The Math Edtech I Let My Own Kids Use

I come to praise edtech (for once) not to bury it. Also: commentary on the latest in AI & edtech.

I ask about edtech more or less weekly, “How are you so sure this technology is going to revolutionize anything? Have you ever met a child?” As a break for myself, as a treat, I am going to share some edtech (and other stuff) I like and use to supplement my two elementary-age kids’ math learning throughout the year and summer¹. Except where noted, there’s nothing in it for me with these recommendations.

First, here are two items from the print materials category.

Addition By Heart

Dan Finkel’s addition flashcards are beautiful to look at and hold in your hand. Amplify has a free, digital version that looks pretty great also. (Disclosure: I work there!) Finkel uses spaced repetition pretty thoughtfully and I appreciate the emphasis on numerical flexibility, like “making tens” where the student turns 6 + 9 into 5 + 10 for easier addition. We work on twenty cards from across the deck most days, keeping the cards moving towards their eventual “graduation”².

Beast Academy

Then we do a page or two out of the Beast Academy books from the team at Art of Problem Solving. My kids dig the comic-style illustrations and character design and I dig that they’re working on creative math puzzles and problems that give meaning and purpose to the fluency work.

Occasionally, I’ll pull a book out and stare at one of the pages, feigning confusion, dangling a worm out on a line to my kids. More often than not, one of them will wander by and help me out.

Okay, on to the digital category. We have some road trips coming up this summer so I have gone pretty deep into the state of math learning apps and found a couple I like well enough to throw onto our tablets.

With digital apps, I’m looking for several things simultaneously (all of which are the bedrock of our core math curriculum FWIW):

• Creativity. Multiple different ways to be right in math.

• Responsive feedback. Getting something wrong should feel interesting too, just as it does in the learning experiences kids enjoy in the world outside the classroom.

• Useful metaphors. Especially physical metaphors on the tablet. We need to see those taps, double taps, drags, swipes, etc, put to productive mathematical use.

Also, and I don’t want to go too deep into this at the moment, timed pressure receives instant disqualification. I can be a touch more agnostic for classroom purposes, but it’s an eight-hour drive to Nana’s house! A four-hour flight to Great Gramma’s! There are ten weeks of summer! It’d be a spectacular own goal to simultaneously stress my kids out and decrease their chill math time!

Kahoot! Numbers by Dragonbox

The physical metaphors are solid here. Tap a unit cube and drag it towards another unit cube. The second unit cube swallows the first, grows a unit, and a voice reads off what you just did in arithmetic terms: “1 + 1 = 2.” Swipe across the larger number and it “subtracts.” Then the puzzles start.

Sumaze

Move a numbered square through a maze. You can move that square onto operation blocks like +1 to change its number. You need to move it through different gates like “=6” which changes your strategy. If you made an error, you can hit the reset button and start the level over.

Amplify K-5 Activities

Obvious conflict of interest here, but my kids love these, especially:

• Ollie the Octopus

• Kitten Coaster

• Ways to Make 10

They are designed for discussion between grownups and kids, which suits me fine.

Your Take

What are you looking for in your own mathy apps and materials? What supplemental materials am I missing?

Featured Comment

Michael Pershan:

That clip is the real deal. Best video of real teaching I've seen in a long time, maybe ever.

Odds & Ends

¶ Tracy Zager’s criteria for fact-based apps is great.

¶ I don’t intend to read or review Sal Khan’s new book on how AI will revolutionize education, not out of any principled stance, just because, subjectively, I don’t enjoy the fantasy genre all that much. (Heyo!) John Warner and I spend a decent amount of time backlinking one another on the matter of AI in education, though, so I feel pretty comfortable sending you to his review as my proxy. I’ll link straight to the section I found most interesting: Warner’s critique of immediate feedback in writing instruction. Immediate feedback is a feature of generative AI so Khan portrays that feature as ipso facto valuable for learners in spite of available evidence. As I have said, with generative AI, teachers are eating scraps from the table of commerce and we cannot be so simple as to believe that everything generative AI does is something teachers and learners need.

¶ Common Sense Media just reported the results of a new survey of students and generative AI usage. Headline finding: 4% of students use generative AI daily, which seems, well, a bit low in absolute terms, very low relative to AI’s marketing, and especially low relative to daily usage of, say, every major social media platform. The AI consulting class is pointing to the finding that 51% of students have tried generative AI as a huge coup, but in reality it’s pretty damning for a product when users try it and don’t convert to regular usage. That indicates a lack of value rather than a surplus. Other points of interest: I do not know how to interpret the difference in usage across races, with Black and Latinx kids reporting greater usage than White kids; the answers to the question “What’s one thing adults should know about how teens use artificial intelligence?” (page 26 here) was, for me, the most illuminating part of the whole report by a long shot, especially the responses about “self-esteem.” /via Ben Kornell at

Edtech Insiders

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¶ Claire Zau is doing a fantastic job lately translating the technical product announcements and jumbo research papers from Google, OpenAI, etc, into their implications for education.

¶ The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both put out some fairly scathing reviews of AI relative this week. The WSJ notes that AI’s eye-popping valuations and marketing are running well behind its productivity gains, revenue, and model enhancements. The NYT, meanwhile, goes long on the tutoring capabilities of the latest model of ChatGPT: “All told, I didn’t see a meaningful improvement from the last version, ChatGPT-4. I definitely wouldn’t let it tutor my child.”

¶ Amplify is hiring curriculum developers to work on Geometry and Algebra 2. If working collaboratively and creatively with smart people and powerful tools is your thing, definitely apply. (PS. I am not connected in any way with the hiring panel for this role.)

¶ Derek Tranchina wrote something good and short: Teaching in an Era of Technology Overload: Old Research Provides Modern Insight.

1. I hasten to point out that my kids are getting a very solid math education here in the public schools of Oakland, CA. Their teachers are using a curriculum that is fine by me—especially since ours isn’t finished yet. In parent conferences, their teachers discuss math with me in ways that convince me a) they get math, b) they get my kids. None of them seem to know I am an overopinionated dork who shouts about math education on the internet and I beg you to not wreck this for me.

2. I realize I don’t spend a lot of time writing about fluency here but I know there are few feelings as lousy for kids as feeling incapable in their math class. Additionally, while fluency isn’t the hard prerequisite for doing interesting math that many insist it is, greater fluency changes what a student can focus on and think about, all of which is why I spend some time with my kids here.