Ask HN: What are you surprised isn’t being worked on more?

Elementary Schooling - At a young age teaching skills such as Critical Thinking, Self awareness, Inculcating curiosity to understand others perspective, understanding logical fallacies, Ethical behavior are not prioritized. In a way these are more important than learning the normal sciences which can be taught at a later age. I find focus on that lacking outside of fleeting local attempts.

How close does Paypal come to this? What is it lacking in your eyes (other than the "open standard" aspect)?

Last time I visited Tokyo I bought a sleek little folding Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket but unfolds to nearly full size and types very comfortably. By just unfolding it, it pairs with my Android phone and the on-screen keyboard disappears. Folding it up triggers the phone keyboard to reappear. I take it with me whenever I expect to write anything about as long as this comment.

Being generally a luddite when it comes to devices, I'm honestly shocked at how seamless the pairing process is.

I don't know why they don't sell these in North America.

I teach at the high school level. I fervently believe that the lack of any kind of modernization of assessment tools for k12 educators is a profound impediment to the advancement of education (and instead we flail around with fads and bullshit).

There are millions of assessment items created and administered by instructors everyday in the United States, but the results are unreliable so we spend billions on standardize testing which is “trustworthy” while also (often) having negative externalities. We accept this dual system because the two modes of assessment have different goals, but it is wildly inefficient.

If it were possible to create an assessment platform that supported the rapid generation of unique and trustable assessments[1], we could have 1) more frequent/less costly assessments of student progress, 2) better instructor accountability, and 3) greater opportunities for non-traditional educational pacing.

[1] more ‘contextual autocomplete’ than ‘discrete item creation’ as a primary mechanism for assessment creation. Yes, someone has to create the original bank of assessment materials - but, for the love of god, how many times has an assessment been developed on “To Kill a Mockingbird”, the Pythagorean Theorem, etc? Make the tool slick enough for content creation that it is at least on par with current offerings, do automated assessment analysis a la College Board, et. al. in the background on all submitted content, and then allow the instructor to create an assessment based on the class & lesson context as easily as accepting/rejecting a list of questions as a final “cultural fit” culling. Ideally, this final step would be completed as quickly as the instructor can read and reject assessment items such that they could - conceivably- be able to create and administer an assessment during a lesson in a manner that is reactive to the immediate progress of the students. Reduce the assessment feedback loop time this much and the ground would move under the profession.

Edit: for those asking via email, the core tech here to be developed (at least initially) is automating the assessment analysis: how do you know the assessment items are correctly assessing what you want them to?

Once you have that there would be downstream effects on instructional design, pathways to graduation, talent identification, etc. - but that’s the special sauce.

The labor of assessment analysis is what provides the creators of standardized tests the ability to maintain a monopoly on trustworthy assessments. They will not themselves develop the tech to do this analysis in an automated and distributed fashion as it would undermine their core business. In this way, they seem to be trapped in a classic innovators dilemma.

This 110%. It's especially obvious after moving out of the US and it's hard to convey how much better cities built for humans are than cities built for cars than by experiencing it for yourself.