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?