New teacher-driven features allow more control and more seamless math experience
PHILADELPHIA, June 27, 2013– In its ongoing mission to make math painless for students and educators, education technology startup FastFig released powerful new features yesterday that give teachers increased control.
“For us, the priority is always making sure that teachers and students have the best tool possible,” said FastFig Founder and CTO Brian Peacock.
By soliciting steady feedback from the thousands of teachers, students and professionals that currently use FastFig, Peacock and the team were able to focus on a few important features that would give teachers the power and flexibility to use the program at more levels of math. Educators using FastFig liked how easy it was to use with plain language, compared with some of the other, more expensive code-based math programs, and the new update expands that capability to all levels of math.
“We wanted to make FastFig the default choice for educators whenever they need to show math to their students,” Peacock said. “For that, we knew it had to look like real math that a student might turn in on a piece of paper.”
The update also allows FastFig Premium members to turn off the program’s solving engine, so that teachers who want to can monitor every step of a student’s problem solving.
For the past two months, the FastFig platform has gone through steady improvement, leading to the release of FastFig Premium in May.
The story of FastFig began two years ago, when Peacock was an engineering student with insufficient tools. “All of the math software my school purchased was incredibly difficult to use so we just didn’t use them,” Peacock said. The tools also required that he be at one computer – not using multiple devices the way he and his classmates all did regularly. Finding himself constantly working with pen, paper and calculator, he decided there had to be a better way, and began teaching himself to code so he could create FastFig.
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FastFig, “The Word Processor for Math,” does to the calculator what the word processor did to the typewriter. Our platform pairs a powerful math engine with a proprietary, patent-pending user interface that intelligently determines if a user is typing math or text and formats it accordingly, solving basic math, through algebra all the way up to calculus. Collaborative tools allow users to save their notes on any device, share them with others around the world, and print or export easily. FastFig was funded by the prestigious DreamIt Ventures as part of their inaugural Austin program in 2013. We’ve been featured in places like the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Business Insider and Technically Philly, and is consistently one of the top utility apps in the Google Chrome Appstore.
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If you would like more information about FastFig, please contact Jay Hotaling at email at:
jay @ fastfig.com.
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