Introducing Derivita CEO and co-founder: Devlin Daley

But if you’re more of a reader here are some highlights and insights from the event:

The beginning

As many of you may know Devlin was a co-founder at Instructure and a co-creator of the Canvas Learning Management System. He comments, “The quiz engine in Canvas was not designed to do math. We thought someone else would come in and plug into Canvas to get that really deep part of it [ability to incorporate math text and analytics]”. This, along with the obvious need for an advanced technological solution to teach math and create digital math courses, was the start of Derivita. 

Devlin traveled to schools and education conferences to ask what teachers and students actually needed to better their math educational experience. He elaborates, “I found that the students were having a very poor [math learning] experience. The technology wasn’t actually helping them learn math”. The existing math courseware question types were limited and of poor quality. Learners and educators wanted open-ended questions and advanced ways of showing or seeing the student thought process. But this was difficult to create and develop, which was why, “no one had actually done it yet. I [Devlin] needed to build something that actually understood math symbolically”. 

This required creating a new Derivita programming language which would soon be named Omaha. This is also where co-founder and CTO, Ryan Brown, became a main “architect” of Derivita. From here, the duo continued to develop the software and content library we see today to match the needs and requests of current teachers operating in the STEM space on the daily.

Devlin finishes our origin story with “I remind myself every day that it's an incredible amount of hard work, but I am actually living my dream. Working with schools and teachers again - there is nothing better”.

Some of the questions:

Q: Which capabilities are you most excited to show when you first introduce Derivita?

“One that nobody sees is that each question is a miniature program. It knows how to randomize itself, it knows how to do math, how to create a prompt, take student answers, deliver dynamic feedback to the students without revealing answers, and then also work through a series of steps to show a worked out solution- that all in itself is unique and amazing. - We’re the only ones with dynamic worked out solutions and if you use it [Derivita] you’ll never be able to use anything else.

But in terms of what people see, I love the open-ended expressions. Give me any expression with any property- I mean it's still magic to me, every time I see it”.

Q: Does Derivita have any plans to expand to subjects outside of math?

“Yes. But we’re going to do so very carefully- the first step will be just that other people can create other content using Derivita. The next step is we will help people create common assessments or benchmarks in other topic areas, and then in the long-term horizon we’ll have item banks like we do for math for the other topic areas”.

Q: What is the biggest thing you learned to help support students and teachers on their math journeys?

“We’re still learning- but what I’ve gotten from it is the absolute necessity to stay true to our values of listening to our teachers- and we’re not telling them how to do it right but [instead] we’re in support of what they’re doing”.

Q: How did you come up with the name Derivita?

“You know I’m a tech guy so I had to make sure the domain name was available, so I was looking up a bunch of different names. Derivita comes from - it's a made-up word- and ‘derivative’ is obviously a math term, but to ‘derive’ something is to follow a sequence of steps- and so it's kind of the old fashioned way of teaching and learning-  with teaching and learning being interchangeable in old english. So ‘derive’ is to follow a sequence of steps to go from something you don’t know to something you do know”.

And last but not least, I would like to include my personal favorite quote from the AMA which is “I am weak-sauce when it comes to spicy.”

Thanks Devlin!

Watch the full AMA on our YouTube channel.

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