Our Story
Built out of spite
for red pens.
MarkBot was created by a teacher who loved teaching — and despised marking. Here's the honest version of the story.
It was 11:47 PM on a Sunday
There I was, staring at a stack of 200 Year 9 History essays. The topic: “Explain the causes of World War I.” The reality: 200 variations of “Some guy got shot and everyone got mad.”
My red pen was running dry. My coffee had gone cold. My will to live was somewhere between questionable and gone.
Nobody warns you about The Marking
I became a teacher to inspire young minds — not to spend every weekend deciphering handwriting that looks like a spider dipped in ink had a seizure across the page.
Every teacher knows the feeling. The pile growing taller on your desk. The guilt of watching Netflix while it judges you. The Sunday night panic when Year 11 mocks need to be back tomorrow.
The breaking point
Somewhere around essay 47 of 200, I had a thought. Some might call it procrastination. I prefer “investing in future productivity.”
“What if I just made a robot do this?”
So I spent the next several weeks building MarkBot instead of, you know, finishing the marking. My therapist calls it avoidance behaviour. I call it shipping a product.
The real reason
Teachers are underpaid, undersupported, and burning out at a rate that should alarm everyone. If MarkBot can give even one teacher their Sunday evening back — to rest, to plan better lessons, to simply exist outside of school — then every sleepless night building this was worth it.
That's it. That's the whole story.
— A teacher who still gets nightmares about unmarked papers