The Story Behind STEAMCOACH
STEAMCOACH grew from a simple question: how can students get better practice, not just more practice?
I first encountered that problem through Science Bowl. My teammates and I needed a better way to practice the speed, breadth, and decision-making the competition demanded, so I built a Science Bowl practice app with text-to-speech translation and a buzzer system to help simulate the pace and pressure of competition.
Later, as President and mentor of my middle school Science Bowl club, I noticed that my practice app helped students with speed but also noticed that their practice was becoming recognition, not reasoning.
That led to a harder question: could I generate new problems that preserved the reasoning and difficulty of real competition questions?
I began researching Automatic Question Generation and building AI systems for creating complex STEM practice. What started as a Science Bowl tool became a broader exploration of how technology could make learning more adaptive and meaningful.
At that point, Science Bowl started to feel like only one part of a much larger problem. From my own experience preparing for STEM competitions, I knew how difficult it could be to find high-quality practice outside paid classes and specialized resources.
Through a partnership with Math, For Real, I began applying the same ideas to math practice and created Math Forge, a platform for generating targeted problems and helping students identify where they need more practice.
That evolution became STEAMCoach: a growing collection of tools for Science Bowl and other STEM competitions, designed to give students more meaningful practice and educators better ways to support them.
The mission is still rooted in the same question that started it all:
To turn practice from repetition into understanding.