Technology

UPchieve, an online tutor app for low-income students, launches a free tool for teachers

Published

4 hours ago

September 20, 2024

UPchieve student (Aaron Custodio) next to UPchieve on a computer

UPchieve, the free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling app for low-income students, announced Thursday it’s giving teachers in Title 1 middle schools and high schools a new tool to ensure their students get the academic support they need.

The new offering, called “UPchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to offer 1:1 support to their students. They can invite students to sign up for tutoring, create classes, and monitor students’ platform usage. Previously, students had to sign up for tutoring services themselves, but with this new product, teachers can now recommend students for 1:1 tutoring at no cost. In the coming weeks, they’ll also be able to assign tutoring sessions to entire classes.

UPchieve for Teachers is available to educators working in Title 1 middle schools and high schools. Title 1 is a federal aid program provided to K-12 schools with the highest number of low-income families within school districts. Approximately 43% of public schools qualify for Title I funding, with fewer than 50,000 schools benefiting from the program.

This new offering is expected to help UPchieve expand its user base by reaching students who may not be aware of free services like this or who may not be actively seeking additional assistance.

“The product is going to be really valuable to teachers because it’s going to help them accomplish some of the hardest parts of their job,” founder Aly Murray told TechCrunch. “Students are coming into the class with different gaps in their foundational skills. Teachers have to try to support all of their students, but there’s not enough time to support each student individually, so that’s a natural place where a tutor can help. We’re really excited about launching a product that’s going to give teachers more control.”

UPchieve was founded in 2016, shortly after Murray graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. As a former low-income student herself, she struggled to access academic support services throughout her schooling and wanted to make it easy for other students to be able to get help whenever they needed it, even when working on homework late at night.

“I was raised by a single mom, and as an immigrant to the United States, she often wasn’t able to help me with schoolwork and with my college applications. And so that had a big impact on my life. It made things very difficult, and I found that I often needed help late at night when there was really nowhere I could turn to for support,” Murray said.

UPchieve says it has matched over 190,000 tutoring requests from more than 20,000 students across all 50 states. Its 24/7 online tutoring sessions are conducted in the in-app messenger or via voice chat on the web or mobile app. UPchieve covers over 30 subjects, including math, science, English, history, humanities, and more.

Tutors can volunteer by signing up on the website. Volunteers can even be students themselves; however, they must be in 9th grade or higher. UPchieve currently has around 2,400 tutors active on the platform.

“All of the volunteers on UPchieve go through a background screening, training, and certification process to become a volunteer tutor. Before they’re ever going to work with a student, they have to pass a quiz in every subject that they want to help students with,” Murray explained.

Similar to other edtech companies, the company utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-4o to assist tutors in providing AI-generated feedback and progress reports to students after the sessions are over. In the future, the company also plans to use AI to help tutors create practice problems and offer AI-generated summaries of student sessions through its Teachers product.

“We have no plans to replace our human tutors with AI tutors anytime in the near future,” Murray added.

As a nonprofit organization, UPchieve relies on charitable donations, grants, and paid partnerships with schools, districts, and corporations. Donors include Atlassian, AT&T, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Guggenheim Capital, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, the Skyline Foundation, and Verizon.

UPchieve has partnered with over 50 schools, and each school or organization pays a $10,000 partnership fee per year or is sponsored by a donor or corporation who pays the fee on their behalf. The company also graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 batch.

In 2023, UPchieve raised over $4 million through philanthropy and earned revenue from paid partnerships. The company claims its annual recurring revenue (ARR) is currently $840,000, which comes solely from paid and sponsored partnerships.

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Technology

Up close with Sony’s PS5 Pro — and the 30th Anniversary model

Published

12 mins ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

Up close with Sony’s PS5 Pro — and the 30th Anniversary model

We’ve now gotten our own brief look at the $700 PS5 Pro, coming this November. Fair warning: it’s a very limited look indeed. Just photos, no touching yet!

Given how little Sony has yet shared about its big, pricy console refresh, and the excitement for the company’s just-announced limited-edition PlayStation 30th Anniversary Collection, I figure you may want a peek anyhow.

Plus, I can now confirm its arrangement of USB ports: unlike what we’d previously heard, both of the console’s USB-C ports will be on the front, with two USB-A around back.

So here are some photos. First, the PS5 Pro. Then, the PlayStation 30th Anniversary Collection, including throwback grey versions of the PS5 Pro, PS5, DualSense, DualSense Edge, and PlayStation Portal — which all include a new version of Sony’s easter egg microtexture that includes a “30” next to the other PlayStation symbols.

PlayStation 30th Anniversary:

More photos of both in our gallery below:

1/23

Starting with the 30th Anniversary Collection; regular PS5 Pro photos later in the gallery.

Photography by Sean Hollister / The Verge

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Technology

The Huawei Watch D2 is a surprise sequel to one of 2022’s weirdest watches

Published

32 mins ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

The Huawei Watch D was one of the weirdest wearables of 2022, and now the airbag-packing, blood-pressure-tracking marvel is back.

Released this week as one of six new Huawei Watch models, the D2 builds on the ground-breaking blood pressure tracking of the first D model. In a world-first for any smartwatch, its ambulatory blood pressure monitoring (ABPM) system is now certified by China’s National Medical Products Administration and the EU’s Medical Device Regulation body.

The blood pressure monitoring tech is housed inside a revised chassis that’s slimmer and lighter than the original Huawei Watch D. Say what you want about the cool health tech, the last one was pretty ugly. The new version is a lot more Apple Watch-esque and features a 1.82-inch AMOLED display. While not a stunning design by any means, it’s at least more agreeable on the eye and a much less offensive housing for some otherwise smashing health gear.

The Huawei Watch D2 paradox

Huawei Watch D2

(Image credit: Huawei)

The advent of Huawei’s Watch D2 continues this device’s heritage as a bit of an enigma. Including blood pressure technology in a device the size of a wristwatch is a marvelous technological feat. Like the previous model, the D2 houses a narrow mechanical airbag in its strap, and on paper, this is the ultimate wearable for anyone with blood pressure issues.

However, Huawei remains banned in the U.S., vastly limiting its reach, and precluding the inclusion of Google‘s Mobile Services. As such, even where you can buy Huawei devices, the ecosystem is incredibly limited and requires the use of a lot of alternative services.

Still, Huawei has taken the best of the Watch D and repackaged inside a much more amiable second iteration. Sadly, it seems the innovative (and arguably life-saving) blood pressure tech will continue to be held back by Huawei’s usual issues.

Blood pressure monitoring in more mainstream smartwatch models remains out of reach. Behind the scenes, Apple has been working on blood pressure monitoring on the Apple Watch for years. Most recently Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported that the Apple Watch Series 10‘s redesign caused a delay with the feature due to problems during testing. The best Apple Watch is now available in stores, with a new titanium finish and a larger display in tow, but no BP technology.

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Technology

Field Tested in the Galapagos

Published

54 mins ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

Normally we share updates through long articles, but writing about photography is like dancing about math. What if we share it in a video? (Spoiler: we are not launching a video app.) If you dig the new format, let us know in the video comments or through Halide@mastodon.social

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Technology

Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts

Published

1 hour ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts

Holes at the top of this image are vertical shafts to underground aqueducts called qanats
Nazarij Buławka et al

Most of the ancient underground aqueducts that enabled humans to settle in the world’s hottest and driest regions have been lost over time. Now, archaeologists are rediscovering them by using artificial intelligence to analyse spy satellite images taken during the cold war.

The oldest known underground aqueducts that are found across much of North Africa and the Middle East are called qanats and are up to 3000 years old. They were designed to carry water from highland or mountain…

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Technology

How generative AI changes consumer lifestyles

Published

2 hours ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

How generative AI changes consumer lifestyles

Host Andrew McDougall sits down with technology experts Jason Thomson and Thomas Slide to discuss the future of generative AI. What can brands do to connect with consumers using the latest generative AI technology? How will this change the way consumers look for information, and what is the next “big” breakthrough in this space? Listen to find out more.

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Technology

This $75 million blockbuster was reportedly shot on an iPhone

Published

2 hours ago

September 20, 2024

NewsAdmin

This $75 million blockbuster was reportedly shot on an iPhone

The highly anticipated horror flick 28 Years Later was shot entirely on the iPhone 15, Wired claimed in a report on Thursday, noting that with a budget of $75 million, it’s is the biggest movie yet to use a smartphone for filming.

The main filming for the Danny Boyle movie finished up last month and the final product is expected to land in theaters in June 2025. Those working on set had reportedly been instructed to sign a non-disclosure agreement to ensure news didn’t leak about the use of the iPhone. It’s possible that Apple and the moviemakers had been planning a big reveal to highlight the powerful capabilities of the iPhone when it comes to capturing moving pictures, but Wired’s report may impact that plan.

It was first suggested that Boyle was using a smartphone for at least some of the shots for 28 Years Later after a photo of the movie set taken by a paparazzi in July revealed, on close inspection, a protective cage holding something that was most definitely not a regular movie camera but instead, quite possibly, a high-end smartphone.

Wired investigated further and received confirmation from several people linked to the movie that Boyle had indeed been using a number of iPhone 15 Pro Max handsets — connected to elaborate rigs — to film scenes for 28 Years Later.

Having a prominent moviemaker like Danny Boyle use an iPhone for a big-budget movie is a real boon for Apple, which sells a lot of its smartphones off the back of the handset’s strong reputation for producing excellent imagery.

Apple itself also showed off the phone’s ability to record footage for elaborate productions during its Scary Fast event last October in which introduced the new MacBook Pro and iMac with M3 chips. All of the presenters, locations, and drone footage in the online presentation were filmed using the iPhone 15 Pro Max, though as many reports noted at the time — and which also applies to 28 Years Later — the phone was supported by a plethora of advanced moviemaking equipment such as lighting, dollies, and cranes, and also had a highly experienced post-production team to craft the footage into something compelling. The results are astonishing for such a tiny device, so we’re eager to see what Boyle has managed to do with it.