Reimagine Math

The extent of the problem

As per various research studies, 3 out of 4 children do not enjoy Math. It is a global problem. A lot of funded research is undergoing in understanding the Math Worry. I suggest anyone search "Math Worry Books", you would find at least 30 book titles. The entire world will benefit from our solution. Reference: Status of Math Anxiety in Children

Our target communities

•Children from 6 years to 16 years

•Adults who want to become certified Vedic Maths teachers and provide Math tutoring services using the MAth2Shine platform.

Reasons for the problem

The reason for Math Worry in children are as follows: 

• Children learn foundation Math through old and non-optimized methods. There is hardly any change in the way School Math is taught at an early age. 

• Many adults and teachers send a psychological signal to children that Math is a complex subject. 

• Our currently followed school Math curriculum complicates Math. Some examples are simple Math operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication division, fractions, etc.

• A feeling of Math being a complex subject at an early age sets the wrong foundation for later schooling and college years. This feeling creates anxiety when the child gets into high school or college. 

• School system change is slow. Parents may be giving more weightage to marks and not children's fundamental Math Skills. Math needs to become a fun subject.

• Tutors are overwhelmed with the administrative work such as preparing lesson plans, checking homework and classwork etc.

Solution of the problem

An ancient Indian system of Math known as Vedic Math provides a framework of Math Naturalness using Algorithmic Thinking and more optimized and creative methods. Math2Shine showcases usefulness and improvement using Vedic Math through its Ed-Tech platform data and analytics. 

By looking at the usefulness of Vedic Math, many state governments in India are trying to implement the concept of Vedic Math in New Education policies. We have many Math Teachers in countries like the US and Canada trying to make a difference, go and meet MOE, and make their community aware of the usefulness of Vedic Maths.

Reference 1: Vedic Math to be in India's New Education Policy   

Reference 2: Rick Blum Interview.

Math2Shine co-founder Kenneth Williams has written 23 books on Vedic Maths and trained over 1000 teachers in 75 countries. For example, Kenneth Williams did original research and wrote the book "Why We Calculate Backwards? ". He discovered concepts like "Number Splitting" and many other discoveries and tried to make Math easy.  

Reference 3: www.vedicmaths.org to know more about Vedic Math 

Reference 4: Cosmic Calculator Book by Ken Williams

Our solution comprises the below components : 

-Physical Books & worksheets.

-Ed Tech Platform with Student and Tutor Portal and associated deep Analytics. 

-Embedded videos in our Ed-Tech

-Regional language translations. One of Ken's books is translated into seven Books. Ken's students have translated the book into their language to benefit their country.

Process of Spreading Vedic Math globally

•Step 1: Train Adults using Video-Based Courses.

•Step 2: Provide Math2Shine Portal to teachers to understand our system and content.

•Step 3: Trained teachers join the Math2Shine tutoring program. They can teach Vedic Math, School, or Abacus. They earn a major share of the revenue. Math2Shine keeps part of the revenue.

•Step 4: Teachers stick to us because we save them the time of their admin work, market them better, and provide better parents satisfaction.

•Step 5: Show child performance improvement through Analytics.

Our solution serves the below segments :

1- Tutors, Homemakers, and those who want to teach Math :

•We would provide training in Vedic Math, School Math and Abacus.

•We provide a tutor mini website to enroll students.

•They use Tutor Portal

2 – Children from 6 to 16 years of age

•They use the student portal

3 – Schools & Tuition Centers

•Teachers and Students of a School use Math2Shine to improve the overall outcome and reduce teachers time spent on various admin tasks. 

Our founders, Lokesh Tayal and Kenneth Williams, are just one part of the solution delivery. We have a technology development and support team and a content development team. 

Our main strength lies in our community development efforts. The key characteristics of our community are as follows :

- Spread in 75 countries.

- Our community members are committed. Community members did our book Elementary Teacher’s annual in 7 languages on a voluntary basis.

- We provide a teacher training platform for Vedic Math, School Math, and Abacus

- We enable many Micro-Entrepreneurs with the right tools to teach and earn.

- Our focus is comprehensive business automation. It would help us to ensure a fast global scale-up.

We are coming up with a proper community structure. This community structure would help community members to support each other in many aspects such as “Technical Support”, “Doubt Clarifications,” “Content Translation,” etc. 

Our process of Vedic Math teachers training courses help us to consolidate our relations with our course attendees. These attendees support us in manty ways beyond just conducting the classes.

A lot of research is undertaken in the Math domain in the last 50 years. In spite of having a lot of focus on “Mathematics’ in STEM education, we have not done any significant research on how children feeling and confidence change with Natural Math strategies of the mind.

Math2Shine data and analytics prove a huge improvement in children's Math attitudes and Skills.

MIT's recognition of our efforts will motivate various countries, parents, and policymakers to research Math Naturalness and experiment with our methods and strategies. We would be able to achieve the below objectives :

-Incorporate Mental Math as part of the core curriculum.

-Teach Algebra and Negative Numbers early in the school system.

-Adopt systems that ease the administrative workload on teachers.

-Use Analytics to know where are the children weak and cover those topics better. 

We would be in a better position to scale our efforts and raise capital to transform Math Education for children and also enable adults to create an additional income stream by teaching children in society.

Following are the elements of innovation in our solution.

Books

•Kenneth has expanded Vedic Math into the new dimension of improving number sense, algebraic sense, trigonometry, calculus, etc. He has written 23 books. He gave a new approach to teaching using the Cosmic Calculator Series of 5 books. He wrote 3 teacher manuals for Elementary, Intermediate, and Advanced Levels. All of these are original research in the field of learning and teaching Math.

•We would link physical books with online hosted videos using QR Code. This will help us in a fast scale-up.  This can also be used by people who have limited internet access.

Ed-Tech

•Steps of the mind are shown in “With Steps’ worksheets.

•Software creates new questions in the worksheets when attempted again. It means a child practice skill and not just the questions.

•Easy classwork and homework assignments. It is checked automatically by the software. It reduces teacher workload.

Learning Process

•Enable Self Learning, as well as Tutor Enabled learning model

•Personalized Practice Analytics, skills strengths, and Weaknesses drive the teacher and student action to focus on weak areas and improve these areas.

•Learners are more motivated when they see the analytics of their work, their worksheets are immediately checked, they can revise concepts by watching videos and color-coding their performance. 

Business Model

• Tutors promote themselves using their micro-website.

• Math2Shine support tutors in better marketing.

• Math2Shine improves tutors' earnings through after-school programs. We share revenue with them and our software reduces their administrative work. In nutshell, teaching children become many time joyful work.

The number of Certified Vedic Math teachers & Number of Students : 

  - In one year, we want to create 700 certified teachers. They will serve a student community of 17500. 

  - In five years, we want to create 50,000 certified teachers. They will serve a student community of 1.25 million.

 Student time spent on the platform.

- We want students to use the platform. Our efforts are sustainable when students learn through the system and practice worksheets. The average usage of 50% of the users is high at the tune of solving couple of hundred worksheets a month. 

The number of languages translated.

Math2Shine is for all students irrespective of diversity in social, economic, and spoken language settings. We have created a model for translating our content into multiple languages. Some of our teachers did the work for Hindi and Italian languages. 

Onboarded Schools

Schools are not focused for the first 3 years due to a long selling cycle. We would be focusing on the School Segments after 3rd year of our operations. This KPI would kick in for year 5. 

One Year Goal

•Train 1000 tutors in Vedic Maths and  700 tutors would be certified and start teaching using the Math2Shine platform.

•Enroll 17500 students for after-school tutoring.

•Monitor Math Skills improvements using Analytics and conduct targeted skills improvement programs for tutors and students

•Monitor Average Time Spent in Math2Shine to measure stickiness

Five Year Goal

•Train 70000 tutors in Vedic Maths. 50000 tutors would be certified and start teaching using the Math2Shine platform.

•Enroll 1.25 million students for after-school tutoring.

•Enroll 1000 schools for Math2Shine Vedic Math, School Math, and Abacus program.

•Convince 10 countries' Ministry of Education to incorporate Math2Shine methodology in their core curriculum.

•Monitor removal of Math Worry in these children and conduct a survey on their attitude on Math subject. 

•Collaboration with multiple universities on cognitive abilities improvements using the Math2Shine platform.

•Monitor Average Time Spent in Math2Shine to measure stickiness

Our solution would not only create childhood Math joy but impact their entire life. Their employability will increase. We expect the following change trajectory :

-All the adults who receive Math2Shine training feel a wonder of Math Easiness.

-Our certified teachers would teach their children, other children in the community, and in schools. Since certified teachers would be earning from Math2Shine, they would be motivated to teach in the community to get more students.

Conduct regular Mathmagician events using the Math2Shine portal.

We would publish our results on Math Skills improvements in children and collaborate with universities and research institutions on the gradual elimination of Math anxiety in children.

Rick Interview Snippet of Feeling Good in Math

Interview Snippet with an 83 year old Vedic Math teacher from Canada

Math2Shine is a generic Content Ed-Tech platform. Salient features of our core technology are as follows :

Scalability :
- Math2Shine is a SaaS-based platform built as a Progressive Web app.

- We are hosted in the cloud. 

-Platform offers content creation and publication security models. This allows us to customize the content as per the country or organization's needs

Algorithmic Content Creation
 - We write algorithms. These algorithms create our worksheets. It provides freshness in content. When a student practices again, new worksheets questions are designed.

Analytics
-A student has access to complete analytics, Practice Analytics, Worksheet Analytics, and Lesson Analytics. It enables a student to precisely know what their strength and weaknesses are.

Workflow and Engagement
-We have a seamless workflow between student and tutor. As a student solve his worksheet, it is reflected on Tutor Screen. A tutor can give immediate feedback. It enables the experience of Physical Tutoring in an Online Setting.

-A tutor can assign the homework to children. Our workflow will track the due date and automatically marks completed work in various statuses such as “Completed Ontime”, Completed Late,” and “Late,” etc.

Easy for Students to Learn and Teachers to Teach

-We came up with a model where steps of the mind are shown on the screen. It helps in practicing “With Steps” worksheets. Once it is completed, students can move to “Without Steps”, “Speed Building”, “Real Life Problems,” etc. 

Language Translation

-Math2Shine has its own model of translating into any language in the world.

-Diversity is a key aspect of Math2Shine Growth.

-We firmly believe that Vedic Math originated from India, but, it is for the globe. People across the globe from the USA, Canada, Argentina, UK, Philippines, Nigeria, and India are contributing to our efforts

-Over 50% of our team will be women. We have women from India &  Argentina who are contributing to our success.

- Kenneth William's prior work of training over 1000 teachers in 75 countries set a solid foundation of diversity. Diversity is essential for us to maintain it for better appreciation of the Math2Shine system.

Revenue Segments

-Provide Tutor Training. Tutor become Math2Shine Partner. We help tutors to do better marketing and branding. Tutors would bring students. ( This is the focus segment in the first 3 years )

-Students subscribing to Self Learning Mode

-Students subscribing through School Sales

-Kenneth Williams Books. Math2Shine owns the copyright of 20 books of Kenneth Williams.

-Vernacular language books and math2Shine platform.

Business Model Canvas

We would need initial capital to support our branding and marketing efforts. All other aspects of our business would be software-driven. For example :  

- Tutor Training is software-driven through our platform. 

- Scalability will be through Growth Hacking methods. 

- We would get revenue through our 20 books sales.  Copyright of ken Williams books belongs to Math2Shine. 

We expect that after 3 years we would become profitable to support our operations. We would need capital for scaling to the "Awareness" and "Interest" development phase of our journey.

We did not raise any external funding. This initiative is self-funded by Lokesh. We receive some revenue from the customers. Our major focus is to make sure the development of a robust scalable platform. We intend to raise capital now for better scalability and marketing efforts.