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.