Creating an unrivalled AI experience for UK Educators
☀️ Stanley is the response to a dynamic space of education; a new platform where teachers can work collaboratively alongside AI to help accelerate learning. It's built upon the idea that everyone deserves a good quality education and in order for this to happen, good quality teaching needs to take place.
Stanley pairs schools data with Stanley AI alongside all the apps & services teachers use to create an unrivaled AI experience for schools. It goes beyond generative AI as it helps create actionable insights for all tiers of teachers, from pastoral to academic teaching. Pairing school data with Stanley is powerful as it allows educators to tap into potentially unused data they may not have used. Stanley has access to all school data, giving it a clear picture of schools. This allows teachers to ask questions like "Why has our attendance dropped so low?' or "What students are getting the most negative behaviour points and in what lessons" and Stanley can spot patterns and trends while providing actionable insights.
Where Stanley gets powerful is when it integrates to our in-house tools and external tools. Activities is a way for students to fill out tests created in minutes by teachers utilising Stanley AI. Activities can range from multiple choice, fill in the gaps to complex exam questions ranging from 2, 4 or even 12 mark questions; and because Stanley knows your school, it can give accurate marking based on Exam Boards examining terminology and technique tailored to subjects. Stanley spaces quicly allows you to share activities and generated content to all other teachers, serving as a central place for Subject Departments and SLTs to share content and work efficiently.
When external tools are added, Stanley just gets more powerful. Powerpoint generation for lessons is already common in other teaching AI tools but Stanley takes it to the next level. You can simply ask Stanley "Create me a computer science lesson powerpoint on programming fundamentals" and because it has access to school data it already knows the exam board is OCR and can create an intuitive powerpoint tailored to the exam board. It goes the extra length to create meaningful starter tasks based on what Stanley already knows. If Stanley notices that students may be struggling with python based on data from Stanley activities it can create a starter task designed to address learning concerns.
Stanley connects to your school email allowing it to draft, send and view your emails when prompted. This allows prompts like "Whats the latest update of the new SEND provision looking like from my emails" or "Create a powerpoint of whole school attendance by year group and send it to Laura" possible, collating data from multiple sources to help accelerate tasks
Stanley is built to help speed up workflows, allowing teachers to focus on teaching that really matters through powerful integrations.
How we built it
Stanley on the web is built with Next.js and styled with tailwind. The AI Stanley uses is a collation of various AI models from different providers using the most efficient model for the task keeping costs low. Fetching school data is made possible through Wonde and an intuitive sync model we've made. Typically other EdTech platforms sync from wonder to their database nightly, but we've incorporated a live sync, allowing Stanley to be up to date on behaviour events and attendance
Challenges we ran into
Making meaningful powerpoints was a challenge we ran into that was quickly solved by "The knowledegbase". By creating a collation of data for each subject and examboard, we gave AI a reliable source of data that is managed by us to use to create relevant powerpoints and activities. The knowledgebase also means we can use cheaper AI models and we can spend less usage on things like web searching costs. Making a consistent AI marker was something also tricky, but through RAG and prompting, we managed to get an AI that was capable of marking GCSE questions reliably.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The whole Stanley project is great feat and stands for a progressive direction for education and teachers. It streamlines workflows, frees up time and gives hours back to teachers so they can focus on teaching.
What's next for Stanley
There's so much more in store for Stanley, we hope for a more progressive external integration catalog with tools like Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams and other software so Stanley can work where teachers do. We'd like to implement new features like automations to streamline anything in the teacher world and a new mobile app to use Stanley on the go
