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About this site

iPad Textbook Company

Client

Peter Bakhyryev, Genius Education

CS 5150 project team coordinator

Tim Novikoff
tnovikoff@gmail.com

Background

Genius Education is a company, currently in formation and based in New York City, that aims to replace high school textbooks with apps on slate devices like the iPad. The content is all new; we do not adapt old textbooks as our vision for a new educational product departs too much from textbooks to make retrofitting existing materials worthwhile.

The basic framework for displaying the material in our apps is a web page within the app. Because of this, most of the interactive elements of our apps must be done in web-friendly technologies such as javascript. However, our content creators (math teachers and professors who write the material and design the animations and interactive features) are generally not fluent in javascript themselves; they are simply good at explaining math and designing pedagogically useful interactive features and animations.

Goal

The goal of this project will be to make software, either a web-based solution or a downloadable application, to facilitate the distributed generation of our interactive features and animations. We need our team of content creators, teachers and professors who are dispersed around the state and country, to be able design interactive features and animations from home while writing the accompanying text etc.

We are making software that allows users, our team of content creators, to design and build interactive features and mathematical animations, through a GUI. For the purposes of this course, we will start with a simple class of interactive features like simple 2D coordinate geometry interactive diagrams and go from there.

Team

All sorts of team members are needed, and the platform we use to build this software will depend on the team. One possibility is a web-based solution so that HTML, PHP and similar technologies would be most useful. Another possibility is that we make a downloadable application in Objective C or Java. At this point, it could definitely go either way.

In addition to coders we also need people to design the user interface, create graphics, test the software, coordinate team efforts, communicate with testers outside of the team, and much more. No matter what your skill set, there is likely a place for you on this team so all are welcome to apply!

Contact

Anybody interested should contact Tim Novikoff (gmail: tnovikoff) with a simple statement that you are possibly interested, and any information about yourself which you wish to include. Getting specific information about your background, experience and interests will follow from there.