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PingPanel
PingPanel is a website that lets students organise themselves into expert panels based on their area of interest or a teacher recommendation. These student panels can then win points and gain status by answering the questions questions of their fellow students.
While a huge amount of expertise lies in Gifted and Talented children, the potential for other students to interact with them is weakest precisely when it is needed most; while doing homework. While Twitter and Facebook have enabled 24/7 social interaction, no platform has enabled always-on, student-led learning on quite the same scale. Delivering this is the goal PingPanel has set and we do this by inspiring and enabling Gifted and Talented students to teach their peers.
PingPanel lets students & teachers organise themselves into expert subject panels (e.g. maths, music or even rugby). Panelists can then win points and build status by answering the questions of their fellow students.The interaction format is simple and familiar. Each panel has a Twitter-like feed of questions to which any student can ask a question. New questions are emailed to the panelists who build reputation points by answering them on their computer or mobile.
This question and answer model has good precedent and is already working extraordinarily well on sites such as Stack Overflow and Quora. It works so well that a number of technical children already use these platforms and often even answer the questions of their adult peers.
They say the best way to make sure you know something is by trying to teach it. By inspiring exactly this behaviour, PingPanel creates a learning resource that can be deepened year on year and which makes Assessment for Learning an integrated part of the child’s Virtual Learning Environment. In enabling and inspiring students to gain status by teaching their contemporaries, we not only reinforce their personal knowledge but also create 24/7 peer teaching resources, leaving all the students better equipped and more independent.
Having studies Physics at Oxford, Peter Nixey did two years of Computer Vision research and then setup as an independent web software developer and consultant. Together with two friends, Peter founded Clickpass.com and then applied for and won investment from the prestigious YCombinator seed investment programme and moved to San Francisco to build the company. With investment from Paul Buchheit (the creator of GMail) and Chris Sacca Peter went on to sell the company 18 months later. Since then Peter has worked as both a product manager and engineer in the US and UK.
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