Welcome to Woof Learning. Here's more about us.
The backstory
As a parent of two grade school-aged kids, we try to make sure that they have good habits around reading and math skills. This means homework, reading interesting books, random math questions while driving in the car (I promise, they enjoy this), etc. They love books, and they love solving problems, and they also love screens. While there are plenty of computer- and app-based educational games out there, many of them are a bit heavy on the "game" and light on the learning. I tried with Woof Learning to stick to the fundamentals: reading and math.
The fun is in the practice itself, and the positive feedback both from the points and doggy badges that you can win as you play. The focus isn't on "right" or "wrong," but in helping to build understanding and reinforcing learning.
Woof Reading builds reading comprehension skills in kids from Kindergarten through 5th grade (and beyond). During gameplay, it lets you pick a story topic and a story type (ex. story, poem), and then it "writes" a story for you. Once you've read through it, there's a few questions at the bottom that you can answer to win points and dog badges. The cool thing here is that, whether the answers you give are spot-on or maybe a bit off, Woof Reading will provide helpful feedback with text evidence and will point the reader to the part of the story where they could find the answer. We do this by integrating with a brilliant AI technology that can understand the story, the questions, and the resposnes...and then to give substantive, relevant feedback. See more on the use of AI below.
Woof Math has a similar gameplay experience, but is simpler: you select the type of math that you want to play (ex. addition, subtraction, division, multiplication) and how challenging the questions should be, and away you go.
Finally, what about the "woof" in Woof Math? Well, candidly, it's a bit of an homage to our dog Charlie. You may even notice a cat sneaking in there (our cat Eli). But really, it was just a way to make it more of a game, and keep it loose. Enjoy!
Ted Schuster
Founder and developer, Woof Learning
Built in Illinois
WoofLearning@gmail.com
Woof Learning uses AI (artificial intelligence) to enhance your experience
Woof Learning uses an AI assistant called Claude from Anthropic in three ways: (1) In Woof Reading, to generate story ideas and questions about those stories, and (2) to evaluate the answers to those questions, and finally, (3) in the "me" page where you can see your personal progress and account details (see the "Feedback from your last 10 challenges" section). Here, we share information on the Woof Math timed challenge questions you didn't answer correctly so that Anthropic can help to provide helpful feedback on areas to focus continued learning. The "evaluations" in the "reading" and "me" pages do not just say "right" or "wrong," but also provide contextual feedback to help to build understanding.
Why are you using AI?
This technology is particularly good at taking prompts - for example, "write a poem about my dog Charlie," and then constructing stories that are not just legible, but also quite interesting. Similarly, if you're asking about real-world information ("write a story about Abraham Lincoln") - the responses are reliably accurate. The technology also does an impressive job of making sense of information and providing feedback that is easy to understand, and conversational in tone. If a student is, for instance, having some trouble with multiplying by 9's, Woof Learning can provide this feedback along with helpful suggestions.
Woof Reading is NOT intended to replace live instruction, or reading with a parent or tutor - it is simply a way to supplement and hopefully strengthen these efforts. It is also NOT intended to replace the beauty and originality of books and storytelling. The stories that Claude creates are fun (and sometimes witty), but are meant to be rather straightforward. The idea here is not to produce profound literature, but to simply help with reading comprehension.
What are you doing to make this app safe to use?
AI tools are very "intelligent," but are guided by what a user asks them to do. Woof Reading, for this reason, does not allow you to freely ask for any story idea. Instead, it relies on two simple inputs: (1) the type of content to create (ex. "poem," "story"), and (2) a fixed set of prompts (story ideas) that we have selected, and which a user can choose in the app. So for instance, during the game, you may ask Woof Reading to write a "poem" about "space travel." You can see all of the pre-set prompts for Woof reading here. Put simply, we set the type of stories that can be created so that all topics are safe and, ideally, interesting. We also have additional safeguards in place to ensure that appropriate language is used.
Anthropic (the maker of Claude) also details their user safety approach here.
If you have any feedback on the prompts, or further questions on the use of AI in Woof Learning, please contact us at WoofLearning@gmail.com.
Privacy policy
Woof Learning (Woof Math, Woof Reading) does not presently have advertising on this site nor does it sell or share any information gathered with any third party, such as an advertising network.
Woof Learning does ask for a reasonable amount of personal information during the sign up (account creation) process, which is detailed below, in order to operate the Woof Learning games. Note that none of this data is shared with Anthropic ("Claude").
You may both review all information that you've shared with Woof Reading at any time (in the Account page), and you may also delete your Woof Reading account at any time, which will permanently remove all information shared with Woof Learning as well as other data such as your scores.
Below is the information that is required to create a Woof Learning account:
- "Your parent's email": We ask for a parent email, not a child's email, to help us identify you when you can't find your username or password. To clarify, Woof Learning will NOT email you as a part of this process. If in the future we decide to send out emails with updates to the site, for example, we will explicitly ask for your permission in the app.
- Username: This is how game players will be referred to during game play.
- Password: Your password will be encrypted, and you can reset it at any time.
- Security questions: We ask for a few "security questions" when you sign up for a Woof Learning account. This is also purely for the purposes of helping to get you access to your account again if you forget your username or password.