PlayingMath is an educational platform for teachers or parents who want to supervise their children’s daily math progress more closely. Our goal is to improve children’s outcomes while reducing the cost of education by encouraging the incorporation of digital tools and applications into school programs or independently used by parents as tutoring.
Our aim to assist Hispanic children started 4 years ago. We achieve this by teaching math online in their native language. We now have math classes in English and Spanish to help children in America. We also provide English courses to help Hispanics.
Here Is Why We Started Building An Educational Platform :
The time it takes children to achieve some objectives is long; building discipline and measuring their progress is key. What would you think as a parent if you sent your child for swimming lessons and they did not know how to swim after 7 years of classes?
Let’s see what happens when parents send their children to school and measure math results after 7 years. PISA is the world’s premier yardstick for comparing quality and efficiency in learning outcomes across countries.
The top countries on the list are those countries that have fewer students that do not have mathematics skills. The red lines represent the percentage of students that lack basic math skills.
The US was ranked No. 36 with 27% of their students on level 1 or below: lacking basic math skills, and 51% on level 2 or below. At level 2, children have minimum levels of proficiency.
PISA computes its result by sampling different countries and scoring 15-year-olds on grade 7 or above. Notice that the results have deteriorated slightly since 2003.
PlayingMath Success Story:
Manuel wasn’t getting good grades in math, and one day, his grandmother asked us to help him. Manuel attended grade 5 in a public school in Mexico.
School had already started two months before we were contacted. We recommended that Manuel work through PlayingMath Grade 5, starting from lesson 1, and ensure that he covered 4 lessons per week: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. Manuel spent no more than 40 minutes in each lesson.
The results of the PISA mathematics test conducted in 2018.
PlayingMath makes it possible for students to do the same lesson more than once before submitting the lesson to school—or in this case, Manuel sent each lesson to his mom. Manuel’s mom received an email every time he finished his lesson.
Manuel’s mom can review the full questionnaire, Manuel’s responses, correct answers, and PlayingMath-suggested strategies used to solve each question. Since we design customized reports for school directors and teachers, we can dig into the results to ascertain individual competencies.
After 6 months, Manuel’s grandmother told us that he was improving between 2 and 3 grades in school. He now scores 8 or 9 instead of the 6 or 7 that he scored before using PlayingMath. Manuel’s improvement helped him do much better in other subjects and also improved his self-confidence.
Instead of assuming our children learn everything in school, why not start to look for extra help when they have the time to learn concepts little by little and using a methodology that is consistent?
In August 2017, the Mexican Academy of Science organized a Math Olympiad. During the first phase an average of 100,000 students from all over the country participated. During the second stage only the top 10,000 continued and the third and last stage had 1,000 children trying to get the gold medal.
Emiliano Coatl Gonzalez is one of the 7 winners (gold medal) in the category of children under 12 years. He was in fifth grade and PlayingMath was the main tool he used to study for the Math competition. Congratulations again, Emilio!
Our Methodology
- Short video lessons (2 to 10 minutes)
- Exercises with individualized feedback (10 to 15 minutes) that are graded instantly
- Step by step teaching that allows students to learn and infer new concepts while developing strategies on their own
- Help students to develop fluency with math operations while understanding the underlying concepts
PlayingMath is a discipline-based platform that helps students (currently K-1 to K-6) to improve their math skills. It runs on computers or smartphones. The annual subscription is $19 per student and includes Math and English lessons that can help students (and their parents) to learn English.
