Extracurricular Activities

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.

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.

Dr. John Leddo, a Yale PhD who has published more than 100 papers in scientific journals is leading an online research class. In this class, Dr. Leddo teaches students how to do original scientific research that leads to publication in a scientific journal.

The goal of the class is both to teach students how to do scientific research and work with them on projects so that they can publish their work in scientific journals. To date, more than 400 students have published papers with Dr. Leddo and these papers have been read by over 75,000 scientists from around the world. This is an excellent opportunity for middle schoolers who want to apply to private high schools, Thomas Jefferson or Academies of Loudoun or for high schoolers who want a strong credential for their college applications. Publications are professional accomplishments that stay on a person’s resume for life. The class will meet on June 17, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26 from 9 am to 11 am. Tuition is $350. There students will learn how professional scientists do research and select a research topic. They will work on their experiments for the rest of the summer, typically meeting with Dr. Leddo for 1 hour per week on a 1-1 tutoring basis at $50 per hour. This course is a tremendous value in terms of price versus quality. Horizon, a competitor, offers a summer research program as well. Their course is $5950 and they don’t guarantee their students’ papers will be published. Those students who are published get their work published in high school journals rather than professional journals as our students do. We offer a much better quality product at 20% of the cost.

Recently, we’ve had the following college admission success stories by students who have published in this program

Ivy – Admission to Harvard, 5 publications

Aaron – Admission to Harvard, 1 publication

Shaan – Admission to Yale, 3 publications, 1 conference presentation

Nihal – Admission to UC Berkeley Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology program (only 40 students accepted worldwide), 4 publications

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

My credentials are that I have over 40 years of experience in research and have published some 100 papers myself. To date, over 400 students have successfully published (typically collaborating in small groups as scientists often do). These papers have been read by over 75,000 scientists worldwide. Successful projects students have participated include:

Developing an assessment methodology and supporting AI technology that assesses what students know with the accuracy of a human teacher, rather than just whether they give the right answer. The methodology has been shown to be highly predictive of student problem solving and students who are assessed and remediated using the methodology show a full letter grade improvement compared to those who are assessed by the traditional “show all work” method and then remediated based on their incorrect steps.

Developing and testing artificial intelligence-based electronic textbook software that provide to be 300% better than Pearson Education’s electronic textbook (Pearson is the world’s largest textbook publisher).

Showing that our AI-based educational software is more effective in teaching than human teachers.

Developing medical machine learning technology that allows a user to enter a medical condition and then the software goes on the Internet and teaches itself to diagnose that condition with greater than 90% accuracy (4 papers published).

Developing and testing artificial intelligence-based educational software that proved to be far more effective than Khan Academy’s software.

Developing methods for improving SAT reading, math and writing scores (4 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. (mulitple papers published)

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.

For more information or to register, contact Dr. John Leddo at john@myedmaster.com or 571-242-6986.

From Saturday, 3/7/26 to Saturday, 5/2/26, MyEdMaster will conduct a course in medical machine learning. Middle, high school, and college students are welcome to enroll.

Previously, students in the medical machine learning class created MyYouthspan, a health and longevity software product now being sold through METY Technology (MyEdMaster’s spinoff company). Because students love to play sports, and inspired by the fact that Tom Brady used a longevity lifestyle to prolong his football career, MyEdMaster and its university partner, University of Miami (a college sports powerhouse), along with a professional soccer player, are creating MyYouthspan for Athletes that will apply machine learning and the latest in health and longevity research to make personalized recommendations as to what people of all ages can do to improve athletic performance and add to the number of years that they can enjoy playing sports.

In the present medical machine learning course, which will be led by Dr. Taruna Agarwal, students will participate in the building of MyYouthspan for Athletes. Students will conduct research on what interventions improve athletic performance and prolong playing careers and learn data science and machine learning techniques to help build the actual product. In addition to the valuable educational experience and experience from working on an actual product, students will gain additional benefits. First, since many students love to play sports, they will learn how to boost their own athletic performance. Second, as we have done in every medical machine learning class, students will get a scientific publication with their names on it. Third, we will enter the resulting machine learning software into the World Artificial Intelligence Competition for Youth.
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). Medical machine learning students applying to college can site their publications, their work on an actual product, their partnership with the University of Miami and their competition entry. This is a lot of benefit from just one extracurricular activity that other programs can’t match!

This will be a 9-week course that meets virtually through Google Meet each Saturday from 8:30am-10:30 am. Classes are recorded in case students miss a class. The tuition is $475. ($50 will be paid for referrals of paying students who enroll.) 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.

On Saturday, 12/27/25, MyEdMaster will offer classes for the eCybermission and Regeneron’s ISEF competitions. eCybermission is open to students in grades 6-9 and Regeneron’s ISEF competition is open to students in grades 9-12. Both are very prestigious and offer cash awards to successful competitors. Each competition has both a regional competition in March and a national competition thereafter. Teams of 2-4 students compete.

We believe we have a unique opportunity for participating students. We have been conducting research with Arizona State University on adaptive chatbot technology that doesn’t just answer questions like chatbots like Chat GPT or Gemini do. Rather, our chatbot assesses what users already know about a subject and adapts its interaction to the user’s level of expertise and what the user still needs to learn. We have published scientific papers showing that our technology greatly outperforms ChatGPT and Gemini. Since it is rare for students to build technologies that outperform those of industry leaders, we have already had 2 of our students achieve early admission to Stanford University.

We will be offering students the option to work on one of 5 application areas of this adaptive chatbot technology. These are education, health, law, finance and interactive educational TV that lets students interact with animated TV characters and receive personalized instruction and corrective feedback while learning. Early enrollees in this class have already started working on the education and legal chatbots. It is noteworthy that the University of Virginia (in addition to Arizona State University) will start partnering with us in January on our interactive TV project. Since UVA is the most popular university that our students apply to for college, participating in this project will let students put on their college applications that they partnered with UVA in creating state of the art technology.

The intended outcomes of these classes are a prototype technology and a published scientific paper that can be entered into the competitions. 9th graders can actually enter their projects into both competitions and are encouraged to do so. Coaching the teams will be Dr. John Leddo and chatbot specialists from METY Technology, MyEdMaster’s spinoff tech company. The classes will be held online using Google Meet. Each class will meet on Saturdays from 9:30 am to 11:30 am and Sunday from 11:30 to 1:30, although students are not required to attend both sessions.

Tuition is broken down into two parts. The first is $350 for the first competition in March. If students qualify for Nationals, then a second class will be formed.

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.