From the Periphery: DeskPad.ai and the Students Who Stopped Me At ISTE 2026
- Dustin Rimmey
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
I was walking through the expo hall at ISTE 2026 when a young man stepped out from a small booth and said something I have rarely heard at a conference before.
"Excuse me. I see that you're a teacher. Can I show you a tool that another student and I built together?"
I stopped.
I stopped, not because of the question. It was everything about the moment. The confidence of it. The directness. The fact that he was not holding a branded tote bag or offering me a chance to win something. He was a student who had helped build something and wanted to show it to a teacher, and he was not apologizing for taking up my time.
That is not how most expo hall conversations start. That is how the best ones do.
His name is Daniel Troshin. And the tool he wanted to show me was built by him and his teammate Akshay Ganesh — a fellow student who founded DeskPad.ai in June of 2025 with one question driving everything: is it possible for AI to actually help education? Not just exist in education. Not just be tolerated in education. Actually, help it.
Here is what scared Akshay enough to build something. As AI moved into classrooms and writing assignments, he watched his classmates offload entire assignments to it. "Chatting" something — uploading it to ChatGPT for completion — became a widely used term. The critical thinking was not just being bypassed. It was being quietly eroded, one pasted paragraph at a time.
In his own words:
"As unchecked AI barged itself into classrooms and writing assignments, I saw many of my fellow classmates offloading entire assignments to it, and with it, their critical thinking skills. AI is one of the most polarizing technologies ever created. I get it. Concerns around hallucinations, the environment, privacy — all of them are legitimate. But I'm working on DeskPad because at my core, I am fundamentally techno-optimist. I believe that with the right people, and with the right intentions, AI can become a democratizer of learning in a way that has never been seen before in human history."
Most people who noticed this problem either called for bans or looked the other way. Akshay and Daniel built a third option.
What DeskPad Does
DeskPad is a writing workspace with a Socratic AI tutor built directly into it, and it lives inside Google Docs, which means the barrier to adoption is essentially zero. No new platform to learn. No separate login. Just an add-on in the tool teachers and students already use every day.
The AI tutor is named Sage. And here is the thing about Sage that made me stop and actually pay attention at the booth: Sage never writes for students. Not one sentence. Every reply Sage gives hands the work back to the student as a better question, drawing out their reasoning, sharpening their argument, pointing them back to their evidence. The thinking stays theirs. The writing stays theirs. Sage just makes sure they are doing both as well as they are capable of doing.
For teachers, DeskPad provides something that no AI detector can reliably offer: full transparency. Every draft is visible. Every Sage conversation is visible. You are not guessing whether a student wrote something or had it written for them. You can see the whole process: the false starts, the revisions, the questions Sage asked and how the student responded. That is not surveillance. That is the kind of insight into student thinking that teachers have always wanted and never quite had access to before.
The setup takes minutes. The add-on is available on Google Workspace. And for students, DeskPad Learn is completely free. No student ever pays. That was a deliberate choice, and I think it says something important about who built this and why.
Why This Matters Beyond the App!
I think it is easy to look at a tool like DeskPad and file it under "useful edtech product" without fully registering what it actually represents. But I want to share why I think this matters.
Two students watched a problem unfold in their own classrooms. They understood it from the inside in a way that no administrator, no policymaker, and no edtech company with a large expo hall booth could have. They had access to the exact feeling of being teenagers surrounded by AI that was making the work disappear, and they were scared by what they saw, not of the AI, but of what was disappearing along with the work.
And then they built something.
They did not write an op-ed. They did not start a petition. They built a Socratic tutor that embeds itself in Google Docs and never writes a single sentence for the student using it. They built full teacher transparency into the product from the ground up. They built it on the principle that AI, done right, can be a democratizer of learning rather than a replacement for it.
And then Daniel walked onto the expo floor of the biggest educational technology conference in the world, found a teacher wandering past their small booth, and asked if he could show them what they made.
I am that teacher. And I am genuinely glad he stopped me.
Try It Yourself
Get the Google Docs add-on: https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/deskpad/726553757950
Book a demo directly with Akshay: https://calendly.com/akshay-deskpad/30min
Read the founding story in Akshay's own words: https://deskpad.ai/about
This is what the periphery looks like. Two students with a booth, an idea, and enough confidence to stop a passing teacher and ask them to look.
Go look.
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