A few years after leaving grad school, I tried picking math back up. The textbook experience was as bad as I remembered — no feedback, no way to ask questions, no one to help when you were stuck.
Private tutoring is the real solution, and it worked for me as a kid — it built confidence in a way class never did. But it's expensive. I wanted to build something that could give that experience to anyone.
The design challenge I cared most about: don't let AI become a homework machine. The whole point of learning math is developing the ability to think through hard problems. So Marcus is built to guide, not solve — it asks questions, gives hints, and explains step by step, but doesn't hand you answers.
It covers K–12 through college-level math (linear algebra, calc, etc.), adapts to what you know, and tries to be the patient tutor most people never had access to.
Would love feedback, especially from students or educators.
the site immediately ran out of tokens. Nice idea.
My struggle is to motivate my students to just to their homework. Doing anything on top of that is very hard. Unless you convince schools to use your system (or Khan academy) instead of regular homework, it will be tough to make headway for all but the best students who breeze through homework - but those don't need your product as much.
BTW, the site ran out of tokens before it could even complete one step (8000 tokens), so I could not fully evaluate.
This seems easy enough (at least for K12 math) that you could probably host it from home on a local model, ignoring all the cloud API limits.
A few years after leaving grad school, I tried picking math back up. The textbook experience was as bad as I remembered — no feedback, no way to ask questions, no one to help when you were stuck.
Private tutoring is the real solution, and it worked for me as a kid — it built confidence in a way class never did. But it's expensive. I wanted to build something that could give that experience to anyone.
The design challenge I cared most about: don't let AI become a homework machine. The whole point of learning math is developing the ability to think through hard problems. So Marcus is built to guide, not solve — it asks questions, gives hints, and explains step by step, but doesn't hand you answers.
It covers K–12 through college-level math (linear algebra, calc, etc.), adapts to what you know, and tries to be the patient tutor most people never had access to.
Would love feedback, especially from students or educators.
the site immediately ran out of tokens. Nice idea.
My struggle is to motivate my students to just to their homework. Doing anything on top of that is very hard. Unless you convince schools to use your system (or Khan academy) instead of regular homework, it will be tough to make headway for all but the best students who breeze through homework - but those don't need your product as much.
BTW, the site ran out of tokens before it could even complete one step (8000 tokens), so I could not fully evaluate.
This seems easy enough (at least for K12 math) that you could probably host it from home on a local model, ignoring all the cloud API limits.
Good luck!
Thanks so much! Really appreciate the feedback.
Sorry about that! Just granted infinite token usage to all those who signed up in the last hour. Feel free to play around.