your kid's video game time, not their learning time.)

   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.

   • 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. They're proud of their progress, and that's all the motivation they need.
7. 7. 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) for any of it's math instruction. 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.
8. 8. 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, Spaced Repetition & "Spiral 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 theory 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 or small-group instruction (as the architects of high-dosage tutoring programs 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. It's just very hard for any teacher to attend to each of their students in this way.
   
   Grokkoli can provide this to every learner, all day long.
9. 9. Is Grokkoli a full math curriculum?
   No, not yet. Grokkoli is currently focused on core arithmetic and foundational math concepts ➔ the areas where most learning gaps tend to emerge and persist, especially in the early grades. Our system emphasizes number sense, operations, place value, and early fractions, all of which are critical for long-term math success. At this time, Grokkoli does not cover topics like geometry, measurement units, or data/graphing. We plan to expand into these areas in the future, but our current priority is ensuring every learner builds a strong, durable foundation in pure math first.
10. 10. 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 :)
11. Still have questions? Contact us here