School Subscriptions — Overview

Problem-Attic makes available more than 240,000 questions from many well-respected sources—totally free!  It is not necessary to subscribe or pay anything to access these questions.  All teachers at your school can start making documents right away just by signing up for a free account.

As an option, your school can subscribe to Problem-Attic and get additional content and program features.  The price is $695 to $1995, based on school size (number of students).  The subscription runs July through June and is school-wide, meaning it supports teachers in all grades and core subjects: math, science, social studies and ELA.

Here’s a look at what’s included in a school subscription.

✔  35,000 standards-based math questions

This bank of questions was developed by EducAide Software, the maker of Problem-Attic, which has more than two decades of experience with standards-based instruction and assessment.  The questions are not just aligned to but actually written for Common Core, TEKS (Texas), SOLs (Virginia), and OAC (Oklahoma).

You’ll find our standards-based questions to be exceptionally high-quality and rich with graphics, real-life data, and interesting problem scenarios.  The overall average is about 40 questions per standard and 1000 to 2000 per grade.  They’re even written in pairs, so you can easily create review worksheets, makeup assignments, pre- and post-tests, etc.  For details and sample questions, click here.

✔  42,000 additional questions for math and science.

These questions, all original, provide deep coverage of Pre-Algebra to Pre-Calculus, SAT and ACT math, and four AP subjects: statistics, calculus, chemistry and biology.  While the SAT/ACT questions are nominally for test prep, with Problem-Attic they can be integrated into your regular curriculum and are excellent for teaching problem-solving.

The Pre-Alg to Pre-Calc database has approximately 19,000 questions. They are nearly all free-response or short tasks. While they can certainly be used for testing, they’re intended to supplement or even replace the problem sets in a textbook. They’re great for daily warmups, in-class lessons, homework, and review.  For details and sample questions, click here.

✔  Export to your LMS or a Google Quiz Form

Problem-Attic makes all of your other classroom technology more powerful!  When you combine its database with Google Classroom, Schoology, Canvas, or almost any other LMS, you get a best-of-class solution:  outstanding content and maximum flexibility. The 300,000+ questions look great whether they’re printed or delivered electronically. Moreover, they can formatted exactly the way you want.  That is simply not possible with a typical item bank or “test generator”.  But it’s the key to a modern digital classroom, for doing real formative assessment, and for tailoring materials to meet the needs of every student.

✔  Built-in scoring for smartphones and other devices

Problem-Attic has a scoring app built right in, so you can get quick feedback from students and create interactive lessons, games and other classroom activities with zero fuss.  The app is not meant to track student progress—it works without you having to upload a class roster—but it still has rich reporting capabilities and lets you send results to almost any grading program.  It makes everyday teaching and learning more efficient, and if your school has a BYOD or 1:1 initiative, the scoring app will make it a resounding success!  Please give it a try in the Play Area.

✔  Slideshows, online tests, and real playlists

Besides the export options described above, Problem-Attic can turn any document into web-hosted slideshow.  This gives you a way to present questions instantly for a class activity, or as exit tickets, a pop quiz, review for a test, etc.  For newer strategies like blended- or self-paced learning, you can create a fully-interactive test or homework assignment, or a PDF that is hosted by Problem-Attic.  The best news is that you select the questions.  Any link that you post, say, a mini-assessment for a video or online lesson, will be a playlist in the truest sense, a perfect match to your curriculum and instructional goals.

✔  Reading Passage Collection, Graphics Library

At EducAide, we take content curation seriously.  So we’ve done a topical organization not just of questions, but also of reading passages and graphics.  The new reading collection has about 1800 passages organized by author, title, genre, word count, grade, readability score, and theme.  The graphics library is similarly convenient.  We’ve extracted about 60,000 images from problems and organized them by topic. This provides great stimulus for new problems, everything from science diagrams and geometry figures to maps, political cartoons and graphic organizers.  To learn more, see reading collection and graphics library.

✔  Math in Spanish, Parallel Test Forms

Problem-Attic’s database keeps growing!  Recently we added 8000 questions in Spanish for CCSS and TEKS, math grades 1–5.  With a feature called language-switching, you can create matching documents in English and Spanish with just a few clicks.  A similar option, which works with all of the original math questions in Problem-Attic, is called “parallel forms”.  This is a fantastic time-saver for creating pre- and post-tests and make-up tests, or to improve test security with forms A and B.  For details and sample documents, click here.

✔  Full-featured editor, curriculum development & sharing tools

Problem-Attic’s editor is made for teachers who like to write or modify questions. It has lots of time-saving options for graphics, tables, special symbols, and math equations.  In fact, it’s the only web-based editor with live math, a way to see symbols and equations properly formatted as you type them.  Perhaps most importantly, when you have a subscription, the entire database becomes editable and customizable.  With Problem-Attic’s framework builder, you can easily share what you create, including a bank of questions organized around your own teaching units, textbook chapters, or local curriculum.

✔  API, Countdown Game, and more!

School subscribers get access to Problem-Attic’s API, which can be used to extend the functionality of the program.  For a demonstration, please check out our game called P-A-Countdown.  It turns multiple-choice questions into a fun classroom activity.  There are 75 sample games, and subscribers can create new ones simply by selecting questions inside of Problem-Attic.  We expect the API to make possible many more uses for the database, such as for personalized learning, etextbooks, and test accommodations for students with special needs.

Please contact us if you would like more information about the features described here, including the API.  We’re happy to assist you, and we hope to welcome you on board soon as a subscriber to Problem-Attic!