The education-focused software development agency is to receive a £49,633 grant from Innovate UK to establish Carousel, an assessment tool designed in partnership with Adam Boxer.

Aircury has been awarded a grant from the government’s £40m COVID response Fast Start Competition to create Carousel, an innovative assessment and knowledge retention tool designed in partnership with teacher and science blogger Adam Boxer. The competition was run by Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency.

Carousel will be a digital application that helps students to embed knowledge in their long-term memory. Teachers can either use Carousel’s carefully-sequenced question banks spanning a full curriculum, or upload their own questions. Students then take quizzes combining questions from both recent and earlier curriculum areas, using previous responses and spaced repetition to select questions. The system will include auto-marking of free text and student-teacher feedback.

The product is particularly needed during the current lockdown when things that have been taught may be quickly forgotten. Longer term Carousel will help to facilitate homework, revision and embedding learning.

The concept is well-researched and evidence-based. The idea was originally developed several years ago by science teacher Adam Boxer and prototyped in an Excel-based system called Retrieval Roulette. It evolved with input from a highly engaged teacher community, including the #CogSciSci grassroots collective of science teachers. This extensive learning from teacher practice is being incorporated into the Carousel product.

Jose Diaz, Managing Director of Aircury, said: “Carousel will play an important role in helping students to embed learning. That is important now more than ever, given the urgency for schools to find better ways to handle learning at distance.”

Adam Boxer said: “Retrieval Roulette is a great tool, with a brilliant group of contributors. This opportunity means we can now take things to the next level, and build a program that will make a huge difference to student learning with minimal hassle for hardworking teachers.”

Notes for editors

For more information on Carousel, including registering your interest to be an early adopter, contact Joshua Perry at info@aircury.com.

Aircury offers high quality software development for the education and non-profit sectors. For more information visit www.aircury.com.

Adam Boxer is a chemistry teacher who writes about science education, cognitive science and evidence-based practice. Adam’s blog is at https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/.

Innovate UK is part of UK Research & Innovation. For more information visit https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/innovate-uk.