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Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

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Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#101

For education, isn't the problem we are trying to solve the one with motivation, values and emotional handling? The tools, play a part, but it is engulfed by the real problem mentioned before. How are you going to deal with it?

When AI can handle the content, teachers get to focus on motivation, values and emotions. I started my career as a teacher and spent > 8 hrs a day lesson planning, delivering content & grading. If I could have handed that off to a great program like Bloomy, I could have built far better relationships & my students would have been so much better off.

There is already every form of content, hundreds of times over, for almost every K12 topic.

The problem hasn't been content for nearly a decade.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#103
Hey first of all, Congratulations on the launch. I'm a teacher at a Dutch applied university where we use mastery learning to teach students software development, the code for our learning system is open source so feel free to take a look [1].

I personally always followed traditional schooling but programs like flip the classroom or https://www.khanacademy.org/ really helped me and I now also see the same value in my own teaching and your work so thanks for working on this.

At my program we have experimented a lot with teacher bots, AI grading, using AI to generate assignments and other forms of AI but in the end we always came back to 1on1 feedback sessions and ditched the AI to be just an optional tool. In a teacher feedback session a teacher would open the work of the student and grade the work based on how much of the objective was reached. In our experience students will find the tools to not do there homework and that is more than fine as long as they understand what they are doing. We eventually settled on 1 or 2 day exams without AI. Screen recording as proof. Where you get graded on the same objectives and can use any trick you have learned. Assignments typically take 1 day to compleet. Assignments need to be redone if a student scores less than 80%. On the exam often 55% is a passing grade.

So some of the things that pointed out to me where: 90% correct sounds really high. A lot of AI access sounds like a lot of trouble shooting to find the right amount and per student this amount may be different. We for example see that some students do better with AI and others learn less. Students may also ask AI outside of bloomy and I could not find how that is precisely handled. Lastly the course sounds very independent. Are there any group projects or assignments that can be done together. We are for example currently exploring adding tags to assignments to indicate you could pair a programming assignment or that you could pair with AI.

[1]: https://sd42.nl/

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% This looks very poorly thought out by the site alone. The quotes are all concerning as well because all three of them have emdashes. Maybe they're paraphrased, but then those aren't the actual quotes from those educators. Parents and teachers who are willing to put middle schoolers in front of screens more are doing our future a disservice. There are real studies (none that I can find on Bloomy) showcasing how t…

Thanks for engaging! Let me clear up some inaccuracies lest others misunderstand. First, those are all verbatim quotes from the educators. They were taken directly from letters of reference (which I recently had to compile for a quite intense Technical Due Diligence for a district). They're real school leaders. They're listed plainly on the website. You can look them up online. Whether they used AI in the creation or…

> First, those are all verbatim quotes from the educators. They were taken directly from letters of reference (which I recently had to compile for a quite intense Technical Due Diligence for a district). They're real school leaders. They're listed plainly on the website. You can look them up online. Whether they used AI in the creation or editing of their letters, I do not know.

This feels off to me as they don't feel like real quotes given they're all very similar.

> The platform has been designed to minimize PII required. We have a very standard third-party vendor stack. Basically just OpenAI and Anthropic as frontier labs for the models, but neither is permitted to train on our data (we have Zero Data Retention agreements with those organizations). The other vendors are standard for operating the app (e.g., Supabase, Vercel). Nothing crazy here.

There are many sections in your "Privacy Snaphot" section where you don't explicitly say there is data retention. This to me feels like a convenient workaround to the other training callouts. You listed 4 vendors above yet none of that stack is called out transparently in any of your publicly facing documentation. Why? Do kids educations not deserve for parents and staff to understand where the data actually resides and how it's processed? That's the thing with technology in schools - there's always a loophole way for any company to collect and store data on kids. Their behavior, their persona, their intentions, their thoughts... We all know how egregiously Flock is being used against taxpayers. I suspect these types of learning platforms will also be used against kids in the near future and startups like Bloomy don't actually have the improvement of kids as their goal - the goal is $$$. And when you sell off Bloomy to Google or Meta, then what? You state no long term goals and you make no commitments to student, staff or parents. Those districts who trust you have no clue in how they're handing data over to you.

> Not only can users request deletion of their data -- it's standard for any user who cancels their relationship, within 30 days. You can read it right in our privacy policy.

I've read a lot of ToS and Privacy policy for companies like this. They all fall apart when you ask for proof. So... How do you prove the data is gone? I'm a parent who requests my kids account do be deleted along with the data. How do you showcase all of this? I know that, from experience, nobody puts time or effort into this because it's not a money maker. But, yes, I can read your policy. Your policy actually says nothing to the extent of giving me any sort of confidence in how you handle student data. By all means please explain.

Finally, you don't address (at all) the impact study I referenced. So where is your data coming from? Any long term studies? Or are these metrics one offs? You don't share # of students, nothing. I don't understand how you build trust with kids data that is very proximal to AI systems that have not been proven safe with respect to young children. What is Bloomy's response?

Edit: I think it would be rather interesting for Bloomy to provide free accounts to some red-teamers to really understand if what you claim is true with respect to your pipeline of protections. I have zero confidence an educator building something like this has actually thought through data protection, model protection or any of the base level considerations you need when building a tool that handles user data, let alone data of minors.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#105

Hey first of all, Congratulations on the launch. I'm a teacher at a Dutch applied university where we use mastery learning to teach students software development, the code for our learning system is open source so feel free to take a look [1]. I personally always followed traditional schooling but programs like flip the classroom or https://www.khanacademy.org/ really helped me and I now also see the same value in my…

These are really thoughtful points. Thanks for sharing them. I'd love to check out your code.

The percentage mastery threshold on Summit may indeed be quite high, but the Summit also comes after the student has proven they are ready for the it by satisfying the BKT threshold on Climb. Still, though, it is worth testing out mastery percentage thresholds to see if lowering it makes any positive difference (e.g., maybe we are not letting students progress fast enough because the bar for quasi-perfection is so high).

On students asking AI outside of Bloomy: that is always likely to be a challenge. One way we mitigate this is by protecting the clipboard so students cannot copy/paste in or out of the platform. This is especially helpful in our Writing Studio tool, where students write long form essays (although clipboard protection is optional and can be disabled by the teacher/parent if they wish -- e.g., if the student typically drafts in Google Docs or Word and wants to easily paste).

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#106

One metric I would add is mastery under decreasing assistance. A student who answers correctly after three increasingly specific hints has shown something useful, but it is not the same evidence as solving a fresh version unaided. If both outcomes update the skill score equally, the personalized path can advance the student too early. For each attempt, I would keep the skill, item variant, number and specificity of h…

Great points! Agreed on the distinctions. With enough data we should be able to identify lots of cool things about mastery.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#107

Congratulations on the launch! How do you solve for "meaning?" Is there some implicit expectation that kids arrive with motivation to discover meaning, or some extrinsic rewards? As AI essentially commoditizes the mechanical aspects of learning, this is the question we find ourselves asking. I would like to share our journey running a microschool (where our kids go, along with 40 others now) and how we use AI and wha…

This is a very thoughtful response! Thank you. I'd love to chat with you further, if you'd like to reach out directly to me (just use the demo form on the site). We are launching Bloomy this fall with Prenda and Apogee microschools (and in discussions with 1 other large microschool network). Your perspective would be valuable.

Quickly, on meaning: academics are a necessary but insufficient condition for a meaningful school experience. Thus Bloomy is not aiming to solve the meaning question. At the same time, meaning and purpose should (hopefully) create richer outcomes on academics, whether those are pursued using Bloomy or something else.

Meaning is also subjective. You could ask each of our schools using Bloomy what their meaning is -- I'm sure they'd all have an answer, and each answer would be at least a little different.

But I'm sure they'd all say they infuse meaning into their school days.

I'll check out your blog as well.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#108
The focus on mastery learning via adaptive curriculum is a much-needed approach for K-12, especially since the biggest bottleneck in education is often the one-size-fits-all pace. I am curious how you plan to handle the feedback loop between the AI tutor and the student's emotional engagement with the harder subjects. I am working on something similar for adult personal growth at https://mindsolutions.ai/r/hn , where we use personality assessments to tailor the learning experience, but managing the pedagogical side for younger learners is a much more complex challenge.

Re: Launch HN: Bloomy (YC S26) – AI-powered mastery learning for K-12

#109

Congratulations on the launch! How do you solve for "meaning?" Is there some implicit expectation that kids arrive with motivation to discover meaning, or some extrinsic rewards? As AI essentially commoditizes the mechanical aspects of learning, this is the question we find ourselves asking. I would like to share our journey running a microschool (where our kids go, along with 40 others now) and how we use AI and wha…

This is a very thoughtful response! Thank you. I'd love to chat with you further, if you'd like to reach out directly to me (just use the demo form on the site). We are launching Bloomy this fall with Prenda and Apogee microschools (and in discussions with 1 other large microschool network). Your perspective would be valuable. Quickly, on meaning: academics are a necessary but insufficient condition for a meaningful…

Will reach out, thanks!
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