Epiphanie Overview for Teachers

Hello! Thank you for visiting Epiphanie AI Tutoring website. You may have reached this page because one of your students is using our system to do their homework - if so, please allow us to explain what our site does and how we help your students.

This site is here to help students with math and other technical subjects. It’s designed to work with teachers, tutors, and other education partners to help find those areas where students are having trouble. I’ve developed this site based on forty years of personal tutoring experience - during that time, I’ve found that 90% of my Calculus students’ mistakes aren’t about calculus! They’re trigonometry errors, logarithm issues, problems with negative exponents - even simple sign and addition mistakes. This site helps them catch and fix those mistakes. We’re not solving the problems for them, but guiding them along the way to help them find where they’re making mistakes and fix them. We’ll also recommend supplementary material to help reinforce areas where they’re having difficulty. Soon they’ll be able to share reports with you about the material that they need to work on too (under development - watch for updates soon).

Does Epiphanie do their Homework for them?

Absolutely not! There are several websites out there that will solve math problems for students, and many students are aware of these sites. But students who do use them quickly realize that this doesn’t do them any good - they won’t have the skills they need to master the material and succeed on quizzes and tests.

On Epiphanie, students complete their assignments (enter it on their own or work on one that you’ve shared), and do their work step-by-step in the Epiphanie system. We’ll give them pointers along the way to help point them in the right direction when they make mistakes. When they’re done they can print out an assignment to turn it in, including an overview of the mistakes they made and suggestions on foundational material to work on.

Note that our advice will depend on the subject matter they’re studying and their history with other problems. For example, the simplifying the following equation \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. 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. We want to support math constructs to the greatest extent possible, but that means students can enter equations that will give us headaches. (You’re not teaching about Lambert W, right?) We’ve allowed flexibility with the math wherever possible, but that means that from a pure mathematics standpoint some of the equations are not properly formatted or answered. The example above is one of them - we don’t currently have a mechanism to report the hole in that answer. Solving periodic equations like sine and tangent functions also have limitations. And our mechanism for reporting multiple solutions such as “x = {-3,3}” is not mathematically correct (we plan to add support for the ∈ symbol soon, however support for the universe of possible set notation will be limited and we don’t plan to support algebra on sets anytime soon.) We feel that these shortcomings don’t significantly detract from the overall value of what we’re trying to help students do, though we’re always trying to get better.

Our initial release only has some basic 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