At Learnalot we decided the best way to tackle this problem was to fuse maths with video game-style graphics and music together to create role-based scenarios where the student was tasked with solving a particular problem.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
- Benjamin Franklin

Whether saving the world from a giant asteroid, ridding a haunted house of ghosts or recapturing escaped convicts, our learners are presented with a problem and then asked to solve it by using maths skills that are hand-picked from around the curriculum to create believable and valuable activities.

Performance is tracked for teachers and parents to monitor and scores are displayed on ranked leaderboards, promoting friendly rivalry between classmates and peers from around the world. With improving their position on the global leaderboards a powerful incentive, our learners repeatedly play through the activities and games in order to perfect their skills and shave valuable seconds off their times.

The learner is always presented with a fresh problem as the questions and underlying data are randomly generated, so the process is always about perfecting skill and increasing knowledge and never about simply remembering previous answers.

Learnalot allows teachers to forget about preparation and marking and focus on delivering the best possible lesson as each resource also comes with supporting worksheets, teacher’s notes and lesson plans – which have all been prepared by experienced teachers.

You can sign up to Learnalot’s basic package for free just by filling an application form or you can become a subscriber and get access to our exclusive premium content as well. A 20% subscription discount is running until the end of April.

There is also a demo resource available on the website complete with supporting documents should you wish to sample the software without even registering.

With 10% of the UK’s schools already signed up just weeks after launch, Learnalot is proving a hit with teachers, parents and students alike. Register today and see for yourself how successful Learnalot is at engaging learners of all ages with maths.

Most of the feedback we’re receiving is incredibly positive. The quality of the software, the range of scenarios, the graphics, the sound, the supporting documents – everything is going down well. There is a discrepancy in one area of feedback however, and that is the difficulty of the questions.

While most schools seem to feel that we’ve pitched the questions at just the right level, some have asked us to make the resources harder and one has even asked us to make it possible to disable the hints function and force the students to work it all out for themselves without any help whatsoever. Brutal!

On the other hand, we’ve also received feedback that the questions in what is actually our easiest resource – Britain’s Got Power – are too difficult and that their students are struggling with it.

While I have no intention of naming individual schools, teachers or students, the pattern in the feedback is certainly worth discussing and exploring in more detail so that we can better understand exactly why this discrepancy exists and whether there is anything that we, as an educational software provider, should do about it.

Although the data and questions within the activities are randomised, they’re always within sensible parameters and as such the range of difficulty for each student can, I think, be considered negligible and therefore be rounded up to a constant. So if the difficulty of the software is a constant, why are we being asked by some teachers to make the software easier and to make it harder by others?

There could be a variance in the abilities of students, of course. While some students excel in maths, others excel in other areas and can find maths problematic. But such variance would be extraordinary on a school level and is much more likely to exist on an individual level with every school in the land being home to students on either end of the spectrum.

Could it be student age – and by loose extension, ability and/or experience? Taking extreme cases, one school that thinks we have it just right has students a full year younger than another school that thinks we need to make the resources easier, and although this is an extreme in one direction, there are no extremes in the opposite direction as would be expected so we can probably discount student age as a plausible factor as well.

What about student sex? Whilst the school that most strongly believes that our resources are too difficult is a girls’ school, other girls’ schools have not said anything at all about the resources being too difficult. Similarly, the schools who want us to make the resources more difficult are made up of both boys and girls in fairly equal measure, and still more schools that are made up of mostly boys have said that they feel the difficulty is spot-on as it is.

Just to remove all doubt that student sex is not a factor, in a recent study published in Science, Professor Janet Hyde used data from around 7 million US children in 10 US states from grade 2 through to grade 11 and showed that the difference in performance between the two sexes was negligible and that while boys were marginally ahead in some states, girls were marginally ahead in others.

Our own results, though obviously from a much smaller pool, would seem to corroborate this finding as several of the top spots on our leaderboards are occupied by girls. The gender ratio of the schools must therefore be irrelevant when trying to work out the reason for the discrepancy in requests to alter the difficulty.

So again, why are some schools asking us to make the resources easier while others are asking us to make them harder if we can assume that each school on average has students of approximately equal ability?

From what I’ve seen so far, the answer is the teachers themselves.

One school told me that although their students are now doing very well with the resources, this wasn’t always the case. At the beginning the students were struggling and thought the resources were too difficult, but she said this was because they were used to getting their answers on a plate. They weren’t used to having to think about the best way to solve a problem using first principles. They weren’t used to not being given the answers if they didn’t get the question right the first time round. She stayed the course however and since then the students have accepted that they need to do the work themselves, they have embraced the challenge and have excelled in every resource. Those students are now dominating several of the leaderboards and are eagerly awaiting the next resource so that they can continue to flex their mathematical muscles.

On the other side of the scale, another teacher whose students initially struggled with the resources said that they were using another service instead which provided simpler activities, and he reported some of the more difficult questions in our resources as “bugs” that needed fixing.

Intrigued by the difference in approach between these two teachers, I recalled back to when I was at school and what my teacher used to do with us in order to have something to compare against. Indeed, my teacher didn’t use any educational software at all because back then our school had only just migrated from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and marker pen. The “ICT room” consisted of around 5 computers and was only ever used by students on the “computing” course. In any case, a persistent theme of my maths lessons were that we were told what we had to learn and we practised it until we knew it. There was no such thing as choosing an alternative task that we were happier with because it was less challenging.

Looking again at the contrasting approaches on display here, after discounting every other variable it seems that the teachers themselves are the key factor in why we’re receiving such mixed feedback on the difficulty of the resources. Some teachers are pressing ahead and weaning their students off resources that almost complete themselves and are achieving incredible results in the process, whereas others are seemingly happy to let their students continue with a false sense of achievement with software that doesn’t offer any challenge at all.

While it’s clear that the teaching of maths in the UK is not consistent even from a sample as small as ours (it will be interesting to see what happens when we start looking at hundreds of schools), I think it’s clear which method leads to better performance in students.

So where does this leave Learnalot?

Well, we aren’t going to start developing software that almost completes itself because that’s a pointless exercise.

What we will do instead is continue to challenge and engage our learners and push them to the limits of their abilities because this is how students learn new skills and improve existing ones. We will broaden the range of difficulty exhibited in the resources ever so slightly to make them more inclusive to those who aren’t as strong in maths and more challenging to those who are gifted, and we will continue to do so with scenarios that students find interesting and engaging.

This, I think, is the way to bring out the best in young learners and by building a suite of resources that covers the entire syllabus in this way, I don’t see why we won’t have a significant effect on these learners’ maths skills.

The portal isn’t yet taking subscribers as there’s still some work to do on the resources themselves, but with the portal now completed it made sense to unveil it for three important reasons:

1. It gives people who are interested in what we’re doing (and Google Analytics shows there’s a fair few of you out there!) an opportunity to take a look and to get excited about what’s coming.
2. It allows people to register for the newsletter and be kept up to date with resource progress and more importantly, the portal’s launch.
3. Finally, it allows the search engines to start indexing the site so that when we do launch, potential users will be able to find us.

Registrations on the forums are welcome to all those who are interested in the portal or who wish to ask questions or provide feedback. Naturally, the portal will also serve as a support forum when we launch.

For more information either check out the launch post at Quak Multimedia or check the Mercury website directly, where there is even a demo of the software showcasing some of its capabilities.

Mercury is viewed as a live product that will evolve and adapt over time with the needs of our clients, so this won’t be the last time I mention Mercury on this blog I’m afraid!

As well as the software itself, we’ll also be offering a development service where we will either help clients develop their eLearning or develop it all ourselves for an extremely competitive rate.

Any questions? Feel free to ask.

Mercury is a Flash application that builds rich eLearning from simple XML instructions. Everything about the eLearning can be defined quickly and easily, including the resource’s language(s), navigation layout, number of pages, content structure, sessions, activities, assessments, videos, photos, audio, animations and text.

Course material can be presented in an almost infinite number of ways, with total control over the look and feel and the ability to select from a wide range of options when it comes to functionality – all without typing a single line of code. In fact, you don’t even need to own Flash to make a resource in Mercury.

The product will be launched initially with two pricing options – one for a single use license and one for unlimited use. Further options may be possible at a later time depending on feedback.

I’ll post an update when the site is live, but any enquiries before that time are welcome.