As Natalie pointed out, status icons help you easily decipher at a glance how your students are progressing. Remember we don’t leave you wondering what factors have contributed to each student’s status; you can always hover your mouse over an icon for a more in-depth look behind the status. This is particularly helpful in identifying areas that need improving quickly and effectively. To see the video click link.

The hover over feature is also found in a number of other reporting areas. For example, this feature appears on the number line when looking at students in the class view. Hover over a student icon on the line to see who’s who and their current Maths Age™. We also want to make sure teachers and administrators are able to ensure students are using Maths-Whizz properly. Just click on the usage tab while in class reports to see each student’s usage while in the tutor mode.

So remember – time spent in the bedroom watering plants or using the replay feature are not counted toward usage. This is helpful if you feel as though your students are scheduled to use Maths-Whizz 60 minutes a week but their usage is only registering say 40 minutes. I hope you found this video tutorial and post useful.

Next time we’ll be taking another look at reporting features, with even more tips and recommendations for how you and your students can get the most out of Maths-Whizz!

In keeping with the ‘Powering Learning’ theme of BETT 2012, Maths-Whizz, the online suite of services that guarantees raised standards in numeracy for  5 to 13 year-olds, is encouraging visitors to ‘power happiness in numbers’. The award-winning system encompasses online tutoring service Tutoring Plus and the online, teacher-led content library, Teachers’ Resource. Maths-Whizz creates positive learning outcomes by building confidence and encouraging shared, interactive learning at home and in schools. Crucially, progress is measurable, as students are continually assessed. This detailed real-time reporting is very beneficial for schools wishing to access government funding.
Visitors to BETT will be able to experience Maths-Whizz first hand. Demonstrations by practitioners (teachers and non-teachers), using whole-class interactive tools and best practise guidance, will show why Maths-Whizz is proven to raise standards in maths. The newly-launched features of Teachers’ Resource* (v 3.2) and a superb related show offer* complete the Maths-Whizz BETT experience.
Visitors to BETT 2012 are invited to:
•    Meet Whizz Prof, in attendance each day.

There will also be plenty of stickers, pens and other treats for teachers to take away for their school.

•    Take advantage of the  BETT school offer:
In addition, and exclusive to BETT visitors, any school that buys at BETT will be able to buy version 3.2 of BETT award-winning Teachers’ Resource for just £750*.

•    Come to our events:
Daily discussion forum with current teacher and Headteacher Maths-Whizz Users, please follow us  on twitter @whizzprof  for more details.
Educationalists Katie Krais and Lorrae Jaderberg share perspectives on how to raise numeracy standards through after school clubs on Thursday 12th.

Now that we have literally thousands of users, we at Whizz can begin to see the exercises which are more of a struggle than others, and frankly there are exercises we must  improve to ensure  that the children do really understand the learning objective all the time. A  Certain of our tests get failed much more than others which could be about the test or the animation which preceded it as we know, for example, that many children struggle with telling the time on an analog clock. Mine did, how about yours?

Occasionally we find that we have been too hard on our users. In one of our exercises for 7 year olds, we didn’t realise (until the consistently high failure rate convinced us!) that we were expecting them to be familiar with 3x, 4x and 5x number facts when at that age level, the curriculum requires only 2x and 10x knowledge. Hopefully now, many fewer of our children will have to face repeating one of the 7 year old animated exercises over and over again.

Many of the other most highly failed animated exercises are Rapid Recall ones. They are usually fun to do and frankly if they get failed a lot, it’s no bad thing if the child has to do them again. In a few cases, we are going to review the times we allow for the answer to be given. But we don’t want that time to be long enough to use a calculator or to go and find Dad! We’ve got some other ideas up our sleeve for this issue but it would be great to hear some suggestions from our users. So please do let us know what you think.

With tests we know we have to find a balance between going slightly beyond how we have taught the learning objective- without going beyond, you can’t always test whether the point of the exercise has been understood- and taking too big a step. We know we haven’t always got that balance right and are fine tuning where necessary. There’s no sense in having a test which only a tiny minority can pass first time, and condemning children to excessive repeats of the same animation.

In the Parent Dashboard we have through Exercise Preview given parents the possibility of allowing their child to skip repeating an animation but it’s a nuclear option which we would rather never had to be used!

Care to comment on any of these issues? We would love to hear your thoughts!

 (…. to the tune of the Twelve Days of Christmas)

On the first day of Christmas my Maths-Whizz said to me
We’ll help you be a Whizz at Maths, as good as you can be!

On the second day of Christmas my Maths-Whizz said to me
… If you do your Maths-Whizz 30 mins a week, you’ll get a sticker from Mummy.

On the third day of Christmas my Maths-Whizz said to me
If you want to try before you buy, a trial is completely free

On the fourth day of Christmas my Maths-Whizz said to me
You get to do Maths, when schools are closed, coz its online for the whole family

On the fifth day of Christmas my Maths-Whizz said to me
Even though I can’t sing……

Get to do Maths, when schools are closed,
Try before you buy
Stickers from Mummy
And we’ll help you be the best that you can be!

Can anyone add the next few verses?

 Santa Claus can be a fun maths teacher for primary school children. We have outlined five fun tips that can be incorporated into learning in the run up to the big night…. and of course don’t forget, the Maths-Whizz Winter Adventure is live later today (and can be accessed from the bedroom or console area).

1) Calculate the profit Santa generates for Royal Mail
Letters to Santa help him know where to go and what to deliver. Royal Mail estimates that it receives approximately 750,000 letters to Santa every year. Parents can work with children to calculate the estimated £345,000 on stamps that children will spend sending their instructions to Santa.

2) Map the distance from their house to the North Pole
Whip out a map and show children where they are in relation to the North Pole. Ask them to guess how many miles Santa will have to travel to reach them. Then, teach them how to measure the miles. How close did they come? You can even take the opportunity to discuss the principles of longitude and latitude. This website will help yopu check your answers !

3) Count the countries that Santa will visit   
Every year the good folks at BBC and Norad keep tabs on Santa during Christmas night. You can use the web site to view and discuss the 24 times zones that Santa will cross. Pondering Santa’s leap across the globe will probably introduce many children to the concept of time zones for the first time. To increase the challenge, parents can help children calculate the time it will be in other countries when Santa is visiting them.

4) Find out the calories Santa will consume in mince pies
Parents can research their local population and estimate how many children Santa will likely visit in their area. Let’s say Santa visits 5,000 homes and consumes one mince at each home. If the mince pies are 100 calories each, how many calories will Santa consume? Don’t forget that a half of cup of skim milk at each house is 40 calories. Good thing that Santa moves beyond the speed of light, another lesson to sneak in.

5) Don’t forget fun facts about Santa’s Reindeer
When Santa comes, how many hooves on the roof will children hear? How many watts of energy does it probably take to burn Rudolph’s nose that lights the way? (assuming that it’s a standard light bulb) You can also explain to kids that reindeer antlers can range up to 39 inches in width to 53 inches in length. As for food, according to the Alberta Reindeer Association, reindeer require 2.1% of their body weight in dry matter and the average reindeer weight is between 250-300 pounds.

Whizz Prof teaching Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource

Don, Sarah, Dana , Hamzeh and myself were out in Abu Dhabi at BETT ME this week. We had been there before, the Whizzprof hadn’t. The fact that he was meant everyone had great fun- check out our Facebook page for pictures!

He met HE Dr. Mugheer Al Khaili, Director General of the Education Council and helped out our very own Dana when she was being interviewed for Al Jazeera. He also taught a couple of classes of children and gave out loads of stickers.

BETT was a showcase for some great products , but more importantly, it was also about ideas.

After having met Nadia Bhakuri, at Opportunity Arabia in London last month and hearing about  this visionary architect’s work in Saudi Arabia’s Building Schools programme, it was superb to meet other architects and engineers to hear about their work in the region. One thing was crucial, designing schools is no longer about trying to recreate an old model, it is about grasping the opportunity of creating a fundementally new way of teaching.

Whilst speaking to HE Dr. Ahmed Gamal El-din Moussa about Egypt’s plans, he said he wanted to focus on a new way of learning and teaching and expected the buildings in which chidlren were being taught to reflect this.

“We want to welcome families into a space that is friendly. We need to engage with society as a whole, not just the children that come through school doors. A new approach is essential if our young people are to reach their full educational potential”. This echoed Nadia’s vision of having spaces that worked within the culture and the heritage of her country, but that also allowed parents to participate in their children’s experience. She was particularly passionate about incorporating a welcome area.

The idea behind this is something very close to our hearts at Whizz. Rather than trying to create online textbooks and excercises, ie merely translating the traditional ways of doing things online - Maths-Whizz moves learning from how ‘things used to be done’ into something completely new (click this link to see a video explanation). This has created  a programme and environment that motivates children, engages parents and informs teachers, leading to guaranteed raised standards. With this Triangle of Success  Maths-Whizz makes full use of what ‘online’ can actually do. In order for effective learning to take place, happiness needs to be fostered; Maths-Whizz was created as a fun platform to engage children and parents whilst offering best practice support.

Whizz Education’s passion for creating a new type of learning environment, closely mirrors the thought leadership shown in the Middle East. As H.E. Dr Mugheer Khamis Al-Khaili, ADEC Director General said,

“We are keen to work closely with various stakeholders to improve standards of education in the Middle East and North Africa. This can be achieved through reinforcing joint collaborations.”

It was great to see that our way to happiness in numbers has a part to play in this.…

Further to Ray’s excellent piece from July on the importance of failure in Maths-Whizz exercises, comes a long New York Times piece from last month, asking ‘What if the secret to success is failure?‘.

What if, indeed?

Dominic Randolph, the principal of a hugely successful New York school, was quoted in the article as saying:

I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure.

He touches on something vital both in education and in life. It’s akin to a sentiment often expressed by some of the most successful people: that they have failed more often that they have succeeded.

The Economist recently looked at the importance of failure in business:

Students of entrepreneurship talk about the J-curve of returns: the failures come early and often and the successes take time. America has proved to be more entrepreneurial than Europe in large part because it has embraced a culture of “failing forward” as a common tech-industry phrase puts it[...]

For those people, failing was a natural consequence of  trying, and it actually made them stronger, better. For my own part, I have an analogy in rock climbing. Whenever I climb (with ropes, harnesses, and safety devices, naturally!) it is exhilarating. But if I am trying a particularly difficult or technical route, I sometimes get scared. I become afraid of heights, afraid of falling, afraid of failure. And, until I have tried, failed, and fallen off, I am paralysed by the fear that I might. Knowing that I can fall, and try again, makes me more confident the second time around.

To return to the NYTimes piece, a common focus is ‘character-building’. How a student can be inculcated with ‘boy scout’-style character traits of self-reliance, persistence, discipline, and so forth. A schools superintendent found that the graduates of his schools who went on to do well at college were not necessarily the academic ones, but also those:

[...]who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.

So, what if we aren’t teaching students to ‘bounce back’, but instead to expect success, and happiness, every time? And what are we going to do when those students, inevitably, fail?

Maths-Whizz is about happiness in numbers. And that happiness comes when a student finds he or she has suddenly acquired the keys to a palace of maths learning, and the opportunities that creates in turn; I’ve written before about how important maths is to all sorts of careers.

But we risk wrongly assuming that the pursuit of happiness entails being always happy, without pain, difficulty, or uncertainty.

A common complaint we hear from parents and children is that some exercises are just too hard, or ‘unfair’, or suchlike. Sometimes, this is the result of a bad assessment – where the child has been pushed artificially above his ability level, and is receiving advanced lessons too early as a result. But often it is because the child simply doesn’t like getting things wrong, and gets distressed as a result. And any parent, naturally, hates to see their child distressed, and wants us to ensure that doesn’t happen, and that we ensure it doesn’t happen.

The brutal answer is: we won’t. We can’t. If the assessment has been completed properly, then the lessons he or she gets should be correct, according to our tried-and-tested curriculum. If the child fails, we say: “Wait, think, and try again. And keep trying.”

Maths-Whizz provides help for students, but it doesn’t assume that if you’ve failed once or twice you’ve earned the right to pass. This isn’t a cruel-to-be-kind philosophy; it’s not even cruel.

There is a crucial difference between telling someone that they can succeed if they try, and telling them they have already succeeded because they can. In the first instance we are building confidence, but in the second we are secretly undermining it, because no child will truly understand what it means to try, fail, or pass, until she experiences it for herself.

So: Try, fail, learn, try again…

“We are confident that IBM Global Services will keep us ahead of the game,” said his father, Julian.

This NewsBiscuit  story is a spoof. However, in a parenting environment that is increasingly results-fuelled, the fact that many of us are secretly (albeit wistfully) hoping that indeed it might be true, does make it rather poignant.

There are a couple of interesting facts around homework:

1. A recent survey by the Office of National Statistics reported that a typical working parent was spending a total of just 35 minutes a day ‘looking after’ children.
2. Maths is the subject that parents have the greatest difficulty with in terms of supporting their child’s Homework- 37%.

No one argues that we, as parents, need to shoulder some responsibility for how our children learn. However, if blog comments and posts on parenting websites are anything to go by, there are very few parents or students who believe that the way we engage with education in the home is working.

Indeed, rather than seeing homework as the ‘holy grail’ of positive engagement, many parents will  instead recognise a newly coined phrase that is doing the rounds, referencing homework as ‘the toxic hour’. This reflects a paradigm shift in terms of how we combine parenting and work.  Most parents will prioritise key ‘home-work’ needs when they get home, such as shopping, cleaning and cooking.

With the average parenting time in a working household standing at just 35 minutes it is not surprising therefore that most of us would site sheer exhaustion, rather than disinterest, as the reason for lack of consistent home-work help. Added to this comes lack of knowledge of the subject and the new teaching methods (do you know what maths terms chunking and gridding mean?) as illustrated by mother-of-two Karen Lilley’s comments below:

I am unable to help with a lot of their homework due to the way it is now taught, or often because I simply do not understand it.

So how do we best stop this ‘toxic hour’ from hijacking our precious family time? Outsourcing of homework involvement, via tutors and tuition centres is certainly one way of doing this.  But if we take this typically practical 21^st Century procurement approach are we not missing a vital fact? The real cost of some of these approaches (i.e. hiring a tutor) isn’t just money, we are sacrificing our rightful place at the very heart of our child’s journey into discovery and learning.

The powers that be should also take heed; government recommendations around homework are based on creating parental engagement by directing schools to set work that is just that little bit too hard for children to do on their own. However, the downside to this ‘forced’ engagement is that the harder homework becomes and the more rigorously it is enforced, the more likely it will be that parents will outsource hands-off solutions. The result: Increasingly disengaged children and parents: the very thing homework directives were designed to alleviate.

We want our children to do well, to be able to work collaboratively and to stay motivated. We, as parents, want to participate, but within a frame-work of support, which we would expect to be set by the school. This mirrors how we interact in our day to day working environments. Our professional world is driven by increasing demands for internal and external team collaboration, entrepreneurial spirit, self-directed motivation and leadership. These very qualities should be central to how we work towards our children’s learning futures.

Hands-off methods such as tutoring and homework clubs therefore certainly important, but if we wish to prepare our children for the working world, they are arguably only part of a wider solution.  21^st Century Learning tools are is flexible by their very nature, as they are based on entrepreneurial solutions to traditional problems. With key strategies such as self-directed learning, inherent motivational tools and powerful collaborative frame-works at the heart of companies such as Whizz Education, this sector has seen some of the most exciting and user-driven innovations.

However, these 2011 opportunities available to our families need to be understood and contextualised in order for them to be effective. Maths is the single hardest subject parents find to engage with in terms of homework help.  It is also not surprising therefore that we have just won the consumer driven  5-7 Educator Silver Award. The Maths-Whizz environment promotes happiness rather than arguments and offers peer and parental collaboration within an environment that is fun.  It also consistently demonstrates outstanding results.

Maths-Whizz sets a framework that doesn’t just reinforce learning or what has been learnt, but that actually teaches within the time set by parent or teacher. It also builds upon skills that are collaborative, allowing children to issue peer challenges and receive positive messages of reinforcement from both parents and teachers.

As a parent you can monitor maths homework at any time and send an Email or sticker as reward for your child’s effort. More importantly, the reporting structure is clear and simple and allows parents to understand their child’s progression. This isn’t about drilling children into submission; it is about using an environment of play and enjoyment to build a space in which children learn to the best of their ability.

Dr. Stuart Brown, a psychiatrist and the founder of the National Institute for Play in the US:

If you look at what produces learning and memory and well-being in life, play is as fundamental as any other aspect.

Maths-Whizz promotes happiness in numbers, underpinned by a serious learning programme that guarantees results and is delivered in a way that emulates engagement through play for children. It is successful because it is based on self-directed learning for the student, positive engagement for the parent and classroom motivation for the teacher.

However, in order to make the leap into a wider public consciousness we as parents need to understand that educational success no longer has to be based on corresponding pain levels. Education can be delivered positively – any place, any time and online and your child’s growing confidence and success can be shared. So outsource your child’s home learning environment by all means, but be aware of the fact that being a positive participant in their learning journey is priceless.

The Statistics – 250,000 collective world-wide monthly usage, reported by two leading online providers
(Education City, siterport.org):

• Online Education recognises and fosters the importance of integrating positive educational experiences at an early age.
• Top online tutor Maths-Whizz has created a system that supports learning within the home and school environment making a maximum difference to achievement
• Maths-Whizz has nearly 3000 home users and 16k+ across UK schools.
• Children are self-motivated, however as they get older their confidence dips, which can lead to very negative attitudes towards Maths at the upper age range.
• Maths-Whizz research has discovered that the turning point for this is age 9.
• Online tutoring can therefore complement the lack of specialist teaching at Primary School level – increasing confidence and motivation.
• The EPRA report states that parents of certain ethnic and social groups are less likely to engage with the school.  It discovered that schools that offer bespoke forms of support to these parents are more likely to engage them in their children’s learning.
• Good online tutoring offers key forms of support. It allows the personalisation of provision for parents themselves as learners. Programmes such as Maths Whizz offer exercise previews that allow parents to see what their children will be learning, allowing parents to familiarise themselves with the material.

The article’s authors, Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford, argue strongly in favour of a maths curriculum that exists in relation to the science, engineering, finance (and so on) that it serves every day, and they say why it’s so important.

Garfunkel and Mumford make an analogy with languages. Learning French teaches both abstract grammatical skills and practical language, but you will never have the chance to use Latin to buy a loaf of bread. In this respect – they argue – the abstract skills that you might gain from a dead language are wasted if they aren’t learned in a context that you can use.

This chimes with recent suggestions from a review into maths education in the UK (led by the lovely Carol Vorderman) that our maths curriculum pre-A-level should be broken up into ‘practical’ and ‘formal’ maths.

In this curriculum every student takes practical maths, arming them for a life choosing between mortgages and interpreting medical test results. More able and motivated students can opt to take the additional formal, and more abstract, maths module.

Mumford and Garfunkel say that the new US Common Core State Standards, which I’ve helped Whizz align its maths lessons to, is “highly abstract”, and “simply not the best way to prepare a vast majority of high school students for life.” But I’m not sure they’ve got the point of that (or any) curriculum. A curriculum should tell teachers and students what they need to study, not necessarily how, or even why, except maybe to put a subject in context.

It’s the good teacher who draws the abstract and the practical together to greatest effect. Not every teacher – especially at primary level – may be confident enough to link the two, but by giving the teacher the opportunity to do this, rather than prescribing how to apply ‘practical’ maths, an ‘abstract’ curriculum can be as relevant as the teacher and her students want it to be.

Maths is often called the science of patterns. And if chemistry really comes alive when we blow something up, then maths should come alive when we use it to, say, spot the ‘golden ratio’ in Chartres Cathedral (see Marcus du Sautoy’s BBC Series, The Code).

But it’s a two-way street. Project Euler, which I wrote about last month, trains budding programmers by getting them to solve maths puzzles. Garfunkel and Mumford say that practical skills, like learning to code, are more useful than abstract, but in the case of Project Euler the abstract is successfully used to teach the practical, and with some success.

I’ll concede that the principle outlined by Mumford, Garfunkel, Vorderman, et al – of the difference between the maths you use to calculate change and the maths you use to describe fractal geometry – makes perfect sense. But it may be a false distinction.

Whizz Education US company president, Ben, has a skill which I envy – he can intuitively understand the relationships between numbers. For me, it’s not quite so easy, but I wouldn’t want to be denied this insight into abstract maths because of a lack of natural ability; I can still appreciate Chartres Cathedral.

To return to the NY Times’ authors’ analogy, I took Latin and Ancient Greek at GCSE – two subjects that are, in themselves, utterly useless in the real world. But I was enriched by learning them. I could spot some of the hidden histories and meanings in words with ancient roots, and read street signs in modern versions of the ancient Greek alphabet.

If creativity lies in making connections between apparently unrelated subjects then ‘pure’, or theoretical, maths must be vital for creative young science minds, wherever they are. To assume that they should only use maths that tells them how to calculate compound interest (a truly vital skill) is to assume that they will get no pleasure from discovering a subject for its own sake. And that is sad.

At Maths-Whizz we try to instil a sense both of the practical and the abstract – and with our 1200+ maths lessons there’s ample opportunity for the young Whizzer to link the two. As Hilary and Steve, two of our expert founding mathematicians, once pointed out to me – put a pound sign in front of a sum or subtraction with decimal values and it suddenly becomes easier.

So, here’s to producing mathematicians who know that the abstract and the practical are two sides of the same coin. It’s a coin that can teach them as much about pi – that most wonderful of irrational numbers – as it can about the price of a loaf of bread.

From the minute Whizz Prof emerged everyone was in love with him. His first appearance was on the last day of Broadstairs Folk Week. We discovered he was a terrible flirt with even older ladies wanted to be photographed with him!  As we wandered down the high street children were determined to ask him questions. Whizz Prof quickly realised that the only way he would be able to answer was using his hands. This was fine until someone asked him to multiply thousands. At this point we decided to limit the size of question. One of the most popular ones still proved to be 12x 12 though. From taking part in the Morris dancing, to getting arrested (ostensibly because the policeman couldn’t finish the worksheet!) Whizz prof joined in all the fun with aplomb.

We started getting more serious at Legoland, with worksheets that had been specifically prepared around encouraging family fun with Lego.

Here are a couple of excerpts to test yourself on….

1. Did you know, they have used 400 million Lego bricks in Mini-land alone! Can you write such a large number? There are six zeros in a million and you count them in threes from the end of the number, putting a comma between the groups of three numbers.

(eg)  One million one hundred is 1,000,100     Ten million, five hundred thousand is 10,500,000

Can you write these numbers in figures?

Thirty million ____________      Fifteen million_____________Thirty thousand   _________

One million, two hundred thousand.  ______________

Five million and thirty thousand and nine. ____________

Sixty million six hundred thousand, and thirty-five __________

2.

The models of buildings in Legoland are not the actual size. They are scale models. In Mini-land they are twenty times smaller. They have a scale of 1:20

A scale model of a shape that was 1:10 would make it _____times smaller than it actually is

A scale model of a shape 3:1 would make it ______times bigger than it actually is

A scale model of a shape 1:4 would make it ______times ______than it actually is.

A scale model of a shape 1:25 would make it ______times ______than it actually is.

Feel free to post answers either on the blog as a comment or on our Facebook Page.

….. again the Whizz prof proved to be very popular. But one of the most exciting things for me was seeing children and parents working together to finish the sheets and win a T-shirt.  It also made me realise that really involving myself in Erin’s learning is the best way for her to progress. Maths-Whizz makes it easy in terms of Emails and the dashboard, but there are also other fun things to do, like building and investigating together.

Lots of people took pictures with Whizz Prof. If you are one of them please do add onto your Facebook and tag Whizzprof, so we can all share them. Here’s a couple to get you started. There are more on the Whizz Prof Facebook page.

The last day is today (22nd August) at the Museum of London, Barbican. Thursday at this great venue proved to be a great success, so we hope you can join us. And remember… please do get in touch if you would like us to organise a fun day in your area for half term.