How the Summit Platform Works

Every tutoring service now describes itself as a platform. Usually this means a video call and somewhere to put PDFs.

Here is what ours actually does, why each part exists, and, the part most companies skip, where we have decided technology is the wrong answer.

Live lessons at fixed times

Two live lessons a week for each cycle, at the same times every week: Junior Cycle on Mondays and Wednesdays at 5:30pm, Leaving Cert Higher on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 5:30pm, Leaving Cert Ordinary on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 7pm, and Pre-Junior Cycle on Mondays at 7pm.

The fixed schedule is doing more work than it appears. Self-paced study fails for most teenagers not because the material is inadequate but because nothing forces the session to happen. A lesson at a set time happens whether or not it has been a good week, and that is most of the value.

The join link appears on the lesson page shortly before the class starts, so nobody is hunting for it.

Recordings, indexed by topic, not by date

Every lesson is recorded. Almost everyone does that. The part that matters is how they are organised.

A library sorted by date answers "what did we do on the 12th of November", which is a question nobody has. A library sorted by topic answers "how do I do integration by substitution", which is the question students actually arrive with at eleven at night before a test.

So ours is indexed by topic across the full syllabus for each cycle, and students can jump to a method without knowing when it was taught. Alongside the recordings sit the notes for each topic.

Two consequences worth naming:

A missed lesson is caught up rather than lost. Illness, matches, a family week: the material is still there in the same place.

A student can go back quietly. This matters more than we expected. A sixth year who needs to revisit second-year algebra can do it without telling anybody, and that removes an obstacle that stops a lot of students from fixing foundations.

The discussion board

Maths questions arrive during homework, not during lesson time. A student stuck on a Tuesday evening with the next class on Thursday will, in practice, give up on that question.

The board exists to close that gap. Students post a question, with a photo of their working if that is easier, and get an answer from a tutor rather than waiting for the next lesson.

Two design decisions:

Boards are separated by cycle, so a Junior Cycle student is not scrolling past Leaving Cert calculus to find something relevant.

Images are reviewed before they appear. Every image uploaded to a board is checked by a person before it becomes visible to other students. This is slower than publishing immediately and it is not negotiable, because it is a platform used by children.

Platinum members' questions are prioritised in the queue.

Mock paper grading

Platinum members submit three mock papers a year during set windows. They come back marked against the State Examinations Commission scheme, not with a grade, but with each lost mark identified and categorised, and a written study plan for the weeks that follow.

The reason this is a distinct product rather than part of a lesson: nothing else finds a student's specific errors. A lesson can be excellent and still leave a student unaware that they consistently drop a sign inside a bracket, or that they never justify a maximum, or that they lose fifteen marks a paper to blank parts. Only someone reading their actual script sees it.

The submissions are handled in order of receipt, and the files are stored privately, accessible to the student and to us, and to nobody else.

Family accounts

Households with more than one child in secondary school can run several students under one subscription, each with their own cycle, their own library and their own progress. A parent can look at a child's account without needing their password.

This is a smaller feature than the others and it is the one families mention most, because the alternative is managing several separate subscriptions at several separate prices.

Referrals

Students and parents have a referral code that gives a credit against the subscription when someone signs up with it. It is straightforward and it is the main reason we spend very little on advertising.

What we deliberately do not do

The more interesting half of the question.

We do not automate the marking of written maths. Software can check a final answer. It cannot tell you that the method was sound and the arithmetic slipped, which is precisely the distinction Irish marking schemes are built around and precisely what a student needs to hear. Mock papers are marked by a person.

We do not use AI to answer students' maths questions. Discussion board answers come from tutors. An answer that is confidently wrong is worse than no answer at all in a subject that builds on itself, and a student cannot tell the difference.

We do not gamify. No streaks, no points, no badges. They produce engagement with the app rather than with mathematics, and the two diverge quickly.

We do not lock the recordings behind a drip schedule for students who need to move ahead or back. The library is the library.

The point of all of it

Technology in tutoring is worth having when it does something a person cannot do at scale: being available at eleven at night, holding six years of lessons in a searchable structure, letting a student revisit a foundation without an audience.

It is worth avoiding when it replaces the judgement that is the actual product. Reading a student's script and telling them what they are doing wrong is the whole job, and it does not automate.

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