MathFactLab: Fluency Through Discovery

"When I first started teaching fifth grade in Vermont, I quickly found that my students didn't know their math facts," says MathFactLab creator and company owner Mike Kenny.That discovery would ultimately lead him to designing his online strategy-based math fact fluency application.Mike, who teaches fifth grade at Thomas Fleming Elementary School in Essex Junction, Vermont, first responded to the challenge by researching ways to help his students learn math more easily.Designing a revolutionary systemBut everything he found was based on memorization--which wasn't working.Instead, Mike began creating a system that would help students understand multiplication, division, addition and subtraction. Initially, that system was flash card-based, but eventually, Mike found a developer and evolved it into an online program.MathFactLab is highly visual: math facts are displayed through multiple models, including beads, dice, clock faces and bar graphs.For students using the program, learning math become a discovery process, that's all about reasoning and thinking with numbers, and identifying patterns."It's much easier to apply patterns, than it is to rely on memory,"," Mike says.Starting with certaintyAlso, he explains, students explore what they already know, to learn new math facts.For example, with a student who says they can't do division, Mike will ask if they can multiple a simple number, such as three times eight. Then, he has that student consider that they already understand how to divide, if they can multiply!"Division is simply 'unmultiplication',"he says.And the approach of discovering new facts, and learning visually, is highly effective, as students learn, rather than simply recite, facts."If they can get there themselves, then they own (that knowledge), and they appreciate it all the more, and remember it," Mike says.Mike shared the story of creating MathFactLab, offered a closer look at some of the principles teachers can use in their classroom, and discussed what's next with the program.