MathScore Philippines, October 27, 2014

After over 5 years with a successful business partnership in the Philippines, Henry Chua, president of MathScore Philippines, invited me to visit.  I knew this was going to be a good trip, but it turned out to be more humbling than I could have expected.

The first thing Henry did was pick me up at the airport at 4am.  He had a picture of me I had taken right before my flight, which proved really useful because the baggage claim took more than 1 hour and he was second-guessing every Chinese-looking guy that emerged from international arrivals.  He took me to the New World Hotel in Makati.  He didn't just book any room either.  I was placed on their exclusive 24th floor, which includes a beautiful lounge with tons of delicious, high quality food throughout the day!  We ate some food together while I waited for my room to be ready, then I was able to get a couple hours rest before my day was to really begin.

Here's me with Dennis at New Era University.  Universities in the Philippines often have a grade school component, which was the case here.  Dennis is the other main business development guy on the team.  He also takes care of the finances, which makes him incredibly critical to my business!

One of many posters printed out by MathScore Philippines.  MathScore EduFighter is a hit here. MathScore Philippines held the first ever national EduFighter tournament in the 2013-2014 school year, and intend to do it again this year.

Another poster at New Era featuring our logo.  Every school we visited had MathScore posters or banners in different spots.  I took fewer such photos as I visited other schools.

Here, Teacher Rev (from MathScore Philippines) taught a demo lesson with an incredibly awesome Powerpoint presentation.  The intent is for all of the school staff to learn from the lesson, reuse the Powerpoint and duplicate the lesson with the rest of the classes.  As part of the lesson, the students took out tablets and used MathScore.  The Internet connection was very slow and also shared across about 20 separate tablet devices.  It felt like 1994.  Internet speeds greatly varied between schools, and they certainly need to improve bandwidth at this school.  MathScore is a pretty low bandwidth site, so the fact it was slow was very alarming to me.  Nevertheless, the students were used to this, super patient, and very cheerful.  Their desire to learn was incredible.

Here I took a group photo with all of the students in this class.  Also notice the class size, which I understand was around 40 at this school, and can be significantly larger at some other schools.  I felt very spoiled that my daughter's kindergarten class in Palo Alto only has about 21 students.

After leaving New Era, we arrived at Colegio de Santa Rosa.  At this meeting, we were focused on discussing research.  An important goal of any school in the Philippines is to become accredited and of course maintain accredited status.  One of the strategies that our customers here are using is to use MathScore's usage data as the centerpiece for demonstrating that the school excels in math instruction.  For something as important as accreditation, it is humbling to me that MathScore is used for such an important purpose.  I also spoke about some of our own MathScore-based findings, such as the effect of allocated lab time on engaged time.  Imagine these three scenarios:

• Use MathScore 5 days per week, 10-15 minutes at a time.
• Use MathScore twice per week, 30 minutes at a time.
• Use MathScore once per week, 1 hour at a time.

Which scenario would lead to the most overall engaged time?  Based on our usage data, the first scenario is absolutely terrible.  The second produces good results, but the third scenario produces spectacular results.  The reason?  When you use any software, it takes a while to ramp up and "get in the zone".  If you only have 10-15 minutes total, you'll ramp up, get focused, then immediately get unfocused as you anticipate your time ending.  With 30 minutes at a time, you'll maintain focus for a decent amount of time.  But with 60 minute blocks, you'll get often 50% better engaged time compared to having 2 separate 30 minute blocks.  I am willing to bet that this phenomenon extends to most computer tasks, not just MathScore.

MathScore Philippines, October 28, 2014

Turns out that my first day in the Philippines was nothing more than a hint of events to come.  Our largest single customer in the Philippines, with over 16,000 students, is the Makati Department of Education.  Of special significance to us is the fact that this is a a public school district (nearly all other customers are private schools).  We enjoy such tremendous support in Makati that even the mayor endorses MathScore.  They made their support clearly evident during my stay.  In fact, they convened a special meeting with every school principal in the district on short notice so that I could get to know them.  

Here I am with the top administrators in the district.  The superintendent is seated on the left.

The top 4 MathScore students and their parents were invited to attend.  All of them were wearing "BEAT MY SCORE" shirts, which are awarded to parents and teachers alike when somebody scores at least 100,000 points on MathScore.  Generally speaking, students that score at least 60,000 points have shown a very solid foundation with a strong likelihood of doing well in high school Algebra.  The top scorer (on the left) had 400,000 points, which pretty much proves Algebra I dominance.  Each of these four students spoke kind words about MathScore.  One of them wrote a handwritten letter to me.

This is such a nice and thoughtful letter!  I really feel like our team made a big difference in her life, and I hope she has a truly bright future.

Here I am with the top students and their parents.  When I was given a chance to speak, I made it a point to help these students and their parents dream about possibly getting into MIT, my alma mater.  Many Filipinos have no idea that they are even eligible to apply to MIT, so knowing it is even possible provides hope.  Equally important is MIT's policy that financial means should never be a concern for any student they admit.  If you can't afford to pay for MIT, they will pretty much cover the entire tuition cost for you.  This is also true of Stanford and Harvard.  I did my best to paint a picture for these kids and their parents.  What would it feel like to be the first ever student from your town to get accepted to MIT?  Imagine returning home for the first time, with your diploma in your hand.  How would the city react?  I think you'd be a hero!  I finished my speech with a promise.  If the Makati School District presents a worthy student, I will write a letter of recommendation to help that student get into MIT.  

Here I am with the administrators and teachers.  

They gave me a nice certificate of appreciation.  That's the superintendent next to me, and I don't remember the official title of the lady in the middle, but my understanding is that she is one of the biggest advocates for MathScore in the district and wields quite a bit of influence.  We also celebrated her birthday with cake and candles that day!

This is University of Perpetual in Laguna.  There are multiple MathScore banners at every customer site.

I got a chance to meet up with all the main math teachers in the school.  The question I was asked, which was asked of me many times on this trip, was "Why did I create MathScore?"  In case you were wondering, here's my answer:

My original inspiration for creating MathScore.com started in 4th grade.  Every day, we had an activity called "Mad Minute Math".  You had only 60 seconds to answer 50 addition facts questions.  Just think about that for a moment.  How hard is it to merely write 50 random numbers on a piece of paper within a 60 second time limit?  I remember running out of time, pondering how the heck I was supposed to answer all of them in time.  I eventually realized that I had to read the next problem while I was answering the current problem.  So if the current problem was 6+5, I would read the next problem (such as 9+4) while writing "11" as the answer to the current problem.  As you can imagine, it was sometimes difficult to keep things straight.  I eventually triumphed, and was able to consistently get all 50 right within the time limit for the whole second half of the school year.  As a result of becoming super fast, I noticed that I was better at more complex mathematical computations.  Math facts had become completely automatic, requiring the tiniest fraction of a second to recall the correct answer.  

The other thing I realized was that from a teacher's perspective, math facts practice requires a ton of paper, and more importantly, time.  In some classes, students graded their own timed tests, but in others, teachers would do the grading.  Furthermore, at some point or another, teachers had to photocopy timed tests, file them in folders, track progress (not a small task), etc.  That little 1 minute timed math test costs quite a bit more than 1 minute to a teacher!  In fact, a single timed test might actually cost a teacher as much as half an hour.  

I originally created MathScore.com because I wanted to completely automate timed math facts tests.  By using MathScore, teachers that believe in timed tests could literally save as much as 10 hours per month of tedious paperwork.  Schools would save money on paper and ink costs, and teachers would have more time to teach.  And best of all, by making MathScore adaptive, I could help students work just on the math facts that were giving them trouble.  For example, one student might be drilling his 4's while another was drilling his 6's.  At the time that I created MathScore, adaptive algorithms were only used in online assessments.  What made MathScore different was the fact that we applied adaptive algorithms in our practice content.  Finally, MathScore made the math facts data come alive.  You could easily view the math facts competence for an entire class of students in a single screen.  MathScore was born in 2003.  Building this business was worth the risk!

Here I am with the head of the school.  One thing I noticed was that the large majority of top administrators had PhDs.  Filipinos take their education very seriously.

Here's the MathScore Philippines team.  Without them, I'd have no business in the Philippines.  I am so grateful to have them in my life and to have finally met them in person.  MathScore is helping fulfill their dreams, which in turn fulfills my dreams.  Can't get more synergistic than this!

This, by the way, was the view from my hotel in Makati.  I was on the 24th floor of the New World Hotel.  Beautiful, isn't it?

MathScore Philippines, October 29, 2014

Day 3 got off to a tremendously early start.  I had to be dressed and ready to leave the hotel at 6am.  Miraculously, jet lag wasn't too big of an issue.  I was regularly waking up around 4am anyway, so I guess you could say my internal clock was OK with the idea of an early start.  Henry picked me up as usual, and we headed toward one of the provinces.  Traffic in the Philippines can be really crazy.  Any American would likely be surprised by the dense levels of traffic that can be seen at 6am.  One thing they do well in the Philippines to facilitate flow of traffic is to have excruciatingly long traffic lights.  In many cases, the long delay at intersections is managed not by traffic lights, but by ridiculously brave people that direct traffic every day.  Waiting for 5 full minutes is not unusual, but once you get going, you get to go for a while, so overall, they manage their traffic pretty well in the Philippines!

At Canossa Academy, they arranged a special assembly for my visit.  They have more students than can fit in this auditorium!

Now here is something you don't see every day.  These students performed the "MathScore Dance".  MathScore Dance?  Are you kidding me?  They would clap their hands 3 times, stomp 3 times, then clap to the left, clap to the right, then raise their hands over their heads in an arc and say "Fireworks!"  In this photo, they are doing the fireworks portion of the dance.  If you aren't a MathScore user yourself, your screen lights up with fireworks the moment you've just mastered a math topic.  Most students won't see this event even once per day, so when you earn it, it's kind of a big deal.  If you see me in person and ask me about it, I can teach you the dance too :-)

Here I am saying a few words before beginning an awards presentation.  The top students at every grade were set to receive awards.  Given that I played no role whatsoever in preparing any of this, it felt kind of weird having the honor of actually handing out the awards.  Thanks MathScore Philippines!

This is the first student that received an award.  As was the case with several younger kids, I had to grab her hand in order to shake it.  Some kids were looking down.  It takes a lot of confidence to have your head up high the first time you've ever been recognized on stage!

After a seemingly endless stream of students, we took a final group picture with all of the winners.

Here I am with the Canossa staff.  The people on the left who are not in uniform are part of MathScore Philippines.  From the left, the non-uniformed team members are Dennis, Sue, and MJ.  In the middle in white, that's the head of school, a Sister of the church that runs the school.

True to Filipino hospitality, the Canossa staff offered us lunch.  They were so incredibly polite and gracious.  They didn't even want to sit down with us.  Clearly there were extra seats, so after we were seated, we insisted that they sit with us.  They were embarrassed to sit down, and did not touch the food themselves.  We had a nice conversation and we were sorry when we had to leave to make it to the next appointment.

Here's a nice photo of teachers at Our Lady of Caysasay.  We had taken lots of plain photos, but I chose to post one of our goofy ones.  

Although we had just eaten lunch at Canossa, they immediately fed us here as well.  The food was delicious.  Afterward, I spoke about our geometry proof engine with a small group, then when the whole group arrived, I spoke about why I created MathScore, and then I had something to say about women in engineering.  Here's what I said:

I talked about some research I recently read about that was pretty disturbing.  Suppose a high-achieving girl and boy enter their first year in college and take some engineering courses.  Suppose both of them earn mainly B's and C's, but the girl scores slightly better than the boy.  Most of the time, the boy sticks with his engineering major and eventually graduates, getting a high-paying job.  In many cases, the girl thinks she isn't good enough and switches to an easier major where she can get straight A's.  So this girl might actually have more potential in engineering than the boy, but due to confidence issues, she never finds out.  My message to the staff was to be aware of this, and to please educate their top female students so that they have the grit to finish their engineering degrees when they get into college.  The world needs more engineers, and I think women are the key to meeting that demand.  

They created a nice thank you card with a bunch of handwritten post-its.  They were such a great group.  I hope something I said helped somebody!

This is the first administrator to ever achieve the rank of Fleet Admiral in MathScore, which means she scored at least 200,000 points.  I suppose it wouldn't have been proper for her to wear her "BEAT MY SCORE" shirt to this occasion, but I'm sure she has one.  I wrote "You are Awesome!" on her certificate and signed it.

After we left Our Lady of Caysasay, we took a short break a restaurant with a nice view.  I'm sure the view would be prettier on a sunny day, but it was quite nice nonetheless.

Hmm...what are these kids playing at Santa Rosa Elementary?  It's MathScore EduFighter!

OK, my turn! I had to take on their top 4 students.  Naturally, I chose the Engineering Station, which I designed to be the most important station in the game.  I went on the defensive, upgraded all of my skills to raise my boost bonus, and added tons of deflectors.  The other team sent barrages of torpedoes at me and also used their shield boosters a bunch.  The downside of their approach was that those actions (particularly shield boosters) consume a lot more power than the defensive actions that I took.  I waited until they ran out of power, then I turned to offense and blew up their ship.  Should I have let them win?  Nah!  It's more fun this way.  They kept chanting "Rematch! Rematch!" after the game.  I didn't have time to play another, but I appreciated the enthusiasm!

Here I am with their top MathScore students.

They prepared a cute little "Steven Yang" banner.  I was allowed to take it home.

MathScore Philippines, October 30, 2014

For my very last day in the Philippines, I actual did something that felt like real work.  We went to the MathScore Philippines office.

Here is photographic evidence that I was finally doing real work on this business trip!  OK, you could argue that I was working every day of this trip, but from a programmer's perspective, you aren't doing any work unless you get to touch some code, and that day, for a short period of time, I was actually touching code.  That's Jake sitting next to me.  He is in charge of their IT operations, and apparently he knows some PHP and SQL too!

My nerd session was cut short by a visit from some administrators and parents of an especially bright 14-year-old math genius and his sister.  He recently won a gold medal at a math competition in Singapore and also won a bronze medal in China.  Besides those big ones, he has one quite a few other honors.  They told me that he specifically aspires to get into MIT.

Well, if you are going to tell me that, we have to talk!  I spent quite a lot of time coaching them about what it really takes to get into MIT.  Like many Asians, Filipinos don't know that American schools care deeply about extracurricular activities.  I emphasized that nearly everybody I knew at MIT had a non-academic talent.  So far, he has proven that he's academically qualified, but what he needs to prove is that he's well-rounded.   I pointed out that every year, many students that have won gold medals in international math competitions don't get into MIT.  He's only 14, however, so he has time to develop more interests.  It turns out that he's also great at chess, but that's also nerdy.  He is very good at journalism, however, so I emphasized that if he wants to take that to the next level, he needs to put himself in a position to write a story that gets noticed.  Even journalism, in my mind, is still kind of nerdy.  I mentioned that sports was a great option, but that sparked no interest in him.  I suggested playing a musical instrument, which might have interested him.  So my next suggestion was that when he's in high school, he should become the founder of a new club and become president.   American universities love it when students have leadership skills.  I hope he takes that to heart.  I hope he forms a solid vision of what he wants to do with this life.  I hope he gets into MIT.

Look, Filipinos eating food.  What a surprise :-)

Finally, we visited one last school before it was time for me to go to the airport.  We had plenty to talk about, but the conversations were all similar to things I've mentioned earlier.

My day concluded with a ride to the Manila airport.  Traffic was predictably terrible, especially because of a major holiday on November 1st that causes many families to travel through Manila on their way to various provinces.  Henry, however, was being very conservative, so we arrived at the airport many hours before my flight was to depart.  It's a good thing Henry supplied me with some pesos because there's a fairly hefty terminal fee that you have to pay when you fly out of the Manila airport.  The cost might have been around 550 pesos, which is somewhere around $12.  

In conclusion, this was by far the most rewarding, fulfilling business trip I have ever taken.  It's one thing to sit at your computer all day and imagine people one day using what you are creating, and another thing entirely to see the fruits of your labors.  I've been building this business for over 11 years, and this trip absolutely confirms that my time has been well spent, and encourages me to stay on this course.  My lifelong mission (bucket list if you will) is to change the world in math education and hopefully other areas as well.  I've only scratched the surface so far, but will continue in my pursuit.

If you read all 4 of my posts, thanks for reading!  I experienced so many things that are not reflected in any of these posts, but I hope I did a good enough job telling my story.