As part of our “whole student, whole success” strategy, MyEdMaster offers students exciting extra-curricular activities. These activities are designed to help students develop new skills and experiences they normally would not have and build their resumes as they apply to colleges and elite high schools. We’ve learned that students need to stand out in life in order to get ahead, and our programs are designed to help students do just that.
Extracurricular Activities
AI-based educational software:
AI-based educational software is a student-created technology company that creates educational software that uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and voice technologies to enhance the learning process. We are currently working on Algebra I and reading software. Our immediate goal is to build a commercial software project for Algebra I. This is an accomplishment that most high school and middle schoolers do not achieve and we’ve seen many of our participating students get into Ivy League and other top colleges as well as Thomas Jefferson and Academies of Loudoun. Academy of Engineering and Technology even told one of our students “We selected you because of your involvement with AI-based educational software.” Students with interests in computer programming, developing math curriculum, creative writing, or business are welcome to participate. We have an excellent team led by Dr. Leddo, who has worked in the field of AI and education for 30 years and Yihong Sun, an MBA. They are complemented by the head of a small software development company (that is helping us develop the product), a professional product manager and two masters degree graduates of the computer science department of George Washington University and one from George Mason University. Any parents who want to help mentor kids are welcome to participate as well.
To date, we have three outstanding success stories. We have compared the effectiveness of our software against Khan Academy’s (the leading online educational software with over 10 million users) and Pearson Education’s (the world’s largest textbook publisher). Even though we had our students competing against leading companies, staffed with full-time professionals, our software won decisively both times. Students using our software performed 80% higher than those using Khan Academy’s and 300% higher than those using Pearson’s. Our results were published in several scientific journals and presented at an educational technology conference. After beating Khan Academy, the students at AI-based educational software were hired by a local company to build an AI-based training system for cybersecurity for which they were paid. Many students received recognition for their success through these publications and commercial success, and, as I mentioned above, got rewarded by admissions to top colleges and elite high schools.
Tuition is the standard $43 per hour for tutoring.
Scientific Research and Publishing in Scientific Journals
MyEdMaster will offer its “Be a published scientist” online starting December 23, 2024. While science classes in school teach what is already known in science, real world scientists make new discoveries (what we don’t already know) and publish them in professional scientific journals for other scientists to read and build upon their work. The “Be a published scientist” course teaches students how to do professional scientific research (literature reviews, experimental design and execution, data analysis, writing scientific papers) and is followed by mentorship where students create and carry out their own experiments and publish their results in professional scientific journals.
This course is designed for students interested in STEM and who may be trying to get into TJ/AOS/AET, a private high school or applying to a scientific, engineering, or pre-med program in a top college. Publishing in a scientific journal is a professional accomplishment that stays with a student for a lifetime (unlike other activities that may carry little weight once the student has moved on to higher grades or graduated). Middle schoolers applying to TJ/AOS/AET or private high schools will have an accomplishment that sets them apart from other middle schoolers (MyEdMaster has the only known program like this for middle schoolers) and high schoolers will have a credential both for college admission and when they seek internships at colleges or government labs since they will already have a track record of conducting and publishing scientific work. Our research program has attracted a lot of attention, and our work was recently featured in the Washington Post and several magazines (see the “in the news” section of the myedmaster.com website). Students starting early on in this program can continue doing research and publishing throughout high school and building a strong resume for their college applications. In the past few years, we’ve had the following college admission success stories by students who have published in this program:
Ivy – Admission to Harvard, 5 publications
Nihal – Admission to UC Berkeley’s MET program (only 40 students accepted worldwide), 6 publications
Aaron – Admission to Harvard, 1 publication
Shaan – Admission to Yale, 3 publications, 1 conference presentation
Kevin – Admission to University of Chicago (ranked #6 in US overall), 1 publication
Abhishri – Admission to NYU’s Stern School of Business (ranked #5 in business schools), 1 publication
Srinidhi – Admission to UC Berkeley (#3 engineering school), enrolled in UT Austin with $160,000 scholarship, 2 publications, 1 conference presentation
Sofia – Admission to UVA plus $40,000 Amazon scholarship and internship, 1 publication
The course is taught by Dr. John Leddo, a Yale PhD, who has over 40 years of experience in research and who has published over 100 papers himself. Dr. Leddo will also serve as the mentor for the research projects after the course. To date, over 400 students have successfully published (typically collaborating in small groups as scientists often do). Successful projects students have participated include:
Creating a way for students to self-assess and remediate their own knowledge deficiencies, resulting in large improvements in student performance.
Creating several machine learning programs that can self-teach without any human intervention other than receiving the topics to learn from the user.
Developing and testing artificial intelligence-based software that teaches better than human teachers do (only known software that can make this claim).
Developing AI and voice-based electronic textbook technology that teaches 300% better than Pearson Education’s (the world’s largest textbook publisher)
Developing and testing artificial intelligence-based educational software that proved to be far more effective than Khan Academy’s software.
Creating an assessment methodology that diagnoses, with near perfect accuracy, what concepts students have and why they make mistakes.
Developing methods for improving SAT reading and writing scores (3 projects were published).
Creating interactive educational television technology that proved to be four times more effective in teaching than traditional educational television.
Demonstrating that a Nobel prize winning theory of economics was wrong and providing the corrected version of that theory. Several papers were published and research was also done in South America, Japan, and China.
Showing the most effective way to teach Java to middle schoolers.
Showing that playing cooperative video games can boost teamwork skills in middle schoolers, but playing competitive videogames can harm teamwork skills.
Investigating the conditions under which students can teach themselves vs. when they need a teacher to teach them.
The program starts with an 7-day seminar on principles of scientific research where students learn how to conduct literature reviews, experimental design, statistical data analysis, and writing scientific papers. Afterwards, students work together and with Dr. Leddo to design and conduct experiments.
We will hold courses online using Google Meets. The initial 7-day course will be held on the following dates: Monday, December 23; Tuesday, December 24; Thursday, December 26; Friday, December 27; Saturday, December 28; Monday, December 30 and Tuesday, December 31. Class times are 10am to 12 noon, and makeup classes will be scheduled if students miss a class. Class tuition is $350, which is a fraction of what parents will pay for other programs like Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins or residential leadership programs. After the class, students will work on their research projects through private 1-1 online classes with Dr. Leddo. The tuition is $43 per hour for the 1-1 online classes hour. Typically, 1 hour per week is enough for the research project mentoring.
For more information or to register, contact Dr. John Leddo at john@myedmaster.com or 571-242-6986.
- Showing that a Nobel prize winning theory of economics is wrong and what the correct theory should be
- Showing that playing videogames cooperatively with others boosts teamwork skills while playing them competitively hurts teamwork skills
- Helping clarify a debate in the scientific literature as to what type of homework is most effective for what type of student
- Helping clarify a debate in the scientific literature as to what type of homework is most effective for what type of student
- Showing the proper role of teachers when students try to teach themselves new subjects
- Three projects, each resulting in publications, showing how to boost reading and writing scores on the SAT
- A simple method for boosting math performance in elementary school kids
- How best to teach Java programming to middle school students
Our scientific research program is conducted online on a tutoring basis throughout the school year or in-person at the Courtyard Marriott at 13715 Sayward Boulevard in Herndon any time from 1-5 pm. Tuition is $43 per hour.
MyEdMaster announces a Medical Machine Learning Course Leading to a Scientific Publication and a Commercial Product with Students Receiving Company Stock
From Saturday, 2/22/25 to Saturday, 4/26/25, MyEdMaster will conduct a course in medical machine learning for beginning and experienced programming students. Middle, high school, and college students are welcome to enroll.
This course will build on our previous successes. Previously, we have built a software product that takes the latest research in longevity and wellness and uses data science and machine learning to give people personalized recommendations on what they can do to live longer and healthier and then tracks their progress. That product, called My Youthspan, is complete and is being marketed through METY Technology, Inc., a company created by MyEdMaster and its medical machine learning students (who are also shareholders). My Youthspan’s machine learning technology has been validated through several peer-reviewed scientific publications (on which, the medical machine learning students are co-authors) and the software is now being internationally field tested by three independent university health departments (an endorsement by those universities that they believe the software is worthy of their time and resources to conduct such evaluation studies). In addition to the publications and the evaluation study endorsements by three universities, we have received several awards and recognitions in the past couple of years for our work. We were invited to speak at the DSC Digital Health Conference, we were recently featured on the Scale Smart Podcase Show, we were written up in the Washington Post for our STEM extracurricular programs (a copy of the article and link to the podcast are on the myedmaster.com website in the “In the News Section”), and we won the 2024 Technology Innovator Awards for best AI & Machine Learning Tuition Provider in Virginia. Perhaps most impressively, METY Technology now has over 50 professionals working for it and development partnerships with a dozen universities, including the University of Virginia, representing more than 100 additional people now working on our 11 products (these can be seen on the myedmaster.com website under the Tech Entrepreneurship program page).
The medical machine learning program has been an enormous boost to students’ college applications (the number of students getting into top colleges and selective guaranteed medical programs has skyrocketed) and the value of the students’ stock may soon be skyrocketing given how hot machine learning companies are on the market. Medical machine learning students applying to college can site their publications, their ownership in a tech company, the awards and recognition we’ve received, our university partnerships and our groundbreaking products. Importantly, since most MyEdMaster students apply to the University of Virgina, participants in the medical machine learning program can now put on their UVA applications that they are co-owners of a company and worked on a product that UVA also partnered on as UVA is working with us on enhancements This is a lot of benefit from just one extracurricular activity that other programs can’t match!
The current class will focus on building an enhanced medical advisor using generative AI and large language models. While most personal assistants and chatbots simply answer questions, we will build a medical assistant that engages in a dialog with users, learns about their health and their goals and makes lifestyle suggestions on what they can do to live longer and healthier. It is envisioned that this course will be more hands-on than previous courses and the students will actually work with large language models to create interactive assistants.
As we have done in the past few medical machine learning classes, paying students who participate in the spring, 2025 medical machine learning course will not only get their names on the resulting scientific publications, they will also get a share of non-voting METY Technology, Inc. stock.
We will offer both a beginning (no programming experience) and an advanced (experience in programming) class. Both the beginning and experienced classes will work on this product. The advanced class will incorporate more features into the model. The resulting software will be incorporated into the My Youthspan product. To assist with the development of the product, all students will receive medical instruction from Dr. Taruna Agarwal, who has been the lead teacher of the previous medical machine learning classes. The programming instruction will be led by Hrithik Jain, who has served as programming instructor for several years now.
This will be a 10-week course that meets virtually through Google Meet each Saturday. The beginning programming group will meet from 8-10 am and the experienced programming group will meet from 9am to11 am. Classes are recorded in case students miss a class. The tuition is $475. You can register online at myedmaster.com or by emailing or calling John (john@myedmaster.com, 571-242-6986) or you can call or email John if you have any questions.
Technology Student Association TEAMS (TSA TEAMS)
One of our most popular extra-curricular activities is TSA TEAMS, sponsored by the Technology Student Association. TSA TEAM gives students a wide-ranging exposure to different activities such as mathematics, research and technical writing, public speaking, and hands-on building. Students compete at both state and national levels in teams of four to eight students. Typically, we compete in the middle school division and this is a great activity for students applying to Thomas Jefferson or Academies of Loudoun.
The course is taught by a retired engineer, with assistance from Dr. Leddo. We typically win the top spots at the state competition and send the maximum allowable number of teams to the National championsuhip.
The state competition class runs from January to March and the national competition class runs from April to the beginning of July.