Cissy Yu

Quill.org

Quill.org's free online tools help low-income 3rd-12th grade students become strong writers and critical thinkers. Quill provides teachers with a free, research-based curriculum aligned to national and state standards, and we provide students with immediate feedback on their writing. To do so, we incorporate machine learning to instantly assess writing, enabling students to revise their work and quickly improve their writing skills. Through our exercises, students gain the ability to express, with clarity and precision, complicated thoughts in writing. There are 30 million low-income K-12 students in the United States who struggle with basic writing, one of the most important skills people need to improve reading comprehension and advance critical thinking. We are aiming to help at least 10 million low-income students in the next five years, and we have already helped more than three million students from 10,000 schools across the United States. Quill is supported by grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, AT&T Foundation, and Google.org, among others.  Quill is an open-source organization, and we work with a large community of developers and educators to launch new literacy tools aligned to our mission. Quill is working with researchers from Stanford and Harvard University to build open source artificial intelligence tools that can help students write thesis statements, use evidence to support claims, and compose essays. Through a crowdsourced, community-led effort, we will be able to scale Quill to the needs of every learner in the world.