HighMark

How did HighMark get started?

The initial concept for HighMark began in late 2012. My wife was operating a small but growing preschool. She found that it was difficult to find good, inexpensive assessments. Also it was challenging to keep pace with the paperwork. She was continually making paper copies multiple times per year for each student and then trying to keep that mountain of paperwork organized. And it was an even greater burden to compare the records of each student to track their progress throughout the year. This proved to be expensive and very time and labor intensive.

I am a professional software developer and have been for more than 20 years. My wife knows that I like a good programming challenge. So she suggested I create a mobile app for her preschool. I liked the idea and immediately saw its potential.

We started with some basic assessments like ‘colors’, ‘letters’ and ‘numbers’. These required the student to recognize an image on the iPad and say what it is. The surprising thing was that the students seemed to be more engaged with a digital version of a letter then with same content on a piece of paper. Maybe because it wiggled a bit at them.

Next, we tried more interactive assessments like 'rhyming' where they had to tap an image and ‘patterns’ where they had to drag images to make a pattern.

Again we were surprised that not only were the students more engaged, they were having fun.

That is one of the goals of HighMark: to engage students so they have fun learning.

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