CTAG Systems

12/21/2025

Only $1,500 to Go (to our $30,000 goal) !! Help Us Build a Brighter Future for Pittsburgh’s Title-1 Students in Pittsburgh Public Schools.
Dear friends,
We’re so close to our goal - just ~$1,500 away - and I’m reaching out to ask if you might consider making a donation (or a second one!) to our GoFundMe to help push us over the finish line. We are 95% of the way there (!) but we need to reach $30,000 by the beginning of the new year.
Our project, CTAG Systems, is laser-focused right now on helping Title-1 students in Pittsburgh Public Schools get into - and stay in - the pipeline for nursing and health science careers. This has the full backing of PPS Superintendent Dr. Wayne Walters, and your donation is fully tax-deductible.
Where does the money go?
Every dollar raised is going directly to fund a team of Carnegie Mellon graduate students who will build the next-generation education technology tools we’ve designed. These tools will be free to all students, hosted on CMU’s Open Learning Initiative platform. Not a penny of this will to us.
Mark Krotec (a beloved teacher at Central Catholic) and I believe in this work so deeply that we’ve been volunteering our time to keep it alive.
Normally, CMU charges $80,000 to sponsor a team like this. But they’ve dropped the cost to $40,000 and the to $30,000 because they believe in the mission of our nonprofit—and thanks to some larger offline donations, we’ve managed to raise about $28,500. Just $1,500 more, and the CMU team of graduate students is funded.
(There have been almost 40 individuals who have pitched in and given donations ranging from $25 to several thousand dollars.)
Pittsburghers know how stretched public school budgets are. And now more than ever, students need access to real pathways to real careers. That’s what this is about - a fair shot for every kid.
Please help us make this a reality. Whether it’s $25, $50, or $100 - it all brings us closer.
From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you. We wish you and your loved ones a joyful and meaningful holiday season. Let’s give Title-1 students the tools they need to thrive.
Warmly,
Mark and Ben from CTAG Systems

Our Story: Bridging the Gap Between High School Education & H… Benjamin MacLaren needs your support for EmpowerStudents: Bridge HighSchool Biology to Health Careers

12/22/2024

12/20/2024

12/19/2024

We're all excited to share our GoFundMe campaign! Help us bridge the gap between high school education and careers in health sciences by supporting CTAG Systems. Your donation will help us customize innovative learning tools developed for rich kids to underrepresented students for FREE, via Carnegie Mellon's Open Learning Initiative (OLI) site. Every dollar counts! 😆https://gofund.me/fdadf7df

12/14/2024

Greetings, Facebook friends! Some of you have heard this was in the works for a while now, and I’m thrilled to finally share it with you.
Over the past several decades, I’ve been collaborating with some very talented professors at Carnegie Mellon University, and teachers around the country, to develop a cognitive tutor designed to revolutionize how genetics and biology are taught. This project, known as the Cognitive Tutor for Analyzing Genome (CTAG), is something I’ve been deeply passionate about. Encouraged by teachers I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve taken the step to expand CTAG and work toward getting it adopted on a larger scale.
I’ve also ported the system to Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) platform, where it’s now freely available for anyone curious enough to give it a try (course key: CTAG-S22-CCH). It’s an exciting opportunity for students and educators alike to explore a new way of learning biology and genetics.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be building up this page to share more about the “revolutionary” approach that CTAG takes to teaching biology. In essence, we’re helping students view biological systems as computational systems through a field we call Biological Computation. By using a simple algebra inspired by biological assembly lines and signaling pathways—the same frameworks geneticists use to understand biological systems today—we hope to transform how students think about biology, by giving them a "mental model" for problem solving that unifies all of the "excruciating minutiae" that kids learn but quickly forget.
I know this may sound a bit abstract (and maybe a little intimidating, though hopefully not boring), but I it is designed to spark curiosity and to make cutting-edge biology concepts accessible to everyone by helping students build an abstract mental model (there's that term again) for viewing biological systems, and understanding disease, in a more unified way. So if you’re even a bit intrigued, stick around —there will be much more to come!
So thanks for getting this far (if you did), and I can’t wait to share more about this exciting journey.
- Been Jammin