Dominic Whyte, a college student involved in the Microsoft Garage program along with 45 others, spent 12 weeks on a project with 8 other interns. They took on a project that involved “recognizing and classifying input from the Microsoft Surface pen.” After brainstorming a few ideas, Whyte’s team fell upon one that stemmed from a problem they identified in classrooms, from K-12 to college classes: students having difficulties typing math problems into computers and teachers being able to check their students understanding of the material. They started building and app that utilized the Surface pen and would enable students to write math equations based on questions the teacher asked them. Furthermore, the students would immediately receive feedback on whether not what they were doing was correct. After receiving feedback from the teachers who tested the app, Whyte’s team added the ability to look at the performance of different students compared to others. After the team put the finishing touches on the project they presented the idea at Microsoft’s Global Headquarters in Richmond, Washington.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/blog/2017/09/12-weeks-microsoft-garage/
They certainly discovered a very interesting problem. Math is very hard to do with a pen and I’m glad they were able to find a solution to this. I hope they make a lot of money.
Doing school work like this on a computer is very difficult. It certainly needs to be redesigned. I’ve been fortunate enough to never have to do math on a computer, but I know that many people find it to be very frustrating. I hope that they found a way to make it work much better.
I problem with any touch devices or things like the surface is my awful and way too big hand writing, if their attempts to improve the product can accommodate people like me, that would definitely help them with sales as I would use that over pen and paper.