HN Explorer

Ask HN: Review our weekend project, quizforge.com

6 points by noodle ↗ HN
Given the post on the front page about selling to teachers (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3011981), I thought it would be a good time to post a weekend project created by myself and someone else who doesn't frequent HN so much.

The concept is simple -- we're looking to make teacher's lives easier by providing a service that quickly/easily creates randomly generated quizzes on demand and ready to print. Only works for basic math right now, but we want to expand it into more complex math and different subjects. We have a long list of things we want to do, but its new and just now polished enough to show people.

We have some teacher test subjects, but we'd love to hear feedback from anyone. There are a few things we still need to add in and wire up, but the MVP is about 90-95% done and we're looking for feedback to iterate on.

Its our intent to have a freemium model where the paid account runs something in the $20/year range.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Good idea? Good price?

p.s.: as a warning, we'll probably wipe the user table within the next week or so. If anyone provides feedback and wants a free permanent account, drop me a line. I don't imagine HN will be the actual target user base, so I don't anticipate most people minding.

8 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 29.5 ms ] thread
yequalsx
I'm a mathematics teacher that teaches some basic math courses.

I like the top part of the webpage. It's very nice. The bottom part's font size is way too small. It was hard to read so I didn't. Also the color of the font was too light and that compounded the problem.

I'd like to see how a quiz is made before signing up. I hate that I have to register before seeing how a quiz is made and what options there are while making one. I didn't sign up but will check back.

noodle
we do plan on linking some examples on the front page soon. its fresh off the presses, we literally high-fived about it working about 30 minutes ago. we don't have the marketing stuff complete just yet.

will look into the readability and change it asap.

much appreciated :)

yequalsx
You're welcome. It's a nice site and if you can pull it off it's a nice idea. It would be nice to pay for a service like this provided the cost wasn't too high.
noodle
What do you think would be a reasonable cost given your budget as a teacher? The feedback we're getting from friends will probably be skewed by geography. Perspective from people in other areas would be appreciated.

edit: Also, we fixed the small font thing. Or, at least, made it better. We do intend on moving it away from a big wall of text.

yequalsx
You mentioned a $20 figure and this has biased my feelings. It's known that throwing out a figure causes an anchoring effect by which people judge the value of an object or service.

I've been teaching for a long enough time now that I have a large set of exercises that I've typed up and written out solutions to. I do continue to create new problems and problem sets but I've reached the point where I can easily reuse old problem by making small modifications.

Now I would definitely use something that could create graphs easily. If you could generate the graph of two functions intersecting at points with integer coordinates then that would be really nice. Or one that generates problems with real world data. It's a pain to find out how the life expectancy of Botswana has changed over time and then creating a scatter plot of that for use in a problem.

There are certain problem types that would make this service quite valuable to me. Of course I haven't had a pay raise in over 3 years so my budget is quite limited.

EDIT: Font size change and color change is nice.

noodle
Fair. Do you feel that $20/year is reasonable or are your initially anchored feelings negative? We wouldn't be making any huge shift upward if we do move the price up.

We can probably move into custom graphs and real-world data as we bump up the grade level of the math generation.

What types of problems (if they're not the types you just mentioned) would be valuable?

yequalsx
My initial reaction to seeing the $20 number was that it was more than reasonable. I thought it inexpensive.

Factoring polynomial problems. It's a pain to come up with them. Writing problems where the solution to a quadratic equation has to be integers are a pain. Especially if they are of the type:

(x - 3) (x + 2) = (some number to make it work out nice)

Generating fraction problems where the denominators don't get out of control is and having the problems with a good mix of denominators is good. I've seen some ridiculous computer generated fraction quizzes.