In a big week for startups in the education sector following the launch of the first EduGrowth accelerator intake yesterday, Sydney company Mathspace has announced its landing of a deal with the Hong Kong Government through its edutech arm, HKEdCity.
Following a global tender process, the company will be the digital maths resource for schools in Hong Kong, covering the equivalent of grades 3 to 10. As part of the deal, HKEdCity will offer the Mathspace program to government schools for free over the next three years.
This is part of Hong Kong’s eResources Acquisition Project, which seeks to encourage teachers to apply the latest technologies in their teaching. HKEdCity expects around 100 schools to take advantage of the program.
Mo Jebara, CEO of Mathspace, said Hong Kong’s high position in global rankings for mathematics education shows the quality of the Mathspace product.
“This is clearly a region that prioritises maths education. The fact that Mathspace was selected above all other digital maths resources is a great testament to the quality of our product and pedagogical approach,” he said.
The startup, founded in 2010 and launched to the public in 2012, in effect puts the maths textbook and student’s exercise book both online, allowing teachers to mark work through the platform for both themselves and the student to later look back on.
The last big win for the startup came last November, when it announced an extension of its partnership with global publisher Pearson Education that is seeing its program rolled out across colleges around the United States.
There are also more than 100,000 Australian students using the platform across over 200 schools.
Looking to bring technology into law schools is legal firm Gilbert + Tobin, which has partnered with the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and legal-focused software company Neota Logic to create a new course to provide law students at the university will experience in using new legal technology.
The course, titled ‘Designing Technology Solutions for Access to Justice’ will be introduced in semester two of this year as an elective for undergraduate and Juris Doctor students.
With Neota Logic’s platform allowing non-programmers to build, test, maintain, and deploy apps, the course will see students use the platform to design legal information systems to generate legal documents from precedents, and to provide relevant legal information in response to queries.
Following this, students will work in teams to partner with not-for-profit organisations to design and build a legal information system in response to a particular problem or issue.
The course is modelled on a program Neota Logic developed in the US with Georgetown University Law School; the cost of the software licence will be covered by Gilbert + Tobin.
Associate Professor Lyria Bennett Moses, course convenor, said the course will give students the opportunity to understand and develop skills in an important field of legal innovation.
“Legal information systems, sometimes referred to as ‘apps’, are being increasingly used as a means of providing relevant legal information and generating legal documents. The course will help students understand how these systems work and how to build them, as well as understanding their limitations and negative impacts,” she said.
“The ability to understand and build legal technologies will become an increasingly valuable skill in the marketplace, while the ability to provide appropriate critique and understand their limitations remains important for the legal profession.”
Gilbert + Tobin has made a couple of forays into tech; it has invested in law startup LegalVision.
Image: The Mathspace team. Source: Supplied.
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