Graduates Achieve Beyond the Bubble
This is the fourth installment in The Exonian’s alumni feature series, spotlighting graduates from classes ‘10 to ‘14 doing extraordinary work in their fields of interest, impacting the community around them and further carrying the Academy’s mission for knowledge and goodness. Featured below is Ray Li ‘13, co-founder of a comprehensive, online education platform for math and science.
Ray Li ‘13
Crowdsourcing, introduced just in the past few years, has received a lot of attention as a powerful mechanism to collaborate between or gather interest within a large body of people. Ray Li ‘13 has found a way to use crowdsourcing to provide an innovative online education platform to pool together a plethora of learning material for math and science.
“Expii was a natural extension of my teaching experience into a new medium.”
Li, who is currently a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, is the co-founder of Expii, alongside professor Po-Shen Loh of Carnegie Mellon. Expii, in Li’s words, is “a StackExchange-esque platform for sourcing the best math and science learning material at the secondary school level.”
Originally, Li’s passion for teaching others served as an inspiration behind the creation of Expii. “In 7th grade, I helped coach my peers in MATHCOUNTS. At Exeter, all of my teaching experiences from peer tutoring to presenting problems in math class to teaching at Mr. Feng’s summer program were immensely rewarding. Expii was a natural extension of my teaching experience into a new medium,” he said.
After starting to discuss the idea with Professor Loh during his freshman year, Expii was incorporated by January 2014 and was launched as a private beta in May, four months later. Since then, the team has grown to include even more former Exonians, like Leigh Marie Braswell ‘14.
Today, Expii’s website boasts the work and collaboration of hundreds of individuals from across the globe with discussion forums and detailed lesson plans ranging from topics such as calculus to mechanics. Within each topic are subdivided lessons that break down the material further in an easy-to-learn fashion. “On top of this learning material, we are building an adaptive system that tracks student progress and tailors content appropriately,” according to Li.
Li believed that the collaborative nature of learning in a Harkness classroom resonated with him when thinking about and designing Expii. “Learning happens through conversation, a principle we know well from Harkness. Walking through a lesson on Expii is like talking with a tutor; you read a few sentences, the tutor asks you a question and gives feedback before continuing to the next step. We designed a markup language so that even a layman could script such interactive experiences,” he said.
While his future plans remain unsure for now, Li thought that his love for problem-solving will be a big part of charting his future, as well as his interest in entrepreneurship and teaching. “With my more recent endeavors, it's been motivating to channel this affinity for solving problems in ways that impact the community around me, and certainly I hope to work on similarly impactful and challenging problems in the future.”
Li continued, “While it is hard to guess where my interests may take me, I could definitely see myself working in some form of education many years into the future.”