September 3rd Goals

It's been quite a week (quite a year).  Thumbprint version 1.0 is now available on the App Store.  If you have an iPad, search for Thumbprint and give it a try.

So after all of that, my team took the week off and played paintball, right?

Wrong.  We took Labour Day off, then got right back up on the horse.

This weeks goals:

1. Submit the 1.01 patch to the App Store for approval.  This fixes a couple of rare but serious issues that could cause a user to lose some data.  It also dramatically improves performance for users looking at extremely large collections (like the one we built with over 400 quizzes in it).  I'm excited about this release.  Sometimes 1.01 releases are furious scrambles to keep the app from exploding on launch.  This is much, much calmer.  We're catching a few things, making it run more smoothly, and hopefully delivering a build that users can enjoy for quite awhile.

2. Build out a complete survey course on World History.  I love history.  I love Crash Course.  I love Thumbprint.  This week we put them all together into a sample set of lessons that history or social studies students can use to get up to speed on What Happened Earlier.  For teachers, it gives them some raw materials to play with - Grab the bits you like, modify to your hearts' content, and share them with your students.  By the end of this week, a search for "world history" should give you some helpful results.

I'd like to do a project of this scale every week for the next few months, but we're a small company with a lot of irons in the fire, so that's a goal, not apromise.  We'll do our best.

The Dog Food Test

Advice from my father:  "You can do all the R&D you want designing the world's greatest dog food, but at the end of the day there's only one test that matters: Will the dogs eat it?"

In the Wild West that is the education software business, nearly every app I see fails that very simple test.  Tens of thousands of man-hours of work, millions of dollars, and...?  An app that teachers and students use grudgingly or not at all.  Why?  Because while it may be "powerful" and "flexible" and "based on years of research" it doesn't actually do what they need it to do.  It doesn't help students learn about the world, and it doesn't help teachers facilitate this learning.  What it does is create noise - additional tasks, additional steps and additional headache, usually around making the technology work. Technology-enabled classrooms run a very serious risk of becoming classes in Tech Support rather than in their stated subject.

Now, before you think me too arrogant or dismissive, let's get two things clear:

1. I think technology in the classroom is the cornerstone of a meaningful education

2. My company has just entered the fray with an education app, and this app may very well fail the dog food test

I'll defend my first point in more detail in another post, but let's underline the second.  My team spent a year making the best, most helpful education app it could come up with.  We sincerely believe that this app will help make education better.  Specifically, we believe that it will give teachers and students the tools they need to make technology work for them rather than against them.

And we may be wrong.

That sentence was frightening to write, but also a bit invigorating.  It's not often I feel like a peer of the big players in the space - Khan, Gates, Coursera, Pearson.  But in this regard we're all in the same boat.  We each gave it our best shot.  We did our R&D and ran with our best ideas.  And now all of us, great and small, stand behind our bowls of dog food, waiting.

Graham Porter, CEO

Thumbprint Educational Software Inc.