EnableMath is a new way to learn math based on the foundational educational principles of practice and understanding.

Practice - Too often today students try to learn math without sufficient practice. They do not learn by doing regular homework but instead will cram for tests where what goes up fast must come down equally fast. If you want to learn to play golf you have to practice. You can’t just watch Tiger Woods hit golf balls and then go out to the course and hope to play successfully. Practice is and always has been the secret to success in sports and it is exactly the same in math. You can’t learn math without practice. You can’t just watch your instructor do problems on the board or even listen intently to greatest teacher explaining a mathematical concept. To learn math you must practice.

Understanding - Just as you have to practice math to learn it, you have to understand it to remember it. Again today, with students and teachers rushing through our overcrowded many students are substituting memorization for understanding. And like cramming for tests, memorizing concepts and algorithms leads to forgetting and cycles of learning and relearning over and over again. Mathematics is a visual language. Its fundamental concepts, for the most part, are visualizations that we represent symbolically or verbally so that we can easily manipulate and express them. Whether you are a visual learner and need math to be presented visually, or you find it easy to visualize concepts but get confused when they are presented verbally, the verbal-symbolic classroom and textbook can make it very difficult for you to learn math. You need to “see” math concepts, to be able to manipulate their visualizations because the patterns in math are dynamic, and these visualizations need to be inherently simple and standardized so that you can easily remember and manipulate them in your mind.

A New Technology - We started developing EnableMath from a clean slate to promote practice and understanding. We analyzed the reasons that students did not practice, that they did not do their homework. We developed a common set of visualizations for the concepts of mathematics to make those concepts easy to understand. And we put it all together into a Web-based package along with a completely new set of content to enable every student to learn math effectively and efficiently.

We recognized the need to make practice a process with immediate feedback, where each problem was adapted to the learning level of the student, and where mastery was the goal of each and every assignment. We present all of math on the Web with dynamic visual concepts that students could “play” to see the patterns of math and to promote their understanding of the concepts. And we created one-step-at-a-time examples so that students could step through them again and again. We did this all by recognizing the crucial role that data plays in instruction where student progress is tracked and continuously reported so that learning is fundamentally tied to teaching. EnableMath puts learning where it belongs, in the hands of students. It uses a new technology to focus education on learning activity and not on instructional.