After Dr. Antonio Pérez steps down from his position as president of Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) later this month, he will focus his energy on further developing his app, HiddenChalk.
During his time as college president, Pérez noticed that many students were entering college unprepared for their coursework and exams. He believes that educational institutions often use the same techniques over and over again but never look for a different approach to help students succeed. To Pérez, the different approach to learning can be found within student’s cellphones.
“My approach in creating this app was that I realized how much time students spend on their telephones and that their telephones are always with them,” says Pérez in an interview with Diverse. “For example, they might forget their textbook or they may forget their notebooks, or their pens and pencils, but they never forget their phones. I’m providing them with the opportunity to have it all at their fingertips.”
As he watched student’s cellphone patterns, Pérez also noticed that students played a lot of games. Thus, he initially tested out the use of educational games within HiddenChalk, which he started developing four years ago. He even added prizes as incentives but found that students would rather just finish remediation as quickly as possible without all of the extra features.
“I found that when it comes to remediation, students said to me, ‘we just want to get this thing done and we want to get out of remediation,’” says Pérez. “So I focused more and more on that with my developers and created, I believe, a solution for some of our students who don’t need to enroll in remediation courses. Or if they do enroll and keep on failing, this app would provide a supplement for them and they finally do pass.”
HiddenChalk, which is available to both iPhone and Android users, is in the beta testing process with a select group of students from BMCC. The students participating in the beta tests are enrolled in remediation courses and have voluntarily opted to use the app for additional help. Right now, however, the coursework on the app and the actual remediation class itself are not synchronized.
“The feedback that we’ve been getting from students who have been using HiddenChalk have been phenomenal,” says Sunil Gupta, who is the dean of the Center for Continuing Education and Workforce Development at BMCC and who has also consulted with Pérez about HiddenChalk. “The students who’ve passed the remediation class said that they could have taken the math course through the app without even taking the actual course itself. We were pleasantly surprised. We thought it would be effective but it has proven to be even more effective.”
