#219 AI in Education with Simon Woodhead (Eedi's Chief Data Scientist)

Well, let's go back to the start of the story because we'll have some listeners who are as old as us, Simon, who may remember the company Autograph.

And it's still around in various guises, but that's where we first started our kind of working relationship.

Just tell us a little bit about Autograph and those early days of kind of ed tech in that format.

What was Autograph? How did you get involved? And what lessons did you learn from that experience?

Yeah, so Autograph was one of the first companies which did dynamic visualization of mathematics.

And they really were fantastic and leading in that space for quite a while, particularly on the 3D side.

um so um there were other companies um which came later so Geogebra came later Desmos came later and they're the kind of probably the big names that everybody will have heard of but um uh yeah there was Cabri and there was Autograph and a couple of others I've forgotten the names of um when when we were doing this work um I actually started there straight after doing my PhD um I wanted to work specifically in building learning content for mathematics, basically.

So I worked there where I created lots of resources on things like, you've probably seen all of these visualizations, everybody's probably seen these, where you do things like cut up a circle and then reorder all the pieces to show how you can calculate the area of a circle.

And yeah, and then you had things like the dynamic geometry.

So for demonstrating things like the circle theorem.

And yeah, I was actually there for seven years.

And I think we met about halfway through that time there.

when you'd done a review of Autograph and you'd given us a really fantastic review on your website.

So your website has been going for a very, very long time now as well.

And you were reviewing lots of other products.

But I remember you gave Autograph a really kind of stellar review.

And then we got in touch and we wrote, well, you wrote two books, Autograph Activities.

And there was one student book and there was one teacher book.

Did we do an accompanying website for that as well? Possibly,

yeah.

I'll tell you what's interesting here, Simon, because in the day and age we live in now, it is mad that you had to get autographed on a CD originally.

So that was the first thing.

And then there would be like autograph two, and then there'd be autograph three, and maybe like a year or 18 months or two years in between.

There's no like gradual like update or anything like that.

And also for listeners who will be very familiar with Desmos, there was no autograph web or anything.