Inspiration
As a lifelong nerd, I have always been interested in learning. Not just learning the materials themselves, but learning about learning. For problem-solving subjects like Math, Physics, Chemistry, studying is quite clear-cut: do more problem sets, and try to truly grasp the solutions. For conceptual and information-heavy subjects like History, Geography, Biology, the elixir is more obscure. I dabbled in multiple ways to study these, from making the concepts a song, or singing and dancing while reciting the information, to drawing mind maps of how all the information is connected, but they still proved to be too time-consuming and inefficient.
The science behind
Entered active recall. Active recall is the process of actively retrieving the information because it is necessary to do so--like on an exam--rather than passively reciting the knowledge. Our brain needs a reason to remember something. This is why the studying sessions when my friend and I quizzed each other, and the times when I failed to answer an exam question, marked the knowledge so vividly in my mind.
Implementation
One cannot always have a friend to quiz us, or take pseudo exams over and over, though. Until Quizzie. This application uses Google Gemini LLM to generate a set of answers (multiple wrong, one correct) to the same question by leveraging the model's excellent ability to paraphrase sentences, while tweaking key words that are similar but different. This makes for excellently ambiguous answer choices that require one to truly understand the nuances of the concept.
The future of studying
The future of studying, as I envision: students prepare all lecture notes and important concepts from the textbook, from which they create sets of questions and answers by themselves, then feed those question-answer to Quizzie input field. Quizzie generates and returns the questions and their multiple answers. The student can decide if they want to keep certain generated quizzes or not, as the model may produce less than ideal answers or get hallucinated, and save them to their personal account. Students can share their generated quizzes with each other, multiplying the efficiency. During study session meetups, students can quiz each other with their own quiz, and discuss the answers furthermore to understand the concepts even more deeply.
Money money
High performing students lead to better performance for the schools, so schools should feel incentivized to purchase subscriptions of this app, which will be the main revenue. Individual users, like someone studying independently for a test, or for a job that requires knowledge tests, can either buy a short term subscription ad-free, or use the app for free with the condition of watching mandatory ads.
Room for growth
Further work on Quizzie would be a phone app extension, where users can stay logged in and store the quizzes locally, and the abilities to give the quizzes animation with a personal touch of the user. The more studying feels like a game, the better the outcome. Nerds unite.
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