School Yourself Named a Verizon Powerful Answers Award Winner for 2014

Verizon’s Multi-Million Dollar Challenge Generated Thousands of Innovative Ideas from across the Globe

We're proud to announce that School Yourself has been named a 2014 Powerful Answers Award winner in the education category. Verizon’s second consecutive multi-million dollar global challenge sought powerful ideas that may leverage Verizon’s cutting-edge technology and will help deliver groundbreaking solutions and social good in four core areas: education, healthcare, sustainability, and transportation.

School Yourself is one of three winners in the education category and one of 12 winners total (three in each category). The ideas that win the top prizes of $1 million in each category will be revealed on Jan. 27, 2015 in New York City. The remaining eight winners will receive $250,000 each, for a total of $6 million awarded by Verizon.

John Doherty, senior vice president, Corporate Development for Verizon, said, "We’re blown away by this year’s winners and look forward to revealing who will take home the top prize of $1 million. All 12 winners have shared impressive ideas and solutions and we look forward to seeing them succeed and working with them to leverage our technology and help make the world a better place."

In addition to the prize money, School Yourself has the opportunity to connect with a variety of network, business development and marketing experts, and partners across Verizon to explore ongoing collaborations.

Watch School Yourself's participation in the Powerful Answers Awards Event live on January 27 via www.verizonwireless.com/news. And don’t forget to root for us via #VZPAA.

School Yourself coming to edX

We're excited to announce that our Algebra and Geometry lessons will be appearing on edX as part of their High School Initiative. You can sign up for the courses here, and you can check out the announcement by edX CEO Anant Agarwal on the edX blog.

Both courses will be available in early 2015. And of course, all the lessons will continue to be available on the School Yourself site as we produce them.

A quick shout-out to our very own Michael Fountaine, who designed the beautiful banners for our two courses. First up is the banner for AlgebraX:

If you look carefully, you'll notice the repeating pattern in the background actually consists of the graphs of y = x^0, y = x^1, y = x^2, and y = x^3. Nifty, right?

And here's the corresponding banner for GeometryX:

The background pattern for this one are 0-, 1-, 2-, and 3-dimensional hypercubes.

Happy Pi Day!

It's March 14, which means it's Pi Day!

To celebrate, we've compiled a list of our favorite interactive lessons involving pi:

Circumference and pi

Find the distance around a circle (and then eat some pi). And maybe get a head start on memorizing pi's digits?

Circle area

Using circumference to find a circle's area. If you've never worked through this proof before, you'll definitely want to check it out!

Radians

Discover another way to measure angles. There's more to angles than just degrees...

Sector area

If you're eating a slice of pie, discover a sure-fire way to find its area!

Sine, cosine, and tangent functions

We've completely reworked our introduction to trigonometry, and those infamous trig functions. Play with interactive right triangles as you learn about these functions, and discover what they can do!





In other news, our probability-based game "Beat the Odds" has been named a winner of WGBH's Education Innovation Challenge! (And they even made a video about us.)

And on a final note, we're hard at work producing lessons on trigonometry and volumes of solids, and many of those formulas also have a pi floating around! Here's a teaser of what's to come: