Math2Shine

When a student is asked if they enjoy Math, more often than not they will quickly reply “No”. The large majority of students, all around the world, have this dislike towards Math. When there is excitement for learning, there is improvement. At Math2Shine, we aim for improvement in student’s Math skills by creating a fun and interactive way of learning Math. 

Our software includes Vedic Math, an algorithmic system of mental calculation, alongside Grade-School level Math (Kindergarten to Grade 7). Students use personalized portals to learn and practice from 2800+ interactive worksheets. 

We have found that joy and confidence are also linked. This is why we focus on tracking student's improvement and practice through focused analytics on speed and accuracy. These analytics are accessed by teachers and parents too. 

We believe that through Math2Shine, students all over the world will be more motivated and excited to learn Math. 

Math Skills are useful for all of us, from children to adults, in every aspect of our lives. However, across the world, a significant population suffer from Math anxiety and do not feel math Joy. As per the research published by David C Geary, almost 17% of children population have poor Math skills.

There are various reasons of poor Math Skills in children such as poor skills and attitude of teachers, outdated learning methodology and unavailability of quality content in native languages. Childhood challenges of poor Math learning may set a cognitive bias that "Math is a difficult subject".

Math skills generally predict later academic achievements and lifelong success. Solving the problem of poor Math skills in children is of paramount importance.

Children start feeling more confident in math by learning algorithmic system of Vedic Math. When the child learn Vedic Math methods, they use less processing power of their mind in doing day to day computation and basic Algebra, children become faster, improve their confidence and change their Math attitude. 

More visual Math explanations and relating it to the real life helps in developing better Math Sense.

Students access their Math2Shine portal and learn through reading material, watching videos and practicing worksheets. We track all practice parameters, automatically check worksheets and create a dashboard.  

We provide over 800 worksheets in Vedic Math and 1800 worksheets in the School Math System. These worksheets are algorithms that create new and unique questions to maintain content freshness and student motivation.

Teachers track student learning through their teacher-portal. After students master concepts, teachers assign students Classwork and Homework. Teachers can precisely know all the strengths and weaknesses of each student from Math2Shine’s analytics.  For example, if a class does not do well in Fractions, they can re-teach the topic. 

Quality Math content is not easily available in many regional languages. Our scalability model covers multiple languages. We use human skills of “Text” translation so our context always remains correct.

We use web technologies to render the portal and it’s data fast to the users. In future, we would be launching Tablet / Mobile phone app too.

Some sample screens of Math2Shine are as follows :

There are multiple segments that would be served by Math2Shine. A brief coverage of our customer segments are as follows:

Children from 6 years to 14 years of age: We would be providing our solution to the children of this age group to improve their math Skills. We aim to develop Math Joy as early as possible in children.  Practice is extremely important for this age group to create a sense of confidence when doing Math. Students can repeatedly attempt worksheets to focus on improving skills and not remember questions from the worksheets. Student Analytics will help children in a big way. Children will become faster and start enjoying Math.

Children above 14 years of age: Many children in this age group have poor foundations in their Math skills. These children join a fast-paced Math2Shine course. It is either  tutor-led or subscription based on the Math2Shine Self-Learning portal. Once they learn Math2Shine Vedic Math, they would understand the ease of doing various foundation Math topics such as Numeracy and Basic Algebra etc. This will help them in better academic achievements later. 

Tutors: Tutors attend Math2Shine’s Vedic Math workshop to learn new teaching methods. This is part of their skills development program. They can use Math2Shine portal to teach School Math along with Vedic Math. They would get all of the productivity benefits. Certified Tutors can also join Math2Shine Franchise program. It would help them to earn extra income by teaching children in after school program or during the holidays.

Adults: Many adults would be interested to offer Math2Shine as an After School Program. It would be a Tutor Franchise option.  They would earn by recruiting students on Math2Shine, teaching them and sharing revenue with Math2Shine.  

Schools: Many schools will benefit from  Math2Shine. The automated software provides total transparency and assures quality Math education and practice. It also makes the teachers work easier by reducing their administrative workload.  

We would only be focusing on a few languages and few customer segments in the initial phase of Math2Shine growth.  

We are passionate about providing opportunities to all children to improve their Math Skills irrespective of the language they speak or the country they come from. Many of the students may not have good teachers to guide them— Math2Shine will help these children get excited about Math and improve their skills. 

Many teachers may not have had appropriate skills and learning material to create Math Joy in children. Math2Shine helps these teachers to think creatively to inspire the young Mathematicians 

In addition, we want to create income opportunities for adults who have good Math, and teaching skills but lack resources.

Math2Shine software provide learning resources and worksheets in multiple languages. We just need to translate the Text part of the solution and use the same structure and algorithms that create English language worksheet. It will make us to scale in many countries of Asian region. Some examples of Hindi language are attached here.

Math2Shine would like to classify it's stage as "Advance Pilot". We have done majority of the software and content development. We have live customers who use our system on day to day basis.

Our founder Lokesh Tayal run his own tutor led classes of Vedic Math in Math2Shine. As a teacher, he keep track of his students progress. These students are monthly subscription paid students. 

In addition to it, Math2Shine started running online events to create awareness and generate interest in Singapore. We started getting many subscribers through this model.  

In partnership with Heartfulness, a global spiritual organization present in over 150 countries, we have conducted 5 days teacher training program comprising over 45 teachers in Vedic Math. All teachers were provided Math2Shine logins for practice. We trained over 250 students in Math2Shine way of Vedic Math for them.

We have recently signed up with two schools in India for Math2Shine roll out. These schools would provide Math2Shine around 1200 student and teacher users. This roll out will happen in July / August time frame. 

Lots of research has taken place in higher Math, however, no major innovation happened in teaching Math to children. Innovative pedagogical changes are needed to make Math more natural and enjoyable. Natural thinking in Math, getting sense out of numbers and applying algorithms make Math more creative. 

We combine Vedic Math with Information Technology to make Math creative. We use Information Technology to capture all learning parameters in our system to show improvements through Analytics.  Our analytics would help curriculum decision makers to include Vedic Math methods in core curriculum of the future.

Teachers should be able to appreciate Vedic Math once they learn it. We offer School Math Curriculum in our system to  bring teachers to the platform .Teachers would save administrative time of teaching and class management in Math2Shine. Over a period of time, teachers would find Vedic Math enjoyable and start adopting these methods in their instructions. 

We make the learning process easy. In Math2Shine Vedic Math, we map learning in phases: “With Steps”, “Without Steps”, “Speed Building” and “Word Problems”. This learning journey helps a child to master the concepts fast.  

To make our solution more relevant,  Math2Shine worksheets are created by software algorithms, which provides new questions in each attempt. When we track practice history, we can clearly see the kind of improvement a child has received.

Current Situation of Users 

We have only launched Math2shine in stealth mode and we currently have around 50 active users. We started our public facing launch activities in June 2021 and received good response to our live webinars. We have not spent anything on Digital Marketing initiatives and it is so far all from word of mouth. These users helped us to finetune the platform.

Estimate Users after one year 

We expect to grow to 10000 users in the next one year. We have already closed an implementation plan at 2 schools in Hyderabad and Chennai in India with a student base of 4500 and Math2Shine being used by 1200 users from Grade 5 to Grade 8. 

We also intend to launch a Tutor Franchise option in collaboration with Indian partner who have very high reach in Indian society. This initiative will train teachers and unemployed adults in Vedic Math. They would get Math2Shine Tutor Portal and teach children. Revenue would be shared with the Tutor franchise.

Estimate Users after 5  years 

We expect to grow to 1 million users in the next five years. Our target market is highly populated countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and India. These countries would buy Math2Shine due to language translation. Indian users would buy Math2shine due to Vedic Math focus. 

Our tutor franchise model will bring additional revenue through tutors and their students. 

Student Subscription KPI :

• Number of students reached through out-reach activities.
• Number of students enrolled for free Vedic Math classes. 
• Number of paid students enrolled.
• Number of months a student subscribe Math2Shine portal

 Tutor Franchise KPI :

• Number of Certified Vedic Math Tutor.
• Number of certified tutors who become Math2Shine Vedic Math franchise and start earning through Math2Shine

School Adoption KPI :

• Number of schools that adopt Math2Sshine

 Operation KPI :

• Profit / loss incurred in Math2Shine
• Number of translated languages.
• Number of free Vedic Math webinars 

Full Time Staff : 1

Contractor : 2

Other Workers : 2

Math2Shine is currently a lean organization. Our founder, Mr Lokesh Tayal has worked in sales organizations of companies like Oracle and IFS. He has widely travelled in Asia Pacific and understands the cultural aspects of Asian countries. He understands the importance of marketing,  branding, partnerships, support and implementations. 

Once more financial resources are in place, we would be recruiting relevant heads to manage growth and other functions of organization development. There would be ESOP options to attract relevant talent. We would need to hire people with an education industry background who would add industry context and have deeper network and relationship with schools and decision makers.

We are currently a small setup focused on software and content development. Our small size does not provide a true reflection on our diversity and inclusion focus. 

Diversity is essential for our growth. Our target market is multi lingual countries of Asia. It is important for us to hire people from many countries and cultures in our organization. 

There are more women in K12 education sector. We hope to hire more women for us to better connect with our target customers.

After developing good software and content, Math2Shine is in it’s growth phase now. In this phase, we would benefit from the Solve application in the following  manner.

• This is an opportunity to be associated with a reputable process of evaluation. This will help us in obtaining good feedback and visibility.

• Our Ed-Tech initiative can expedite it’s goal of making children Math-Smart faster because we are proposing a pedagogical change. A winning in the competition will confirm our case of bringing changes in K12 Math education at Primary education level and make future generations Math-Smart.

• The process of applying for the Solve Challenge is helping us to think about certain questions that we did not think about earlier.

• Participating in the Solve Challenge and winning will help us in the fund raising process.

• Since we capture all learning parameters about children's learning journey, we can propose to do a funded research study with some reputable universities.

Math2shine is currently in it's growth phase. We would need to reach to people to showcase value of our solution. In this phase, we would be focusing in organization development. 

Partner support is helping us in pitching to right investors, reaching to new and existing markets, digital marketing and gaining visibility in media will help us grow faster.

MIT pk-12 action group of MIT seems to be doing excellent research in primary education (  https://pk12-mit-edu.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/research/ ), we would be happy to collaborate with them to see how the Math2Shine Vedic Math system improves children's Math skills. Once research proves the real quantum of improvement, it would be easier to include some of the relevant part of Vedic Math in the curriculum of various countries.

Many Solve members focus on the education sector. We can leverage their experience and network and drive dedicated campaigns to improve children's Math skills. It will help us in subscription revenue and provide resources to reach more people.

We would like to run professional teacher development courses in Indian Vedic Math system for K12 Math teachers. This will help them in learning new algorithmic Math methods and provide a lot of good ideas on how to improve student skills in the classroom. With access to Math2Shine software for practicing, teachers can even use their portal to teach Math effectively to their students.

Math2Shine is a complete system of School Math and Vedic Math. We can translate our content in some languages and offer the system to refugees. Most likely, there is a scarcity of good schools to access refugee children. Our video model of learning and practicing the worksheets will help refugees. Since we have all the data to know strong and weak skills of all or an individual child, we can use this data in providing live classes interventions to make sure refugee children learn Math skills.

Among STEM education, not much innovation had happened in Primary Math education. Math2Shine is one such innovation to improve children Math Skills through Algorithmic Thinking and natural way of doing Math. Our model of having a student portal and teacher portal make sure children improve. It also brings overall transparency in student’s Math Skills development and growth.

Math2Shine is a complete system of School Math and Vedic Math. We can translate our content in some languages and offer the system to refugees. Most likely, there is a scarcity of good schools to access refugee children. Our video model of learning and practicing the worksheets will help refugees. Since we have all the data to know strong and weak skills of all or an individual child, we can use this data in providing live classes interventions to make sure refugee children learn Math skills.

Among STEM education, not much innovation had happened in Primary Math education. Math2Shine is one such innovation to improve children Math Skills through Algorithmic Thinking and natural way of doing Math. Our model of having a student portal and teacher portal make sure children improve. It also brings overall transparency in student’s Math Skills development and growth.

Math2Shine is a complete system of School Math and Vedic Math. Our video model of learning and practicing the worksheets will help economically weaker section of society. We can provide them software to learn through video based learning.