Technology has improved the education sector that it makes it easy for the students to not only refer to online materials but also ask doubts on the internet, like as it were a person. With such advancement, it is bound to make the lives of educators, parents, and students easy. Educational apps, such as Socratic, not only help to provide information and course material on various subjects but also enables the user to ask doubts.
1. What is Socratic?
Socratic by Google is an education tech company that offers a mobile app for students. The app uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help students with their homework by providing educational resources like videos, definitions, Q&A and more. Socratic's main aim is to ‘Make Learning Easier’.
2. How does it work?
The Socratic app utilises AI technology to accurately predict which concepts will help a student solve their question. This research was created over the months when millions of real student questions were analysed and classified. Then the app uses this data to guess what the future questions will be asked by a particular student and provide specific educational content.
The app works by letting students take a photo of questions. Using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the app is able to read their photo and classify them using the technology described above. Students receive various ‘cards’ in the app with different learning resources such as definitions, YouTube videos, Question & Answers and, original content and illustrations written by the socratic.org web community.
In 2017, Socratic added additional math features to the app, including step-by-step equation help and graphs.
3. What are the subjects offered?
There are in total 4 main groups of subjects that are offered on the app which have then been divided into sub-branches:
Anatomy and Physiology
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Biology
Chemistry
Earth Science
Environmental Science
Organic Chemistry
Physics
Socratic is freely available for download on the Apple store and Google Playstore.
This article originally appeared in the TeacherTribe Magazine September 2020 edition.