App lets students cheat on their homework, but parents needn’t be worried

Students across the world will be thrilled to hear that they can now outsource their homework to an app.

Socratic, which is available for free on the App Store, is designed to tackle a range of subject matter, but has just been updated with enhanced mathematical capabilities.

Students need only feed a picture of a question – printed or handwritten – to the app, which will then proceed to work it out.

However, it won’t simply display the right answers. What’s really clever about Socratic is that it will also go through the correct methodology with users, who can still learn a thing or two despite their questionable approach to school work.

“To build this experience, Socratic's pedagogy team looked through countless math questions asked by students and categorized them by the steps required to solve them,” reads a release from the company. “Then, they wrote high quality Explainers to teach these concepts, and tested them with hundreds of high school students.”

The team behind Socratic says the app’s steps closely match those a teacher would take their students through, and has promised to expand its capabilities across the sciences, history, economics and the humanities.

“Students can now break down their question into small steps, allowing them to gain confidence and learn how to solve similar questions on their own, said Shreyans Bhansali, Socratic’s co-founder and head of engineering. “We hope to provide an experience similar to working with a tutor, except it's free and on your phone.

“We believe our code has applications outside the Socratic app and we're excited to release the core step-by-step solution code as open source so others can extend it and use it as they see fit.”

It’s currently only available to iPhone users, and if you don’t happen to have an incomplete scrap of homework to hand, you can test out its capabilities on this selection of example questions.