Innovation timeline
We create the products others follow
From team-based quiz games to AI-personalised learning experiences, Zzish has been first-to-market with the features that now define modern formative assessment. Together, these innovations compound into a defensible data and infrastructure moat that would take years for others to replicate.
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AI-generated courses at global scale
First to use AI to automatically generate entire courses of curriculum-aligned content for every subject, every grade, and every country worldwide.
Wherever a teacher is in the world and whatever they teach, we use AI to generate their entire course in their native language so quickly that it appears the content was there already.
It was a significant feat of optimisation to make it work so rapidly and effectively.
Teachers can also create and edit their own custom courses of 400 quizzes in seconds.
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Curriculum-aligned AI speaking scenarios
First to map AI speaking avatars to high-stakes language exams and deliver exam-aligned feedback for every phrase.
Getting a state-of-the-art AI speaking app working in the browser was a non-trivial exercise that took months of iteration and testing. By working in the browser on any device, teachers can instantly deploy it in the classroom with nothing to install.
We also invested heavily in carefully designing hundreds of exam-aligned scenarios covering GCSE French, Spanish, and German, IGCSE languages, High School and AP Spanish, IELTS Part 1 and Part 3 as well as our own Marvely scenarios mapped across CEFR levels A1 to B2 for younger learners.
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AI voice cloning for language influencers
First to clone the voices of language learning influencers and let followers hold conversations with their AI twin.
Our initial version of Marvely was inspired by the language learning influencers on social media who wanted a new way to engage their followers and help them learn a language.
15 of the world's top 100 language learning influencers were keen to participate.
We pivoted Marvely to focus on the classroom, but our relationships with influencers remain strong and are ripe for further partnerships.
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AI feedback for every quiz result
First to automatically generate personalised written feedback for every student response after each quiz.
According to the Education Endowment Foundation, regular personalised feedback is one of the most impactful things teachers can do to help students succeed.
But teachers struggle to find the time to do this.
We made it possible for teachers to provide this feedback instantly and efficiently whilst being able to customise it to their own or their school's feedback style.
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Made 14,000 Oak lessons available
First to make available the Oak National Academy's 14,000 lessons in a full assessment application. These lessons cover every grade and subject in the UK curriculum.
With the permission of Oak and under an Open Government License, we scraped their entire site to import 70,000 quizzes, worksheets, slide decks, and videos โ a task that took several months to complete. Whilst they later implemented an API, the API does not give full access to the content and when they updated the site we re-scraped again.
The content covers every year and subject up to age 16 (GCSE level) and could now be effortlessly translated, with the help of AI, into any other language. With approximately 175,000 questions, many with associated images, the data also presents a unique asset for training LLMs.
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Smart Quizzes redefine personalised learning
Launched Smart Quizzes, our next generation quiz technology that uses generative AI to create personalised learning experiences for every student.
Whilst using AI to create quizzes became commonplace, we took things a step further and used AI to create quizzes with hints and explanations too for every question.
We then integrated these into our quiz engine with an innovative UX that turned simple assessments into complete interactive learning experiences.
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AI-powered quiz creation hits the classroom
First gamified formative assessment platform to ship an AI-powered quiz creator.
Whilst it took our direct competitors more than six months to catch up, our AI-powered quiz creator still packs a special punch with advanced and unique features.
Most notably is our unique ability to use our digitised standards to create quizzes with questions that are automatically tagged and aligned to standards.
These quizzes feed directly into producing mastery data for teachers.
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Blockerzz debuts
Launched Blockerzz, the world's first browser-based 3D block-world quiz game for classrooms.
Blockerzz is a remarkable achievement, a full Minecraft-like game that runs instantly in the browser on any smartphone, tablet, or desktop. We even implemented a VR version that works in an Oculus headset!
With 12 man-months of effort and many advanced optimisations to make it run in real-time on low-end smartphones, the game is a unique and powerful piece of IP letting 60 students play together in a shared world.
Our vision for our Blockerzz platform goes far beyond the two games and could be developed into a true Minecraft competitor for the classroom.
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Next-gen whole class quiz games
First to release an entire suite of modern whole class quiz games, including Battlerzz, Kleo, Rockzz, and Goalzz.
We pioneered whole class team quiz games back in 2017, but in 2022 we took team quiz games to an entirely new level, including our Goalzz game that tied nicely into the World Cup year.
To get Battlerzz to work on poor classroom connections we implemented our own 2D JavaScript games engine that delivers animated sprites seamlessly and efficiently to the browser.
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Leadership analytics arrive
First formative assessment application to provide district and school leaders with daily analytics on the academic progress of every class.
We spent the whole of 2019 building the world's first โ and possibly the world's only โ mastery-based dashboards for school leaders.
Whilst other district and state-level dashboards typically report on end-of-year summative test data, our dashboards uniquely aggregate mastery data from every quiz in every classroom every day, giving school leaders at all levels daily insight into the academic progress of every class.
Google was so impressed with our use of Google BigQuery as the backend, they wrote a case study. Our implementation allows breakdowns to be generated in seconds rather than the many minutes typical of other platforms.
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Mastery-aligned, evidence-driven teaching
- First gamified formative assessment platform to let teachers align questions to standards skills and measure mastery in real time.
- First to use quiz data to evaluate the efficacy of open educational resources.
Since launching our mastery features, we've continued to invest and have digitised around 500 released tests from the Texas, New York and English education departments.
In each test every question is tagged to the respective learning objective in the curriculum or standard so that teachers can effortlessly deploy whole tests or use them as a question bank to create their own.
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Team-based classroom competitions
First to launch team-based quiz games, including First to the Flag and Hoopzz, to drive collaborative play.
Our original Hoopzz and First to the Flag team-based games were what took us viral.
Long before our competitors moved on from boring leaderboards we were turning classrooms into places where even reluctant students were keen to participate.
By focusing on team games we ensured that even less able students felt included and were able to contribute.
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Live push data for teachers
First to use push technology to deliver live quiz progress data to teachers mid-lesson.
It's hard to imagine it now, but back in 2016 getting browser-based teacher dashboards to update in real-time as students answered questions was a real challenge.
We mastered that and teachers loved the fact that student scores emerged in real-time so that they could spot struggling students and help them without having to wait for them to finish the quiz.
The simple three-level bucketing system we pioneered then has since become an industry standard.