XODA · QuizMyBrainz · About

Two Title I teachers. Fifteen years.
One diagnostic gap.
Then: code.

The math was always there.
The assessment couldn't see it.

For over thirty years combined, both founders taught mathematics in Title I classrooms across North Texas — classrooms where most students were developing English as a second language while simultaneously learning to think algebraically, geometrically, and quantitatively.

Every year, the pattern repeated. A student would write an answer that looked incomplete — abbreviated, phonetic, mixed-language — and the rubric would mark it wrong. The teacher could read it. The math was there. The system could not see past the surface.

Some of those students were referred for special education evaluation. Some were reclassified. The problem was not their mathematics. The problem was that no diagnostic tool existed that could read the math signal independently of how fluently the student expressed it in English.

That gap had been documented. Bilingual students who do not exit ELL status by Grade 3 face 156% greater odds of misclassification (Cruz & Firestone, 2022). Seventy-seven percent of bilingual students referred for special education evaluation were found to have been misclassified (Ortiz et al., 2011). The research had named the problem for decades.

No one had built the architectural fix.

That separation is the design.

It is not an accommodation.

It is the architecture.

The architectural decision.

The decision to build came from a specific realization: the problem was not pedagogical — it was architectural. Standard assessment systems were designed to measure one thing at a time. When a bilingual student's response requires separating two signals — mathematical reasoning and English language production — a single-axis rubric cannot do it.

The fix required a system with two orthogonal axes: one that reads the mathematical cognitive signal, and one that reads the language development stage. Neither axis influences the other's output. The separation is enforced at the design level, not applied as a correction afterward.

That is XODA.

The team

Mario Oscar Pureco-Razo

Founder & Principal Investigator

A Computer Systems Engineer who began his career building enterprise training systems, assessments, and analytics — first for executive audiences at Procter & Gamble, then as an ERP systems architect across Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Argentina.

He then spent fifteen years teaching K–8 bilingual mathematics in Title I classrooms across North Texas. That classroom record is the ground-truth foundation for every classification decision in the system.

Today he leads the architecture and development of XODA, the diagnostic system that reads mathematical reasoning independently of how a bilingual student writes it down. The teacher who spent fifteen years decoding what students actually knew — not what their rubric scores reported — is the same engineer who built the decoder into the architecture.

Antonieta Ceron-Ponce

CEO & Co-Principal Investigator

Antonieta Ceron-Ponce is the CEO of mar&mar ideas products & more, LLC, and the Co-Principal Investigator and Lead Pedagogical Architect on the XODA research program.

Her fifteen years of Title I bilingual classroom experience across North Texas provides the pedagogical ground truth for all student response interpretation and diagnostic design decisions in the system. As Lead Pedagogical Architect, she issues the linguistic and pedagogical rulings that govern how the system reads, classifies, and reports student writing. Every classification the system makes can be traced back to a pedagogical decision she has validated.

How it works

How the system reads what standard assessments miss.

Axis One

Language development stage

Reads how far along the student is in acquiring English academic vocabulary — what patterns appear in their writing, how they navigate between Spanish and English. Diagnostic. Informs the teacher about language development trajectory.

Axis Two

Mathematical cognitive signal

Reads the reasoning structure underneath the surface of the writing. Operates independently. Does not care whether the student wrote in full English sentences, phonetic approximations, mixed-language phrases, or abbreviated notation. Reads the math.

The two axes are orthogonal. One does not influence the other's output. That separation is not a feature — it is the structural guarantee that prevents the conflation that standard rubrics cannot avoid.

The XODA system incorporates a proprietary deterministic ruleset.

Review the research record →

Fort Worth, Texas

QuizMyBrainz was founded in Fort Worth, Texas by two educators recognized by the Texas House of Representatives for excellence in Title I bilingual education (H.R. 2522, 84th Legislature). The research program addresses a structural failure documented at federal scale — a problem both founders witnessed firsthand over thirty combined years across multiple school districts in North Texas.

Two Title I teachers. Fifteen years.One diagnostic gap. Then: code.

The math was always there. The assessment couldn't see it.