Many of the factors that led me to creating Math Mania are explained well in Matthew Lacayo’s TEDx Talk: Reforming Math Education. It is pretty crazy how similar our results were in analyzing the problem as well as coming up with pretty much the same solution, which is to introduce math to younger students in a “new” and “different" way from how education systems commonly do. Namely, introduce math in a context of problem solving. Many people don’t understand the distinction between problem solving and “doing math problems”, but the following example should make it clear.
When children were asked “why do you carry the one to the next digit in addition?”, most of them were unable to answer the question. However, most of them were able to solve the additional problems presented to them. This is an example of doing math without problem solving. Setting up children to learn math formulaically leads to most of the dislike found between growing students and math. They never get to experience the full experience of problem solving that makes math so entertaining for others because they lack the deep intuition of approaching a problem that most American education fails to implement.
Math Mania aims to tackle this issue by offering problem-solving styled math through competitions, workshops, Math-a-Thons, and more activities. We hope to grow both our magnitude and scale of impact.
Matthew Lacayo: Reforming Math Education | TED Talk
