Will ChatGPT dream of Bloom's 2 Sigma problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Check out https://www.modernbloom.org/
Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#62The fastest, most surefire way to nuke your child's brain is to give them a screen. There is certainly room for software to design a curriculum for the parent or teacher to use. We have tried (and failed) to find such a thing for our homeschool curriculum. But giving the kid a screen? If you're even a midge honest with yourself, a screen will de-educate your child, leading to the opposite of the intended consequence.
I empathize with the screen time concerns - the reality is most kids in classrooms are already on screens, which are doing very little to move educational outcomes (from what I can tell based on the NAEP evidence). And then you also have kids at home who are on TikTok or Instagram reels - combining screen time with easy dopamine. Some kids using Bloomy decide to use it at home in lieu of social media time. I'd take t…
Regardless of the content on the screen, the screen time is bad for kids.
Even desiring pixel-represented "data" for this fact that is obviously observable irl is itself perhaps a result of excessive screen-time, leading to spreadsheet brain, but I can gratify you with these studies: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]
Of course, no study will exactly disprove the claim that there is some possible content that is a net positive for kids, akin to how no study can prove that unicorns don't exist. But this is exactly the kind of brain-melt, culturally destructive kind of thinking you could expect for demanding "data" for every obvious fact.
Screen time is simply bad for kids. Don't give your kids a screen. Give them a ball, a stick, a book, etc
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle... [3] https://red.library.usd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002... [4] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/... [5] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32202633/
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I empathize with the screen time concerns - the reality is most kids in classrooms are already on screens, which are doing very little to move educational outcomes (from what I can tell based on the NAEP evidence). And then you also have kids at home who are on TikTok or Instagram reels - combining screen time with easy dopamine. Some kids using Bloomy decide to use it at home in lieu of social media time. I'd take t…
Regardless of the content on the screen, the screen time is bad for kids. Even desiring pixel-represented "data" for this fact that is obviously observable irl is itself perhaps a result of excessive screen-time, leading to spreadsheet brain, but I can gratify you with these studies: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5] Of course, no study will exactly disprove the claim that there is some possible content that is a net positive…
Thanks! I’ll have a read. Appreciate your taking the time to source and share these.
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#64Great idea and execution but the design language seems like general llm-generated tailwind. I think you guys are missing a huge opportunity to make the design reinforce the product positioning.
This is interesting, can you say more?
I spent some time researching how to teach commodity LLMs to pose geometrically correct figures and challenges, for the purpose of teaching middle school trig. I originally wanted exactly what you've described here, using AI to unlock Bloom mastery. There's a decently large surface area I covered before shelving the project. Happy to share my lessons with you
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#65Congrats on the launch! I'm curious if you're familiar with ED Hirsch's work and if so how you see a "core knowledge" curriculum fitting into AI-enabled tutoring. Your landing page suggests you might be falling into traditional anti-patterns for strengthening reading skills like "finding the main idea" and "close reading" of the text (your ai tutor animation instructs a student to look closely for the answer). These patterns are commonly used in American education and have largely been discredited. They persist due to outdated learning theory taught in American educational schools and are likely responsible for our falling reading scores. I'm bringing this up because my hope is that any ed tech tool regardless of whether it uses AI would start with the right foundational theory.
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#66This strongly resonates with what we are building at ChemioAI [1], although we have deliberately started with a narrower audience: college students taking Organic Chemistry I and II.
We are also approaching Bloom’s 2-sigma challenge as the design goal. The aim is not another chatbot that gives away answers, but a patient, Socratic coach operating within a structured system of diagnosis, guided practice, feedback, productive struggle, and independent mastery.
One reason we chose college O-Chem rather than K–12 is precisely the concern raised throughout this thread about screen time and introducing conversational AI too early. Organic Chemistry is a notoriously difficult gateway course taken by older students who are already studying digitally. It gives us a more bounded, age-appropriate environment in which to test whether AI can strengthen effortful learning rather than replace thinking.
Your separation of the tutor from the underlying curriculum and mastery system is especially important. We have reached a similar conclusion: AI can ask better questions, provide patient scaffolding, and adapt how concepts are explained, but it should not independently define the curriculum, determine mastery, or become the source of truth. We therefore keep curriculum, pedagogical policy, mastery decisions, and safety controls in a deterministic orchestration layer outside the model.
Congratulations on the launch. It is encouraging to see others pursuing the same underlying educational ambition from a different starting point.
[1] chemio.ai
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#67First of all congrats on the launch.
I worked at an edtech startup with adaptive learning platforms in previous decades. One thing that is always difficult to surmount was that at the under K12 level were:
1. B2b it was hard to land large contracts(like getting an entire public school district to jump from large publishers like HMH or Wiley) because it turned out that the teachers themselves did not care about adaptivity when they had a thousand other things to worry about. But teachers are not the ones that make the deals. It's the school district board and The reps at large publishing just said we are also adaptive and no one would care about how you differentiated. Teachers and students really aren't the lot you have to convince in a b2b deal do you :)?
2. If you want the b2c route then the customer acquisition cost was way too high because again like to get teachers and students to actually adopt this to help them was really a hard sell, especially when the public school system has teachers that are so overburdened with other stuff.
I see that you mentioned charter schools for your pilot, which are not exactly public schools but I dunno of they come with the same set of challenges, but I wonder are these above two challenges are Also something you have had to face while scaling your product?
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#68Great idea and execution but the design language seems like general llm-generated tailwind. I think you guys are missing a huge opportunity to make the design reinforce the product positioning.
This is interesting, can you say more?
I think 383toast is talking about your landing page design which has very strong AI-generated design vibes (blue-green gradients, rounded rectangles with a colored border on the left...)
There are a bunch of skills you can find online to improve on this if you want to keep designing with Claude, and the latest generation of models are better (Fable/GPT5.6).
Check https://github.com/jakubkrehel/skills or https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills (more around animations), maybe https://github.com/leonxlnx/taste-skill (didn't try it)
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#69First of all congrats on the launch. I worked at an edtech startup with adaptive learning platforms in previous decades. One thing that is always difficult to surmount was that at the under K12 level were: 1. B2b it was hard to land large contracts(like getting an entire public school district to jump from large publishers like HMH or Wiley) because it turned out that the teachers themselves did not care about adapti…
OP this is it
Almost all the founders who have tried to go into education have come out with similar thoughts.
Schools are basically legacy companies with low nps products. It might do you better to vertically integrate as hard as that is
Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12
#70Alex, thanks for building this. I imagine it will help many children!
Couple comments on this being 'screen' oriented, which are as you say endemic in schools and terrible.
There's a fair amount of research that paper reading and handling and writing gets significantly higher retention than screen reading. Most especially physically writing notes, but generally comprehension is just higher for paper. Interestingly e-ink is in the middle between screens and paper.
VLMs offer the interesting possibility of 'looking over the shoulder' of students as they work examples and problems by hand through a camera. It's a harder lift, and it's more expensive, but it might find much higher buy-in to think about a combo book / workbook / AI tutor business model, not least because if you talk to almost any parent or teacher they will tell you that they are extremely worried about genz/alpha kids' abilities to focus, read with attention for longer periods of time or handwrite.
Many of the exercises can be evaluated through a VLM pretty much as easily as in a chat window -- more expensive inference, but possibly a much better world.
A middle ground here might be experimenting with something like a remarkable tablet - it's relatively easy to vibe code a responsive eink page right now, and you could do away with the camera side. I guess I'd think of pairing it with a phone app to talk that could hook up to the remarkable.
My pet theory on handwriting notes and why they're so much better than typing or just listening - if not in shorthand, they are too slow to capture lectures word for word, and thus force a first summarization/categorization step, meaning stuff has to literally go in to short term memory then get pulled out and processed; this just has to be better than typing in a sort of fast typing haze and trying to read them later. It's also the reason my college notebooks have things like (WTF?? At any rate, it will be a great service to learners to have a quality AI tutor, and I'd pitch you on looking seriously at e-ink or paper modalities if you want to help students learn even better and faster. The tech is SUUUPER close right now, or even could be there with a little willpower.