Nebraska native's app to help students with writing finds international success

When Adam Sparks first began creating an app to help students with their writing skills, he never really expected it to be anything more than an assignment he completed for his master's degree.

But then, the Nebraska native received grant funding to continue to develop his idea and he quickly realized his prototype could become more than just a class project.

Now, more than a year after officially launching Short Answer, Sparks' app is in classrooms globally and has been used by thousands of students and teachers nationwide.

Since its release in spring 2023, Short Answer has been used by more than 55,000 students and teachers in all 50 states and 10 countries, with most promotion of the app happening through conferences and word-of-mouth.

"It's been insane," he said.

Through Short Answer, students are asked to complete writing prompts assigned by their teachers, which are then submitted on the app to be read and reviewed by their peers. Students can complete a variety of activities, answer questions, leave feedback for their peers, earn points and see where their writings land in the class rankings.

However, the main goal is to encourage students to think critically about their writing and truly absorb the feedback they're given, Sparks said.

Even though he has found success on the international scale, Sparks, who was born and raised in Louisville, said it was in Nebraska where the app truly got its start.

"Nebraska educators and the Nebraska education system were instrumental in inspiring me to want to do stuff like this," he said. "Without them, I don't think I would be doing this."

The former English teacher first got the idea for Short Answer while teaching at a school on the west side of Chicago not long after realizing he had a passion for using technology in education.

The Creighton graduate had started his career in his hometown at Louisville Public Schools before moving to China for a year to teach English. Then, Sparks moved to Lincoln and took a job teaching middle school social studies at Milford Public Schools, where he was introduced to the world of educational technology.

He took that passion to Chicago, where at the same time, he was feeling frustrated with the long hours he spent grading students' papers and leaving feedback that many would often ignore.

There had to be a better way, he thought.

So, he came up with an idea to create an app that would not only make writing instruction easier for K-12 teachers, but help students grow their writing skills at the same time. Then, he took the outline to Stanford University, where he was accepted into the Learning Design and Technology masters program.

He submitted the prototype for Short Answer as his capstone project, which he thought may have been the end of the app's lifespan. But, the work didn't end there.

After winning grants from both the Stanford Learning Design Challenge and the Learning Tools Competition, he and his wife, Alexa Sparks, who is a software engineer, decided to "give it a go" and take the leap to make Short Answer their full-time jobs.

Adam designs the program, while Alexa creates all of the code to build it.

"It's been totally joyful, and especially fun to build with my wife," Adam Sparks said. "Because prior to this, we, at least professionally, lived in completely different worlds. I went to a school every day, and she went and built software at fancy tech companies, and now we get to live in the same world. It's fun."

Once Adam Sparks finished his master's degree, the couple moved home to Louisville to design and finalize the app. While his grandma's farmhouse outside of Louisville may seem like an unlikely place for a former teacher to develop educational technology, it's where Short Answer became the app it is today.

Now, Adam and Alexa Sparks are looking to the future of the app, which they plan to run from Louisville, and seeing where it can go from here. Someday, they plan to capitalize on the new age of artificial intelligence to augment the program while still embracing the human-to-human interaction, Adam Sparks said.

Plus, they hope to expand their reach from primarily just English language arts classrooms to a variety of school subjects.

"Right now, the overwhelming majority of our users are English teachers, and that makes a lot of sense, and we're excited to support them," Adam Sparks said. "But over the next five years, I'd really love to see Short Answer embedded just as much in a math classroom as it is in an English classroom."

Carrie Nielsen, the technology integration specialist for the Catholic Diocese of Lincoln, has been "shouting from the rooftops" about Short Answer ever since she discovered the app at a conference last year and fell in love with the idea.

Through her position at the diocese, she frequently works with teachers across the area to help integrate technology into their classrooms, and has been promoting the app to teachers any chance she can get, she said.

"I tell them that there are certain things that come from Nebraska we're very passionate about," she said. "We have Koolaid, we have Dorothy Lynch, we have Runza. Now, we can also say we have Short Answer."

Jill Baker shares that same passion for Short Answer.

Since Baker, an English teacher at the Louisville Public Schools, integrated Short Answer into her dual credit composition course, she has seen students work harder, be more invested in their writing and engage in more meaningful discussions about their writing assignments, she said.

Short Answer also has taken some of the weight from her shoulders by allowing students to be a part of the feedback process.

"I think we always grow from reading other works, from seeing what other writers are doing, that helps a writer grow in their own skill," she said.

But the most special part of using the app for her is that it was created by her own former student, Adam Sparks.

"There's just a sense of pride," she said. "It makes it feel like it's come around full circle now. And it's really cool to see that I get to be part of something that he created, which I think we're all very proud of at our district."