Our Story

The Early Days

Short Answer grew out of my (Adam Sparks, cofounder) frustrations as a teacher. Students would ask me “how can I improve my grade” and rarely “how can I improve my understanding?” I’d spend large chunks of my weekend grading papers (I taught English & Social Studies) only to hand back those papers and have students ignore my feedback, look at their grade, and move on. At the same time, when I would use tech tools in my classroom that involved students sharing their work with others, the room would transform: Students were completely locked into the learning. So, in my free time, I started to design a platform with the specific goal of making it fun for students to give and receive feedback effectively. I didn’t know anything about design, so I used Google Slides.

LDT at Stanford

To pursue my newfound interest in edtech design, I applied to Stanford’s Learning Design and Technology program for the ‘21-’22 school year. When I was accepted, I decided to leave the classroom and head to California. In LDT I collaborated with cohort members and educational researchers at Stanford to build the initial prototype of what became Short Answer. It was in Dr. Kristen Blair’s Core Mechanics of Learning course that we first discovered the incredible, underutilized learning potential of adaptive comparative judgment. It was such an easy, powerful approach that made feedback so much more social, engaging, and effective for students.

The Launch

What began as my master’s capstone project soon grew into something much larger when Short Answer won both the Stanford Learning Design Challenge and the Futures Learning Tools Competition. My wife Alexa had been helping out by coding Short Answer in her free time, but with our newly awarded grants and with the encouragement of leading educational researchers, we decided to go All-In (😉 Short Answer teachers understand that pun) on Short Answer. Alexa joined Short Answer full-time post-Stanford. We remain a husband-wife team today: Adam designs it, Alexa codes it.

Short Answer Today

Short Answer finished its first full school year as a publicly available product in June of 2024. We have quickly grown to reach tens of thousands of teachers and students across over all 50 states and 8 countries. We believe the new AI-infused world poses many opportunities, but also many risks, when it comes to writing instruction and practice. We couldn’t be more excited to support K12 teachers as they navigate this new reality and help them build better writers through engaging, human-to-human approaches to writing instruction and practice.