Hello and Welcome! Thank you for visiting the Epiphanie AI tutoring website. You may have reached this page because one of your students is using our system or because you've been invited to consider Epiphanie to help your class. Here's what our site does and how we can help your students.
Let’s start with the most pressing question - are we doing your student’s homework for them?
Absolutely not!!!
As a tutor for more than 40 years, I created Epiphanie as a tool to help students learn, rather than a quick shortcut or a way to avoid learning. For more than a decade now, online math sites from PhotoMath to Wolfram Alpha have given students ways to take shortcuts. But the end result is not good for them - they might get 100% all the homework sets, but their quiz and test results are disastrous.
Epiphanie is designed to help students with advanced mathematics - from Algebra through Calculus. It’s designed to work with teachers, tutors, and other education partners to help find those areas where students are having trouble. During my time as a tutor, I’ve found that most of my advanced math students’ mistakes aren’t about the current subject! They're problems with fractions, exponent mistakes - even simple sign errors and math mistakes like 2×4=6.
Some teachers write this off as students being inattentive, but in my experience I find that unfairly harsh. These students are human beings, not computers. They might have gotten 90% on the test on properties of exponents in 9th grade, but that doesn't mean that they'll get every one of those correct now. Unfortunately (for them), if they're going to be successful using the power rule in a calculus class, they have to get nearly 100% of the exponent problems correct.
Everybody makes mistakes like these – but the effect of these mistakes on students is disheartening. If someone makes a mistake with fractions in 4th grade, they notice it and fix the mistake. At that level, many teachers are even correcting every assignment. But if a student makes that same mistake in a pre-calculus class, they’re likely to get an answer that’s far off the mark, or even a problem that’s unsolvable.
Few students consider the possibility that they made a simple mistake - many just throw up their hands in the belief that “they’re just not good at math”. But that's not true!
Epiphanie helps students catch and fix those mistakes so they can focus on the core concepts being learned. We also preserve a record of the mistakes that are made, and teachers or tutors can review these mistakes to see where a student (or an entire class!) needs help.
Imagine checking in the morning to find exactly which problems your students had trouble with on last night's homework; now you know exactly what material to focus on the next day in class!
Note that our advice will depend on the subject matter they’re studying and their history with other problems. For example, simplifying the expression
$\frac{3x+6}{x+2}$
\frac{3x+6}{x+2}
to “3” would be OK in an Algebra I or perhaps even an Algebra II class, but not sufficient in the context of a Precalculus or Calculus class (they need to identify the hole!). Similarly, a student who has been struggling with material might get different advice than a student who has generally been getting most of the questions correct.
Note that our math engine isn’t perfect, and it probably never will be. Epiphanie is designed to support all math constructs, but that means students can enter equations that will give us headaches. (You’re not teaching about Tensors, right?) We’ve allowed flexibility with the math entered, but that means that from a pure mathematics standpoint some of the equations are not properly formatted or answered.
Our current release has some advice for Algebra I-type problems and issues, but the system can already be useful and point out mistakes in more complex subjects like Precalculus and Calculus, even before we’ve developed our AI tutoring algorithms for those subjects.
How We Help Teachers:
We know how hard you work to provide a framework for students to learn math. And we understand that - as much as you might wish otherwise, you simply don’t have the time to provide personalized feedback to students about where they need help, especially help around foundational material that precedes the current classwork.
We want to change that.
By analyzing students’ homework line-by-line, we can show you (and them) exactly where they’re making mistakes. Are they distributing multiplication over multiplication? Having trouble with fractional exponents? Combining logarithms incorrectly? Or just making attention-to-detail mistakes at a higher than average rate? At a glance, we can help you see what’s going on with your students to quickly guide them with additional work and material. We can share similar information aggregated across a class, a subject, or even an entire grade level of students to help you see where students need the most help.
As a teacher, we hope you will view this site as a resource for you and your students. If you would like to explore additional ways that Epiphanie can help you help your students, please don’t hesitate to contact us .
Best regards,
Kevin Moore
Founder, Epiphanie Tutoring