Are you a middle school or high school student in an algebra or pre-algebra class? Are you lazy? Do you want to copy your way through your homework problems so you can text the night away or sit listlessly in front of your PlayStation?
There’s an app for that now.
PhotoMath, a smart camera calculator that instantly solves algebra problems just by looking at them, is a real thing now.
The free homework-expediting app comes from a company called MicroBlink out of the United Kingdom (and Croatia).
The days of having to show your own work or struggling through some math problem are now long gone. PhotoMath provides a handy step-by-step guide for any problem at the press of a button. Just copy those steps verbatim and voila! Full credit.
As you can see in the video below, the way it works is: Users use a red frame to snap photos of troublesome, time-consuming equations. The app them uses optical character recognition to interpret the equation, calculate an answer and provide all those harrowing “show-your-work” steps required to get to that answer.
It’s essentially the same technology already being used by wed mobile phones with banks and bar code scanners.
“PhotoMath currently supports basic arithmetics, fractions, decimal numbers, linear equations and several functions like logarithms,” the iTunes app descriptions explains, according to Forbes. “New math is constantly added in new app releases.”
The technology is in its primitive stages. PhotoMath can only read printed words, for example. Also, a Forbes tester found that the app got confused between “x” as a variable and “x” as a sign for multiplication.
PhotoMath was just released for the first time on Oct. 17. So, if you download it now, you can be on the frontier of academic slothfulness.
As of Tuesday night, there are just three iTunes reviews. Their general theme is that app is pretty good but users want to see massive improvement in something that did not even exist a week ago.
It “only really helps with middle school,” laments one reviewer. “[T]hey should work on making it work for trigonometry problems,” opines another. “It would be awesome to be able to tell the app to do a specific way of solving the problem,” suggests a third.
WATCH:
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