An instant tutoring app is taking Japan and Korea by storm

Overworked and underpaid, no wonder the world is facing a dearth of teachers.

According to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, the world will need a legion of teachers in the next two decades: over 24 million for primary school and more than 44 million for secondary school. South Asia, in particular, will face the second-largest teacher shortage, requiring 15 million teachers by 2030.

To address this issue, education technology (edtech) and artificial intelligence have been enlisted to turn the tide. In China, one in four schools is experimenting with using AI to grade student essays, thus reducing the workload of teachers. And if edtech startup Mathpresso has its way, students will each have a private tutor and get answers to their math questions right in their pockets.

Photo credit: Qanda

Founded in June 2015, South Korea-based Mathpresso is the creator of Qanda, an app designed to assist students with their math and science courses. When Qanda was launched in October 2015, the app was positioned as a platform where students can get in touch with private tutors, who were typically recruited from the country’s top schools. Users could ask questions about school work on the platform, and a private tutor would reply within 10 to 20 minutes.

However, similar Q&A-type apps started cropping up in South Korea, and the market became saturated. And because Mathpresso’s co-CEOs and founders – Lee Jong-heun and Lee Yong-jae – used to be private tutors themselves, they noticed that many students were asking the same questions repeatedly.

As such, to differentiate themselves from the competition, Mathpresso opted for a drastic change. Instead of just being a student-tutor messaging platform, Qanda evolved into a so-called “solution search” platform, which allows students to find answers to common math queries within seconds.

The way Qanda works today is pretty straightforward. All users have to do is to launch the camera app on their smartphone and take a picture of the math problem. The app will then detect and analyze the image via optical character recognition (OCR) technology, perform a search in its database, and then provide the answer in a step-by-step format. If the solution isn’t available in the database, Qanda will automatically connect users to a real-life private tutor.

Users’ queries are also added to the database. This allows others with the same problem to find the right solution via the search engine. More queries mean more solutions, and the speed and accuracy of Mathpresso’s search AI is supposed to improve over time.

In South Korea, where Qanda has been operating for nearly four years, Mathpresso claims that the search engine can find the correct answer nine times out of 10. The database also now has over 200 million queries, which include searches and questions.

In addition, Mathpresso claims that while its Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Indonesian services encompass the entire K-12 curriculum, its English service covers up to college-level questions.

Qanda’s OCR technology is not new. In fact, the initial version of the technology is based on Google Cloud’s Vision API. However, the Mathpresso team has improved upon the technology to better scan text and images. On the other hand, the search technology was developed from scratch, and as far as the Mathpresso team understands, no one else in the edtech space has something similar.

“The reason why we rank number one in both Japan and South Korea is because of our solution search platform,” explains Joyce Choi, global director at Mathpresso. Rival apps, she says, can connect users to a teacher to help them solve problems, but that process can take longer than 20 minutes.

In comparison, Mathpresso provides an instantaneous experience, something that’s akin to using search engines like Google. “We want to be the Google of study content. No one else in the education market has the search solution service except for us. We have completely changed the way students study,” shares Choi.

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