Prehend is an ideologically driven company. Its mission is to help humans learn.
I am building Prehend because education is one of my top issues. Education is important to me for personal reasons. Although I did not have a bad educational experience, I believe that the education I received did me a fundamental disservice. It was not until after I left the educational system that I realized I had lost my love for learning. When I entered the workforce I enjoyed it more than school because it was a better environment for me to learn. This is unacceptable. The purpose of school is to provide an environment conducive to learning. People inherently like to learn. An environment that is not enjoyable to learn in is not merely inconducive to learning, it is hostile to learning. Education needs to be better for future generations.
While some people thrive in the existing educational system, not all do. We need to find ways to make school a place where everyone can enjoy learning. I believe the solution is technology.
I don’t see robots or complex software ever replacing human instructors. The student-teacher relationship is crucial for creating an environment where students love learning. By using software to enhance instruction, Prehend enables teachers to provide superior, personalized education without increasing their effort.
Knowledge Check is the first product launched by Prehend. It automatically generates quizzes that can be embedded into existing and new educational content. This product aligns with Prehend’s mission because the first step of providing personalized instruction is creating options.
Knowledge Check will never require completion of the quiz to progress to different content because I know it does not work for everyone. Nevertheless, I believe that an ungraded quiz like Knowledge Check allows students to decide if they understand the content or not. And I believe having control over the learning process is important for students to love learning.
Below is a demo of Knowledge Check generated using this blog post.