There’s something about teaching that changed me and drove me to where I am now, trying to build things that matter.

Teaching might be the hardest job I’ve ever done mentally. And one of the worst-paid jobs for the most amount of work. This a talking point today in the US that opens veritable barrels of worms, if that was even a phrase. However, it’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done in my life.

I first encountered the job when my wife was offered a position as a Kindergarten Teacher on the Navajo Reservation in Monument Valley, UT. We jumped at the opportunity. We both loved spending time in the red rocks of Southern Utah. What we didn’t know was how beautiful it actually was. I might have 10,000 pictures on a hard drive from just four years of living there, but that’s an aside. It was the people that were truly beautiful. We fell in love immediately with the community and have life-long friends from our experience there. It made so much an impact on us that I started helping in classrooms after only a month or two and became a teacher the following year.

I started in fourth grade, then moved over to the combined high school and middle school the following year. There I started teaching remedial math (for those that needed extra help), business, and technology. What I discovered was:

• Teachers need more help and often times software made the job harder, ironically.
• The students needed a lot of help with math and all the software we used was clunky, not user friendly, and seemed to take more time than it was worth. It wasn’t just unique to the teachers.
• Lastly, I figured out I loved coding and wanted to persue it further.

Immediately, I began thinking about software from a design perspective, but also from a teacher perspective. There wasn’t really anything I encountered that was user friendly or helpful for actually gathering good data on students, other than some online tools that tracked progress. However, what those lacked was a good math interface. Typing out math, especially when fractions, powers, variables, what have you, are involved, it’s not fun nor is it intuitive. This is what inspired my idea.

What if you had a worksheet that gave you back deep analytical data on the students? Nothing like this existed. The reason worksheets are what came to mind first is because handwriting leads to better memory retention for students. Programs that showed videos or had you type answers still didn’t show a student’s thought process for teachers nor did it stick as well. This was the key.

Over the years since I’ve had that thought, I’ve tried building it several times and it got very complex very fast. That, and the data science and machine learning just didn’t quite have the capabilities I wanted without significant resources necessary to build it. Fast forward to now, and I’m using a carefully guided agentic AI setup (currently Kiro) to methodically work through what this build requires, what needs to be done, how the pieces fit together, and how it should ultimately be built. Paired with my now depth of experience in coding and machine learning, this has given me a strong edge in developing this software, which I’m calling “Math-o-matic.”

This project combines machine learning with responsive touch canvas writing, with a strong data backend that tracks progress, common mistakes, etc. There’s also student/teacher heirarchy and interactive hints that are connected both to a system I built and an LLM to parse more natural outputs. There’s still a TON of work to be done on it, but I’m really happy with where it’s going!

And what’s neat about all this work I’ve done so far? I have a working demo that is robust, complex (even if simplistic on the surface), and has really neat features that could potentially put this in the hands of students and teachers relatively soon. It’s got it’s quirks that I’m working out, but I’m proud of this.

Take a look at these short demonstration clips and see what you think!

Note: if you need the video bigger, just right click and open in a new tab.

Logging in:

Handwriting math problems with live preview:

Getting a correct answer:

Erasing previous work:

Getting a hint on a new problem:

^{_{photo credit: Yaroslov Shuraev}}