Luke Saunders, founder of Studyclix.ie, with students from Jesus & Mary Secondary School in Enniscrone, Co Mayo, who helped him develop the website
Our tech start-up of the week is Studyclix.ie, a website for Junior and Leaving Cert students to help them prepare for their exams by accessing information such as past exam questions, sample answers and study notes.
Secondary school teacher Luke Saunders is behind Studyclix. He has worked with a university friend, Keith Wright, a web developer, to develop the website over the past four years.
A beta version of Studyclix was launched at the ASTI teacher convention in April of last year. Since then, Saunders says the number of users on the site has grown rapidly, with 136,000 unique visitors having visited Studyclix during the past 12 months.
He says the site is also proving to be popular with teachers, with more than 3,500 post-primary teachers now using Studyclix as part of their daily teaching.
Study resources
On Studyclix, more than 40 Junior and Leaving Cert subjects are divided up into topics. For instance, if students are studying the Renaissance in History, Saunders says Studyclix will give them access to all the past exam questions, marking schemes, and relevant learning resources such as videos, notes and websites on that topic.
“Students can access all past exam questions, as well as marking schemes, sample answers, videos and free study notes,” he says.
Having started teaching six years ago, Saunders says he came up with the idea for Studyclix after noticing how little the classroom had changed since he had sat his Leaving Cert.
“Studyclix.ie came from my desire to build a learning community that would make the lives of teachers and students easier.”
The website is free for students to access some material, but there is a €20 fee if they want to upgrade to access all of the site’s information. This is a one-off payment, which coves all of the subjects for one year, according to Saunders.
He claims the site is popular when you compare it with the cost of grinds and revision courses. The site is free for teachers to use.
Daily users
Saunders says there are more than 3,000 students who are daily users of Studyclix and he expects this figure to rise in the run-up to the exams in June.
As for the plans for Studyclix, Saunders and Wright are working away on the next version of the website.
“It will offer users increased interactivity and leverage rich media learning sources that are now available,” explains Saunders.
They are also hoping to break into the UK marketplace to attract a share of its some 3.5m second-level student population.
