The HSE Initiative Intends to Boost SAT College Readiness
Eric’s High School Experience is an online K-12 education resource that offers interactive learning tools for those attempting the SAT, seeking ways to improve their high school performance or just keeping up with a lifelong learning goal.
It is a response to the College Board’s call to action after the 2013 SAT report on College & Career readiness revealed that only 43% of students that took the SAT were qualified as college-ready, and that this number had remained virtually unchanged for five years.
The initiative offers a learning material called Virtual Smart Book (VSB), an interactive book containing animated lectures with recorded narrations that will teach students the subject of choice and test their understanding with quizzes. In specific subjects, the student will have a safe virtual environment to practice what she has learned. For example, in the Electronics subject, the student will build and test circuits.
The VSBs currently cover: Literature, Biology, Economics, Math, Chemistry, Art History, Electronics, Physics, ROTC, Computer Science, European History, Music Theory and 3D-modeling. All available for free on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS platforms.
With cloud-based progress storage, with one single account, the student can keep track of all the different cross-platform VSBs she is taking. When logged-in Eric’s HSE website, the student will see a progression bar on all courses and the virtual medals she has earned so far for watching videos and completing quizzes successfully.
Also available is the SAT Virtual Smart Book, which is a collection of practice tests based on the College Board’s SAT Study Guide. This VSB is an automated answer sheet that calculates the results and also provides the best way to solve each item.
A study published by Gen4Mobile, the startup behind Eric’s HSE, evaluated the SAT results of a senior High School student revealing that he raised his score by 310 points after using SAT VSB app for two hours a day over a three-week period.
Eric’s HSE also offers games, currently on the subject of Corrosion, for both adults and kids. They are also for free on all platforms. Right now titles in development include: Language games (English, Spanish, French and Chinese) and Biology games.
Gen4Mobile has plans to make all their products more synergistically interactive, e.g. by allowing students to convert medals earned in VSBs into resources for building a stronger nation in the game Rise of Modern Empires.
For the curious, the name of this resource came after the creator Eric Manalac, CTO at MVE Systems and co-founder of Gen4Mobile. As a high school senior himself, he saw the potential of mobile platforms in making learning a more engaging experience. His projects were recently awarded on MP Reader’s “Corrosion Innovation” 2013 Choice Awards which recognized the best solutions to remedy the $2.2 trillion global cost of corrosion.
For other learning resources, check out another gamified project on World History, The Big History Project, which covers historical topics from the Big Bang to modern day.
