The problem
Engagement falls as school goes on
Reported student engagement drops from 76% in grade 5 to 44% in grade 12.
Gallup student poll, as reported by Education Evolving.
How it works
Teaching that starts with who’s asking.
Any AI can answer a question. CourseBend is built to know who’s asking: what they love, where they’re headed, and what their school requires. It’s augmentive by design: it sits on top of the courses a student already has and adds to what they can do. Nothing about the requirement moves. Only the way in.
The loop
Five moves, for every outcome.
Source
Pull the requirement from the school of record and the published standard. Cite it. Never generate it from memory.
Bend
Work out why this topic matters to this student, and let their interest shape the problem itself, not just decorate it.
Teach
Lead with context. MalachAI explains, asks and guides, and never does the student’s thinking for them.
Check
Ask for it back in their own words. Parroting doesn’t count. The grade stays with the school.
Keep
File each observation into the student’s record the moment it happens, so the next lesson starts from what’s true.
Flavouring vs restructuring
Dinosaurs in a word problem isn’t the idea.
Putting dinosaurs in a word problem is flavouring, and anyone can do it. A bend restructures the way in. A student who wants to design snowboards can meet 1800s wheat disputes through materials, tariffs and supply chains. Same outcome. Very different reason to care.
| Works on the school’s real assignments | Works on something else | |
|---|---|---|
| Knows the student | CourseBend is built to do both | Personal, but the required work stays untouched |
| Doesn’t know the student | Helps with the assignment, for anyone at all | General lessons and practice |
The Student Model
School, curiosity and passion are threads of one story.
Math, a parent’s real-estate lesson, a boxing obsession and a grade 12 Spanish course aren’t separate files. Every observation, whether it’s prescribed, pushed or pulled by curiosity, lands in one connected record.
What they loveA passions map that tells interest from passion from obsession.
Who they’re becomingTheir ambition, in their own words. When the dream moves, MalachAI re-asks. The old one stays in the story.
What they can proveSkill by skill, with evidence and the date they last showed it.
Where they’re stuckFriction signals that change the approach before a student gives up.
Underneath it all: sourced curriculum, retrieved and cited.
From hearing it to owning it
The 1–5 scale
1 Encountered it
2 Repeats it with support
3 Says it in their own words
4 Applies it to a new problem
5 Own words, connected to their passion
Level 5 is what earns a badge. And it assumes you forget: after a gap, MalachAI refreshes at the level a student last reached, and they prove it again. Old knowledge is a locked box. The refresher is the key.
What the research says
Built on what the research keeps showing.
Learning takes hold when it connects to what a student cares about, and when the student still does the work. CourseBend is built on that research.
The risk
Answers on tap can cost learning
About 1,000 high school students used GPT-4. Those with open access did 17% worse once it was taken away. A version with guardrails largely avoided the harm. Guardrails are the point.
Bastani et al., PNAS (2025).
The lever
Connecting a lesson to your own life
In randomized trials, a short exercise linking a lesson to a student’s life helped those struggling most. Ninth-grade science students who expected to do poorly gained nearly two-thirds of a letter grade over controls.
Hulleman & Harackiewicz, Science (2009); Hulleman et al., J. Educational Psychology (2017).
The method
Interests in the structure of the problem
Ninth graders in algebra who got problems matched to their out-of-school interests solved problems better and worked more efficiently. CourseBend carries that idea through every required course, across all of high school.
Walkington (2013); Bernacki & Walkington (2018).
Where we are
Building now.
✓ Live now
The passion bend and the four-question demo. Onboarding work with BC students.
→ Being built
The first version: MalachAI on phone and desktop, snapshots of paper work, and a basic road. First pilot in the new year.
○ Later
Parent and teacher portals, the full record view, and everything on the Road.