Malawi app 'teaches UK pupils 18 months of maths in six weeks' | Hacker News Reader

Malawi app 'teaches UK pupils 18 months of maths in six weeks'

m.bbc.com

85 pointspinkyand56 comments

Not related to the app, but I wish people stop measuring education with time. In my opinion, kids must spend quite a bit of time understanding basic stuff. Information overdose reduces the quality of understanding. So, the metric shouldn't be "18 months of maths in 6 weeks". A child who learnt the same stuff in 18 months is able to comprehend advanced stuff in the later stages than a kid who learnt it in 6 weeks. Again, this is not a criticism about the app. We just need to give time for kids to learn stuff.

There's no evidence that is the case though. This app is highly interactive and provides immediate feedback, so the child knows whether they are doing things right or wrong.

The fact that it's more like a game means it's much more geared to the way that children learn than just working through a bunch of problems from a book or on a blackboard. It also allows the kids to progress at their own rate: spending more time on bits they don't understand until they do understand them. Class learning tends to be subject to the lowest common denominator, or conversely some kids at the lower end of the scale get left behind.

There's significant evidence that learning by interacting is the best way to promote retention. It's probably also fair to assume that the app itself does not simply promote rote learning of facts either, but rather understanding how the concepts work and repeatedly applying them to unfamiliar problems.

That seems to me to be far more optimal use of the time and creates a solid foundation for going on to understand more advanced concepts later.

Alternatively, why not simply spend 18 months working through even more problems on the app to get better and better? I suspect that the law of diminishing returns kicks in pretty quickly and you don't get much benefit simply through longer exposure at the same level. Instead, you can just introduce more advanced concepts earlier and keep on learning. That doesn't necessarily result in information overload, so long as you are continually building on top of a foundation of throughly understanding the simpler concepts and continuing to use them.

For example, once you understand addition you don't really ever stop using it and forget how to do it. Rather, you go on to learn about multiplication, exponentiation, etc. and hopefully, do so realising that they are all just fancy kinds of addition. I think it's much better if teachers can focus on ensuring that their pupils have that kind of understanding and are capable of applying it, than for example making sure that they can recite all the multiplication tables.

Of course, how you should learn maths differs a bit depending on whether your ultimate goal is to be a greengrocer or a computer scientist. Hopefully we're mostly focusing on the latter now.

Indeed. If we had unlimited resources, the best way to teach would probably one teacher per one (or two-three) child(ren). When you're working closely with one student, you can focus on just what that student needs to learn/needs help with. That probably doesn't scale up to the wide level of schooling that a modern industrialized world needs though (Maybe we should leverage that wasted extra efficiency we've picked up to recruit everyone in the work force to work 4 days at their job, and 1 day as a teacher?).

It sounds like this kind of computer-assisted learning might be able to increase teaching/learning efficiency similarly to what can be achieved with good one-on-one tutoring.

I have these apps, my kids love them,and they do get many concepts across very quickly. It's good to know that they are part of a bigger cause.

However, if the apps described in the article are the same as those in the App Store, then some of the concepts are very simple (the early levels can be done by a 2 year old) so it isn't surprising that older children do very well after they are exposed to them.

The later levels on number-lines and fractions are a bit more challenging, it will be interesting to see how well children do on those.

Regardless, even though some of the exercises seem boring and repetitive to an adult, they do seem to have the knack of holding children's' attention.

https://onebillion.org.uk/apps

Holy moly - the "maths age 3 to 5" app is expensive. £15.99 for "all topics". That's $25.

Or cheap, depending on what it is actually worth.

So these apps reportedly get a child the equivalent of 18 months of mathematical development in 6 weeks of short, fun sessions? In that case, it does seem the £15.99 price is off by at least an order of magnitude, but I suspect we disagree on the direction.

For comparison, there are UK private primary schools that will cost you about GBP 12k/year that deliver far less measurable benefit (if any) than that, that are still wildly successful at attracting students.

The benefit of those is generally teaching kids how to pass the entrance exams for good secondary schools.

If it works. The BBC don't link to this study. It's not linked on Dr Pitchford's website - http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/staff/njp/research.ht...

There's a PDF called "unlocking talent" on the onebillion website, but that crashes iOS Chrome so I haven't been able to read it. It's not peer reviewed. It's not blinded.

https://onebillion.org.uk/downloads/unlocking-talent-final-r...

I can find plenty of published research for stuff which is pure horseshit - brain gym - or for stuff approachig horseshit in the way it's applied - Omega 3; learning styles; a lot of "cures" for dyslexia.

So far I have a press release from a company saying "trust us, our app works" with nothing to corroborate it.

What do you get for £16?

Sorting and matching

Counting to 3

Lines and patterns

Counting 4 to 6

Where is it?

Counting 7 to 10

Patterns and shapes

Counting 1 to 10

Comparing

Add and take away.

That's an under whelming list. It's the bare knuckle minimum you'd tolerate if you had a 1:90 teacher:pupil ratio.

Tldr: give them the money because educating Malawian children is good, but for your own children buy a book and do it yourself.

If they intend to reach a billion people especially in Africa I'd say Android should be the priority platform.

If you read one billion's materials, iPads are used as they last longer in the environment they're kept in and get better battery life. When you're charging for a day's use from solar, that matters.

The apps are also written in a cross platform framework. If a good enough Android tablet comes along, it can be used. Their Maths age 3-5 app is available on Google Play.

Disclosure: I'm familiar with the team.

>If a good enough Android tablet comes along, it can be used.

You have made valid points. However, the fact on ground shows that this a continent powered by Android in the smart device category. It used to be Blackberry but that is on the way out.

People should be able to afford the device before thinking about how long the battery will last. And I see the apps are available on phones. There are great Android phones that last quite long.

Do you know you need a credit/debit card before you can access the itunes store? How many people have access to that here?

Can you give be a link to the Android app I cannot see it on the website.

So the inner idea is that poor people must buy poor devices and higher quality is not for them. I have this discussion a lot with my customers about why give a more costly iOS device instead of android to their employers.

iOS devices are more higher quality, more durable, more up-to-date in matter of software and have better app selection, quality and less prone to be invaded by virus and that kind of stuff. And yep, if you let people choose only for price them will NOT buy the best best best android device.

Specially because somebody is cash deprived is why the one with most quality, most durable, more long-lasting life is the smart choose, because we don't have money for replacement (We, because I know what is be in that situation).

So, if a charity wanna help poor people, is smart that they choose the best available option, not using the criteria : Poor people? Low-cost for them!

Or you can actually ask a bunch of people in your target market what OS their current device runs. The answer is Android, in this case. In much if Africa, cheap and long life is the way to go, and local variations on worldwide tech reflect that.

The point is that there are already over a hundred million Android devices in use in Africa, with projections for smartphones as a whole for 154 million mobile connections. This of course excludes some devices without connectivity, and it does include some very low end devices.

But even if the number of devices that are advanced enough to run these apps were to only make up 20 million of those projected 154 million today, it's still clear that if these apps were available for Android, a huge number of people would be able to run them without any additional investment in hardware.

Expect those numbers to grow at a dramatic rate over the next couple of years, and the specs to steadily increase - keep in mind that there are African countries that can be expected to reach full saturation of mobile phone connections within the next few years, and while smartphones and tablets are lagging, smartphones at least is rapidly eating into the feature phone market in Africa too.

If iPad's works best for them for the deployments where they pay for hardware, then so be it (though I must say I don't believe it, because of the huge cost differential between decent low end Android hardware and iPads), but at the same time they are self-limiting to an extremely small subset of the devices that are actually in peoples hands, and their own deployments will be a rounding error compared to elswhere.

(even in the UK, where the linked research was done, limiting to iPad's excludes the majority of potential users)

> Specially because somebody is cash deprived is why the one with most quality, most durable, more long-lasting life is the smart choose

That is only true if 1) the higher quality option is cheap enough to be possible to afford at any point. It doesn't help if it's better if you can't obtain it. 2) the cost of repeated replacement of a lower quality option exceeds the cost of the higher quality option, including the opportunity cost incurred by paying much more upfront for the higher quality device.

This also means that there may very well be very different cost/benefit tradeoffs for a charity vs. someone paying out of their own pocket.

> because we don't have money for replacement

You can get a decent quality Android tablet in the $40-$50 range (AllWinner A23 or A13 based dual core tablet with Android 4.2 and 16GB flash; 7" 800x600 screen; these are no speed daemons but they are good enough to stream video and play a decent portion of 3D games etc; double that and you can start to find devices with IPS displays in the 1280x720 range) even before you start looking at volume discounts. If you don't have enough money for replacement that may just as well be because you chose an extremely high cost device to begin with.

Yes, you sacrifice quality. Yet my son seems to decide whether to use his 7" low end Android tablet or his moms iPad Air based on which game he wants to play, not on the device.

The current distribution is handled at the school level - this isn't about individual's devices. I highly suggest you read the report by the University of Nottingham before jumping to conclusions.

Ha!

people are down voting me because their small minds think it is an iPhone vs. Android talk

I live here in Nigeria. You would be hard pressed to find iPhones. Many people in the UK/US are surprised to learn that we buy our phones full price. ZERO monthly payments.

As a result, people will buy what they can afford. You can find a lot of very functional sub $100 Android phones. Even Windows phones have a better penetration because of cost.

If this is a product targeted at the West, I would not have commented but this is called Malawi App for a reason.

It is not about poor people deserving poor devices as @mamcx has suggested but people going to buy what they can afford.

If you can reach 5X the number of people with the same amount of buying iphones and the disadvantage is obviously (if any) is not 5X, it is not a clear decision?

Did you read the parent post?

On one hand it makes sense that iPad is easiest to standardize for classroom use where multiple hands will be handling it during day.

On the other hand, there are plenty of cheap Android tablets <$100. Anecdotally, my 8 year old niece has had one for a year, a cheap no name dual core 7inch 1280x720 model that cost 60 Euros. Sure, the screen has cracked a bit and the hdmi out is not working properly, but she is still happily using the tablet.

For some reason I keep thinking of that Onion video , should unemployed be buying new iPads: http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-should-the-nations...

It just seems incredibly limiting to focus on IOS.

> And after 30 minutes, she told us, most of the children have had enough and want to go and play outside. Reassuring for anyone who, like me, would rather not have a child who prefers apps to apples.

But why? Faced with straightforward evidence of better performance, even for UK children, why should we be relieved that the app fails at 30 minutes?

We should be talking about making games that teach kids for hours! That little tablet is way more engaging than 99% of the experiences impoverished Malawi children are going to have. Perhaps sadly, the tablet is way more engaging that some large majority of experiences UK children will have too.

It's obvious to anyone who plays video games that achieving that level of attention is possible. And with games like Civilization and Europa Universalis, you can certainly make a long-play game that teaches kids traditional educational knowledge.

I hate the conspiracy idea that educators are opposed to this technology out-of-hand because it threatens them as an institution. And I'm relieved that there are researchers with government backing showing games teaching kids in rich Western countries.

At some point though, parents will have to confront teachers to do what improves performance. The question is not, when will games be capable of improving educational performance? That has already happened, and the evidence will mount inevitably.

The question is, when will we abandon the pastoral fantasy of today's schooling? When will parents have no opinion whether a child "prefers apps to apples," whatever that means?

The dark-age Carolingians made the template for today's public schooling. If a magic book capable of delivering all the world's knowledge (i.e., an iPad) were available to them, don't you think they'd make a very different education system?

You make it sound like they use it once and put it down forever. They don't. They put it down to go play (which, at that age, is another type of learning). Then they come back, maybe later that day, or the next.

Haven't there been studies on this? The human brain is not good at absorbing information after durations longer than this. It has to have time to process information before it can build on top of it. This is why khan academy and duolingo are so effective, too - you consume little bites of knowledge, go away and process them, and then come back.

Entertainment is not the same thing as learning. Videogames and movies are so completely different from the learning process. Yeah, you can learn from them, but for that amount of time not to be taxing you have to fill it with other stuff. Like a storyline and action and drama. They have passive elements which constitute most of their length.

The constant force-stream of modern classrooms is what makes them so dull and tiring, and gives us stupid kids and disappointing graduates. I think it's pretty awesome that they get to focus for half an hour and learn at their own pace (the most critical part), then get to enjoy being kids for a while.

And 30 minutes is about the point where sitting stationary becomes physically bad for you. To the previous poster, try sitting and playing a strategy game for 6 to 10 hours. You should feel like shit afterwords.

Putting my adult body through sitting in a school desk 5 days a week, my health would be in serious trouble within a few months.

Imagine if these 'pay to win' games like candy crush implemented a 'solve this problem to win' mechanism instead.

Maybe even have some sort of parental control where they can pay a fee to switch their kids games into educational mode

I've got a 5 year old son in UK schools, and frankly it annoys me that he's even in school at this age in the first place.

There's minimal evidence that there's any benefit to starting formalised learning this early. The brain is developing very rapidly at this age, and having seen the curriculum it seems bizarre to me. I'm from Norway, and started school at 7 (Norway has later lowered the starting age to 6, with pretty much no effect). We covered my son entire reception year curriculum in a couple of weeks, alongside a number of other subjects.

This also means that I'm unsurprised that they could cover 18 months of the UK early learning curriculum in weeks: There's not much there. Kids in reception in UK schools still spend most of their time with play activities. Thankfully.

My starting point is that when he wants to learn, he should have the opportunity, but I'm perfectly happy for him to run out and play too. Especially because children learns important lessons during play as well. If your kid spends all day playing a game, they'd for example lose out on a whole lot of social skills and other "soft learning" that we don't test for but that is equally vital.

I wonder: In the article they mention that the reasons for such effectiveness are "rapid personalized feedback" and "entertaining content keeping kids focused".

Those reasons could apply to many educational fields. So i wonder: are there any other apps/sites showing very strong gains versus standard teaching?

Would be good to see some kind of vetted ratings collected from a large sample size on which apps actually work better than others - there are so many apps out there and each will try to claim they work better than the rest.

> the reasons for such effectiveness are ... "entertaining content keeping kids focused"

I'd be interested to see studies emerge on the value of entertainment in educational content as the child ages.

In my direct experience with my own children, entertainment provides value due to engagement as mentioned in the article. But, entertainment switches from engagement to distraction around age 5 or so.

My 2 year old definitely stays more engaged with the alphabet app and basic counting apps when they are entertaining.

However, entertainment is highly distracting to my 6 year old.

I've found at 6 she's more interested in how the learning actually applies to the real world, so she engages with educational apps as a means to an end. For example, she likes to write stories. So, she asked me to download spelling apps so that's its easier for mom and dad to read her stories.

With all of that said, I'm a huge believer in the potential of technology to improve education. IMHO, education is no where near optimal.

Interesting comment. And i might have quoted wrong, it might speak of "engagement".

I think this could just be a question of implementation. For example, Duolingo's gamification is fantastic as an adult.

My personal experience is that Duolingo is fun for two months maximum and then it becomes an equivalent of any other exercises sheet.

There is the duolingo study: http://static.duolingo.com/s3/DuolingoReport_Final.pdf

I would interpret its table 11 as emphasizing the need for entertainment or other focus retention for success within a school curriculum. (I consider duolingo good at instant feedback but incapable of retaining focus without significant external motivation.)

I'm not aware of any studies/references, but AFAIK it's been shown that rapid feedback is very beneficial to most kinds of teaching (and anecdotally that seems to work well for me, and anyone I've observed/taught). As another anecdote, my dad spent some time teaching Norwegian (ie: native language, so substitute eg: English as appropriate) in primary school (ages 10 to high-school) at a small school (tiny municipality) -- and always corrected essay assignments as soon as they were handed in, so kids got them back ~1-2 hours after finishing. For that one class everyone had great progression in writing, spelling, grammar -- and perhaps most importantly -- enjoyed getting essay assignments. To the point that the teacher taking over the class(es) couldn't understand why the kids demanded to be allowed to write essays...

As for "standard teaching" -- is there any such thing? Many students, single teacher teaching -- with low degree of interaction and freedom is pretty poor teaching. I'd guess it's also rather common -- but is it really the standard we want to attain?

This strongly reminds me of my favorite Derek Sivers post titled 'There is no speed limit'. If you haven't read it please do:

http://sivers.org/kimo

Aside from the issue of the teaching methods being compared through measurements of time, can we discuss what, if anything is lost through this teaching platform? While it is not being suggested as a teaching replacement, does the lack of social engagement or the confusion on real world applications have any bearing on the way this material is stored inside these young minds? Perhaps if a portion of the lesson included participating as a group, or if the system switched from a lesson guide on the screen to a few remarks from the educator as a back in forth it may better incorporate both the advantages of technology and the advantages of a caring educator? I am curious to read more articles or research on such combinations if anyone can point me in the right direction. Thank you.

Cool, I think this is the first positive article I've read about tablets at school.

And if you want, you can get the apps for your child for free at https://onebillion.org.uk/apps

Shame they are only available for iPads and not androids. The app might be free but iPads are expensive, especially for poor families.

I really don't like commenting on these threads but I had to bite here.

I call bullshit on this. 18 months of maths is a completely vacuous measure of anything and this is pandering to teachers getting even more lazy and dependent on technology as a magic bullet.

As a parent in the UK with three children at school, I can safely say that the problem is that mathematics teaching is just totally shit. The methods are totally ineffective and the fundamentals just aren't taught. It's about teaching the mechanics of passing tests, particularly at primary level which is about the SATs and nothing else. That's why this seems like such a wonderful headline and the BBC sensationalises it.

Teachers buy in every technical measure and scheme that avoids introspection and looking at the real problem.

With that kind of thinking you might like the site/book at betterexplained.com.

Yes I do indeed like that site and have purchased the ebook already!

I have actually self-taught my oldest two their entire mathematical knowledge outside of school (bar that, physics and software engineering, I know little else) and they've done wonderfully compared to their peers because they understand the meaning and not just the method. That's the real tragedy of the education system here.

That sounds great. Did you teach them mostly what's on better explained?

Also I wonder how would math studies look if we teach people the intuition, a bit of the formalism and lot of how to use numeric and symbolic tools - instead endless rote learning.

No. I actually went through the book "Mathematics, from the birth of Numbers" by Jan Gullberg (and Mathemtics for the practical man) and extracted material and wrote my own course. This was all done before betterexplained was brought to my attention. This was trialled against my children and a couple of colleagues who were interested.

I've retrospectively applied some of the ideas on betterexplained to this rather than apply it directly as it's not really suitable for people so young and without some foundation. You can't just pick up that book and apply it without some formal knowledge.

I've been meaning to write the whole thing up as it's about 150 pages of hand written material at the moment. Time rarely allows for such things.

One of the key things I concentrate on is not teaching arithmetic but the relationships between values and the basic rules such as the commutative, distributive and associative laws (which whilst are important in arithmetic aren't understood thoroughly without abstract concepts first). The values themselves are only of consequence once you've worked out the relations. Basically it starts with algebra.

Have you read the study?

https://onebillion.org.uk/downloads/unlocking-talent-final-r...

Would be interested to hear your comments on what you think is wrong with the methodology and conclusion?

I'll read this today in detail and reply later.

I've read similar studies before (I'm on the chair of governers for a school) and will approach with an open mind.

downloaded the apps, will test these with our 4 year old over a few days.

What mobile apps that effectively teach kids programming would you recommend? I have seen Scratch mentioned, and some Minecraft mods, any others that would actually work? The UK has an initiative to teach primary school kids programming, but I dread to think what the quality of teachers or children to teacher ratio will be.

We like both Lightbot and Cargo-Bot

http://light-bot.com

http://twolivesleft.com/CargoBot/

Lightbot is easy enough for our 5-year-old. Our 7-year-old completed about half of Cargo-Bot (the latter half is challenging for us, both professional programmers).

If your kid likes wizards. This looks like fun: http://codespells.org/

They claim to have tested this with kids at their university with great success (watch the video).

Immediately after high school, we got a "revision" class on maths. We did 12-years worth of it in 4 hours.

Math is not measurable in weeks.

England has a common curriculum so you can measure maths in months. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Curriculum_(England,...

The only gripe I have is that they say the kids are using the apps for 30 minutes every day, for six weeks (presumably, that's 5630minutes, not 7630) -- but I don't know how much math kids that age get in school? Is it 45 minutes a day? Every other day?

In general about an hour each day, some days might be 45 minutes. It will vary from school to school and year to year I think.

Hacker news asterix strikes again, eats multiplication sign.

    5*6*30 minutes vs 7*6*30 ...

Put spaces around your asterisks, to prevent their other interpretation in HN posts (i.e. markdown italic).

Thanks for pointing it out (for posterity, and new users) -- I really do know better, but I always forget, whenever I try to write some math in-line in a comment... now the edit-window for parent was closed.

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