“Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze, 1851

“Washington Crossing the Delaware” by Emanuel Leutze, 1851

Welcome to our adventure!

A combination of pique + curiosity, Piqosity is a marketplace and tool for the creation and delivery of individualized, adaptive assessments and lessons. It’s a website where you can create a personalized quiz on any topic using crowd-sourced content.

If we want to talk lofty, Piqosity is our attempt to fix what we see as an increasingly dysfunctional education system in the United States – a system where too many kids are left behind, bored, or must pay to get ahead.

An influential Silicon Valley group, GSV Advisors, has recommended a revolution:

“We can choose to accept the status quo of a failing education system or we can opt to embrace the transformative potential of technology, re-conceptualize traditional models and invest in building our nation’s education and knowledge capital. This is our call to arms. Which side of history will we be on?”

We at Piqosity want to be on the side of history that makes a difference, that increases access to a quality education in the US and the world.

Given such lofty goals, it may seem ironic that our initial set of features focuses almost exclusively on assessments, particularly standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. We realize and admit that standardized tests are increasingly getting a bad reputation in the United States.

However, there’s no denying that this year more than 50 million American K-12 students will take a standardized test (essentially every public school student in grades 3-12 as required by the Every Student Succeeds Act plus some). And collectively they’ll spend some $16 billion doing it. Standardized tests are very present now and in the near future.

So we’re starting with assessments because those 50 million American students need our help right now.

But we don’t plan to stop at just helping kids do better on tests. We chose the name Piqosity because we plan to address the fundamental challenges of education. For example, you could argue that 22 students in a classroom is 21 students too many. Everyone learns differently, and we think that we can create an individualized experience optimized to each learner.

We founded Piqosity on three scalable pillars:

  1. A user-driven marketplace to exchange learning content
  2. Analytics-driven individualization of that content
  3. Socialization of user learners

These three pillars will guide our work as we expand beyond assessments to tutoring, teaching, and ultimately piquing anyone’s curiosity.

We’re just getting started on this exciting journey, and we hope that you’ll join us for the ride!

Shelby Joe & Kannan Ramakrishnan