Junior Derek Yang

What motivated you to create your SAT practice algorithm?

The original idea was somewhat based off when we were trying to practice (for the SAT). On Bluebook you have to go through the entire three, four hour practice test and then at the end it would give you statistics. And I just read some studies that said iterative practice is really good for building knowledge or learning topics, so generally I just wanted to get feedback (from the practice) as soon as possible. (I also wanted to) know whether that feedback was positive or negative in order to build an app to see which topics I specifically need to focus on. Because I feel like a lot of students, they don’t know what they’re bad at, and if they just watch a Khan Academy video on that specific topic their score could go up a bunch.

How long did it take you to create the app?

It took us about two months of development, we made it on React. 

How has this impacted other students studying for the SAT?

We hit 41,000 views on the website over break, and I’ve got a couple kids beta testing it right now, just to tell us their general experience with that. It’s doing pretty okay right now, but I’m just trying to see if we can get more users and see if we can get any feedback on it.

What was the biggest challenge of creating the app for you personally?

I feel like the hardest part for me was trying to optimize the user experience; I understood generally what I wanted from the website, but I wanted the user to know where stuff was, or the user might not know (where to click), and then also adding information on what you need to be doing or where stuff should be, without it also being intrusive.

Junior Brandon Li

What is your SAT practice app?

The app is called Statpad.cc and (the) fundamental idea (for the app) is, we wanted to have a trainer that would give you problems based on the topics that you actually need to practice, instead of just, ‘here’s the entire SAT, you have to find the problems you’re bad at yourself.’ So what our app fundamentally does is it lets you choose the topics you want to practice and out of those it will choose the best problem for you to do. And then we also have other functionality like a dashboard so you can see your analytics and then a vocab trainer.

What do you think is the best way to use your app?

I think in terms of resources, our app definitely has a unique niche. Khan Academy is great if you want lessons or videos, but if you want to diagnose yourself and practice the exact problems, I think that’s a big aspect that our app addresses.

What was the biggest challenge of creating the app for you personally?

The theory of change for our app was already laid out, we knew that we wanted to pull questions from our algorithm to there, so the hardest part was just debugging it and fixing all of the errors.

Is there anything you’re working to change about your practice algorithm?

We think we might want to add a progression system, because people like seeing the achievements pop up. Maybe some competition aspects (as well), like a leaderboard. Most people won’t want to practice on SAT topics necessarily, but I think it can be interesting.