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Maybe a relevant personal anecdote might help you -

My grandfather used to sit with me for an hour every morning and used to teach me maths.

He would focus on basics first. He would make sure I had the basics drilled in to me. Not just understood them, but mastered them. Then we would move on to the next topic.

It was a bit slow at first. But after a while, once the basics were done, I finished the whole year's math book in 2-3 months.

I have seen this in software engineering too. Once I am good at basics, or once they're drilled in enough, I am faster and quicker.

Drilling basics is basically like having the basics in O(1) look up with very reduced space complexity too. It reduces the amount of overhead your brain utilises. This makes your brain free to think about the actual problem you are solving. Also, I think this is what allows your brain to work in the background, even when you aren't actively thinking about the problem.

I've seen this with my youngest son too.

Lockdown has really shown up how my 7 year old struggles with his maths work set by school. I've gone back to basics with him and have been drilling him on simple numeracy until he can do it effortlessly using some flash cards I bought and some iPad apps (DoodleMaths, DoodleTables - can't recommend them enough).

Since then he has sailed through all of the new parts we're learning. I really expected it to be much harder than this, but it seems like not fully understanding some basic concepts and having confidence with basic numbers makes all the difference for really understanding the why of all the concepts that are build on top.

In about 6 weeks of me spending around 30 mins to an hour each weekday he has gone from refusing to look at a maths problem to being confident with it.

Retired teacher here...glad to see fresh thinking on this problem. The mega-publishers that serve school districts are stuck in a 1980s model. A project related to yours is ASSiSTments at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The market is big, with space for several innovative projects.

Will look at it, thank you.

Do you expect that students will utilise the backtracking aspect of the software? I think 12 year old me would just use the solver and then log off.

I am optimistic :)

The entire curriculum is extremely easy when properly explained at correct pace.

As a father with a 12 year old struggling with math, to say something is extremely easy makes me think you have a better understanding of math than people.

To be fair, they never said it was easy to figure out how to properly explain it, nor that the right pace was necessarily as fast as anyone involved would like.

Yeah, I feel there are a few potential PhDs in that statement. Coding the solver and the problem generator is the easy part, figuring out how to explain something and from multiple perspectives will be tough. The multiple perspectives is key. I hope I can build a community of people willing to explain and a community of moderators to vet the explanation.

Sounds like some hybrid of khan academy, Wikipedia, and stack overflow! I would have loved this as a kid :)

I totally agree that getting a high quality corpus of information is the hardest part.

I like the idea of explaining “themes/metaphors”, with version-controlled iterative improvements.

Take your child back to first grade and systematically re-test his knowledge. Identify where he got lost, catch up, and then today's assignments will not be as difficult. The child is likely stuck on something that wasn't thoroughly understood in the past.

I did this for a child recently. He was in the special needs program. I looked at his homework and re-tested his math understanding. It turns out he had no solid understanding of place value and had difficulty with adding two digit numbers mentally. No wonder he was struggling. We fixed that by spending a week 30 minutes per day on just that concept, he caught up to the next roadblock, which was fractions, we fixed that, and so on.

That's expensive if you hire someone to do this, but enabling self-study through ability to backtrack would not require as much teaching skill and be more of a supervisory activity for parents.

There are entire books on how to interpret math word problems, which is really all about converting verbal expressions into mathematical symbols. If you haven't already, buy one or check one out at the library. I am building a parser that implements those books as if they were algorithms.

That's the approach I am working on. No NLP, no ML, nothing fancy like that. It will take a while, but I should be able to pull this off. This is a question about hard problems and I think it qualifies. ;)

I totally agree that missing foundation is a huge, compounding issue, and that it can be solved with “surgical education”. I used to do this as a tutor. You dig deeper down the stack of fundamentals until you find something that’s missing, and then you build the stack back up.

That being said, surgery is hard and can be traumatizing if taken on haphazardly. One of the harder problems, in my experience, is if an adolescent has been behind for years, it takes a long time to get to “normal”, and that can be really depressing for both the tutor and the pupil.

Another huge compounding problem is literacy skills. There are people in high school who can barely read, and it dramatically impacts their ability to catch up in every other subject. You can write a perfect explanation, but it might be totally disorienting to these students.

Education is really hard. I wish you the best of luck, it’s inspirational to read your ideas here!

Exactly. Literacy will be the second prong. I want to annotate Strunk & White with background information. Writing the grammar engine will be difficult.

While reading S&W, I had to look up many terms that were assumed knowledge.

Hey, this doesn't sound too different from the adaptive diagnostic Maths Pathway (https://mathspathway.com/) has. It starts at Level 1 and retests all mathematical knowledge of the student until it reaches their zone of proximal development (ZPD). It's all within a classroom environment, but it means all the students are learning the maths that suit them, not a one-size-fits all which is the issue you are referring to I believe.

Full disclosure: i work at maths pathway.

Sounds interesting. Everything on that site is blocked by request a demo. Why do you not have an ungated overview video?

You could use automatic homework as a reward. Basically replacing broken curriculum with your own until they catch up. (Or even beyond that: homework takes time even when you know everything.)

Intriguing...

My wife and I have taught our daughter materials sometimes 2 grade levels above where she is. I think every child has the potential for genius. It is really how you present the material.

I taught a few classes last year on how to program in Scratch to grades 1-5. The 4th and 5th graders really loved it and they went off on their own to learn more. It was not a large sample, but I think presenting the right material in the right way to the right age makes a huge difference.

I have been thinking of ways to improve education. I think there is a huge potential in online video. If it is produced right in the sense of say "Hollywood" verse say Khan Academy, kids will enjoy it a lot more.

Right. As much as I love Khan, there’s lots of room for improvement. It needs to be interesting. Watch Shadiversity and you’ll love history. :)

Thanks for sharing, I have not heard of Shadiversity. I would recommend MrBettsClass channel for high school history. I wish there were more channels like this for a younger audience.

Can you give us the framework you use on how you presented the material?

I would love to understand where you are from and what education systems you have seen. Where does your assumption of students relying on being taught by parents ceme from?

Personal experience with multiple countries. Studied in both USSR and USA. Witnessed many students struggling in USA.

You are right though, many parents can’t teach. That’s the problem I am trying to solve - parents shouldn’t have to go to school with their children.

I didn't mention parents not being able to teach. I just asked where your assumption for that is coming from.

Just wondering as I haven't heard of this at all in my home country. Homework is usually quite clear, and the basics to get through it are made clear in the classroom. We had separate times for learning maths, and doing exercises.

Have you thought maybe your assumption is based on very very old anecdotal data?

I would be delighted if my product turned out to be unnecessary and I am not being sarcastic.

Science homework should be able to be done in little more than it takes to copy it from an A student. It should not take hours, which it often does. I am looking through the lens of disadvantaged students.

That sounds good and maybe the country you are from does not have this problem (anymore).

The parents I know from my home country are telling me that their kids are often struggling and are overwhelmed by the homework assignments. While this is already recognised also by the board that created the curriculum the changes are slow and half-hearted.

In my opinion, however, that is not even the problem, nor is it the problem that they are trying to solve. We usually forget that teaching is not "transfer" of knowledge. Each person actually recreates the knowledge in their own head and tries to fit it in with the rest of the world they know.

I believe that the best solution to education is to be able to personalize the new content in a way that naturally extends the student's knowledge. As already stated this may mean backtracking a little to be able to put the new knowledge onto a good foundation.

Normally, teachers cannot do that for each student individually so getting a program that could do that customization would be a great win.

Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when you have something we can try?

Not yet, but I’ll revisit this thread eventually.

I learned basic algebra from something like this in book form. Kind of like a "choose your own adventure", but it would pose problems, and either skip ahead on the correct answer, or lead to clarifying text for common mistakes.

(no longer remember the series title, but do still remember the penny finally dropping on "x is an unknown")

I certainly agree that so much about school is problematic and could be improved, but ...

> Schools are functionally no different from part-time prisons.

A prison by definition cannot be part-time ; ). Plus, it's a totally unfair comparison. Schools are intended for everyone. Prisons are intended for a specific subset of people deemed to have broken a law.

Schools are for children. Prisons are for adults.

And so on.

> A prison by definition cannot be part-time

Sure it can. Check out "weekenders" and "work release" programs, for example.

Good point. To me the whole schools / prisons thing just seems dramatic and not well thought out.

“X is like prison”.

Work is like prison. Childhood is like prison. Society is like prison.

Is everything like prison?

If we live in The Matrix yes but we don’t?

> Prisons are intended for a specific subset of people

> Schools are for children. [a specific subset of people]

Bills of attainder[0] may be illegal and unconstitutional, but they're still a thing that happens as long as noone who matters cares.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_attainder