Last Christmas, I had a surplus of unspent annual leave. With no agenda and a restless urge to keep busy, I decided to tinker with Optical Character Recognition; OCR software has become central to a project at work. I wanted to better understand its capabilities and limitations, especially because AI is advancing at breakneck speed. Every evening after dinner, the same scene played out at the dining table. Usually it was my wife who would sit down with a red marker pen and a stack of maths-drill worksheets, freshly completed by our two children. Page after page, answer after answer. Forty-five minutes of tedious checking that neither of us would ever get back. One evening, on a whim, I snapped a screenshot of a worksheet using my phone and fed it to an AI model to see if it could accurately spot the wrong answers; it could. I had a lightbulb moment and what started out as an experiment quickly became an obsession. By the time I returned to work in January 2026, I had built a useful minimum viable product called RedMarker. RedMarker is an app that uses your phone's camera to accurately validate maths-drill worksheets in minutes instead of 45. The real win? We now spend the reclaimed time actually helping our children understand their mistakes, not just hunting for wrong answers.

Red Marker

Get your evenings back from checking maths homework

Get your evenings back from checking maths homework