In education, we have always traded off scale and quality. In a 30-student math class, half of kids are ready to accelerate while half are still working on their foundational skills, but teachers cannot be in 30 places at once, giving each student one-on-one support.
Until now. Imagine 30 teachers in every classroom—that's how Goblins feels. Students draw math on any device, and our AI figures out the "why" behind their confusion, giving instant feedback and building conceptual foundations. (Preview: https://youtu.be/SH9UomzBMUs)
Goblins launched to a private beta in March with 15 schools and 300 students. Since then we've built a waitlist of 2,300 teachers, and we now have paid school and district customers across the US and Mexico. We've also raised from angels and received a large grant from the Gates Foundation.
We are in the unique position of having a product that is both highly differentiated and demanded. Anyone who joins now will be getting well-priced equity. By the end of this school year, this company will be much larger.
Current technical problems we're working on:
→ Building knowledge graphs that adapt to student performance in real-time, routing them to the optimal next problem to work on
→ Extending our handwriting recognition from digital canvas to real paper through Chromebook cameras (think real-time OCR on math equations through low-quality webcams with poor lighting and limited CPU)
→ Creating interactive mathematical lessons (think 3blue1brown, but conversational) that remediate student misconceptions
You'll be engineer #2 on the team, joining Sawyer (CEO, former Head of Design at X1, acquired by Robinhood, and math teacher) and Alp (CTO, previously Stripe and Amazon).
We move fast, care deeply about craft, and obsess over delighting users. If you're interested, email sawyer@goblinsapp.com :)
AI and calculators can easily do computation for us, why not take Conrad Wolfram's approach and teach step #1 which is to identify the problem and understand what computation is required to solve it
(I know nothing about the GP post, so I can't comment anything about them; I'm only relaying my own experiences from tutoring kids who struggle in math largely because they offloaded too much simple computation to a tool.)
Your "problems" are just equations. 3x = 2 is not a problem.
Here's a problem: you and a friend have 15 dollars and would like to enjoy a day at the movies. Movie tickets cost $7.50. Will you have any money to spend on concessions?
The equation that you'd hope a child would produce is something like 7.5 x 2 = 15. And 15-15=0. Ultimately, no there's no money left over for concessions. That's the skill we need to teach. After that whether or not they know how to _compute_ 7.5 x 2 isn't a big deal. Give them a calculator.
It's crazy how indoctrinated we all are thinking equations are problems and teaching kids how to compute is "learning math".