Hello! This blog was created to house updates about Quantifold, a company I founded in 2022. Our current live site is available here, however we have several other sites currently in development which will be going live soon.
I have decided to use Blogger for this site for a couple of reasons:
- We have a team which has to move fast in order to compete, and hence learning overly complex tools early may not have adequate returns. Blogger is simple to the point of being accessible to almost anyone who wants to work with us. We also have a blog written in the JAMstack framework which is live on our production site, however since there are restrictions on the number of editors in the CMS for security reasons we have decided to add subdomains to our site and to use these subdomains to house various blogs relevant to our project.
- We plan to move the information accumulated on our niche subdomains to dedicated subdirectories of the main site at some point in the future. For SEO reasons, Google apparently does not pass all of the value from a subdomain to its corresponding domain. Hence if we build up domain authority on this domain it may not transfer completely to our main site. We will have to make sure that using these subdomains is the best solution for each problem we're having (and in this case I believe using a dedicated subdomain for quick journey-specific updates is entirely appropriate as it would be a strange directory to have on the main site. If you're here, it's because we wanted to specifically share this journey with you.)
- Blogger is quite fast and optimised and we like it for that reason. It's cached globally and we can use it to create custom micro-site ecosystems that we can share around. I personally think the idea of the "tiny-web" is very appealing, so we will use some of the sites we make on Blogger as impromptu repositories for information that we gain along our journey.
We are going to provide quick updates here about how things are progressing with our business, our technology stack and our overall vision. Currently the majority of our work is housed in my GitHub in a private repo. We have chosen GitHub as our version control system as it has many nice integrations which have enabled me to work quickly on our minimal viable product. One such integration is Netlify CMS which is currently used to manage the blog on the Quantifold site.
Our site is currently written using the Gatsby framework which enables us to have server-side rendering of our pages so that users are served a static page. This is useful for page load speeds which is a key SEO metric. I have also considered writing certain parts of the app in NextJS due to its overwhelming popularity these days (and hence an improved pool of candidates to work on this project), however this remains to be seen as there may be compatibility issues between Gatsby and Next as they both essentially perform the same server-side rendering tasks.
I think this would be a good opportunity to explain the overall vision of the Quantifold project.
Current maths education efforts are plagued by a "leaky" effect where critical data about how students learn is lost. If a certain idea can be taught in an efficient and replicable way, then we want to know why that is. Likewise if a certain topic has failed to be communicated to students effectively we also want to know why. If we can access this data and create statistical models around it we can effectively predict in which areas a student will have trouble and put in place protective measures to ensure they don't fall behind their peers. Key areas where students stumble include secondary school algebra, calculus, proof-based geometry, probability and statistics, linear algebra and differential equations courses. If we know when and why this happens then we can help students to find a resolution for their problems in learning mathematics.
The main question then becomes how to do this. We are developing our own model for how students learn based on metrics that we have devised via statistical methods. These metrics will allow us to track a student's progress mathematically. From there, we will develop statistically proven methods to positively change student grades.
This method is scalable, scientific and unbiased. Any student's performance can be measured and suggestions offered to improve it.
We have another vision which affects the framework of how mathematics is taught in Ireland: offering tutoring at the lowest possible cost to the greatest number of people. Currently there are many predatory "grinds" companies in Ireland which seek to profit off of the fear and maths anxiety of parents. At Quantifold we find this approach repugnant. Often these grinds schools simply become a box-ticking exercise which ultimately fails to address fundamental misunderstandings in maths which compound over time and result in students underperforming. In particular online grinds schools which have been on the rise in Ireland since 2020 have created environments unconducive to appropriate learning.
This is a concerning trend, and one which will not improve if this is not addressed.
We have therefore decided that the best course of action is to manage a portfolio of services instead of a single online tutoring service. A portfolio of this kind is a managed set of e.g. tutoring providers which we promote under the Quantifold brand. From this, we can select our best performing services and extract data about why their performance might be so high. This bridges the gap between theory and practice: our predictions can be verified using our own service, creating a lightning-fast turnaround time for improvement of our products.
This process is also extremely scalable. For example if we wanted to test out a teaching strategy which has some data to back up its efficacy, we have the ability to provide this as a service to our customers and to gather this data ourselves. Hence our strategies will become the industry-leading standard due to sheer volume of confirmation in data.
If you would like to join us on this journey (or you want to learn more), follow this blog or visit our main site here to see what we have to offer.
Also follow us on social media:
and join our Discord to chat to some of our team!
We hope that this helps to explain our vision for Quantifold and gives an idea of how we want to expand in future. Thank you so much for reading!
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