EdTech: Dr Aditya Nagrath of Elephant Learning On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact On Education

When everyone is saying the same thing, listen — One way of sourcing information is to present a problem or idea to all of your friends to see what their feedback looks like. Take for example this piece of advice: “Find and focus on your niche.” I’ve heard some versions of this advice presented by three or four different speakers from different business groups.

In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course, many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. In this particular installment, we are talking to leaders of Education Technology companies, who share how their tech is helping to improve our educational system. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Aditya Nagrath Ph.D.

Dr. Nagrath helps students overcome mathematics anxiety and is on a mission to empower children with mathematics. Dr. Nagrath is the creator and founder of Elephant Learning Mathematics Academy which helps students learn years of mathematics over the course of months using their system just 10 minutes per day, 3 days per week.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in Colorado, a midsized town named Pueblo. When I was young, my mother would ensure that my sister and I were ready for the next year’s school work by meeting with our teachers and getting mathematics and reading lists. She would have my sister and I study for a few hours each day over the summer, she did this for four or five years.

When I was in middle school, I had finished all the computer courses that were offered. I asked the computer teacher if I could take a third course, and he setup a lab for us to learn Basic on Apple IIgs. These experiences allowed me to learn how to code C++ from a book that I bought at Barnes & Nobles. By the time I reached college, I had already read books on neural networks and video game programming.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

There are a lot of interesting stories that have happened in my career. I’ve worked on atomic clocks and Palm OS, I’ve written applications that have run on microcontrollers and video games.

One time, I quit my job, moved to Ukraine, and started a software company called Elephant Head Software. Seven years later, I worked with a professor from the University of Denver to create Elephant Learning which has helped over a hundred thousand students learn years of mathematics over the course of several months. A few months ago, I wrote a book called Treating Mathematics Anxiety which was recently published and is now available on Amazon.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

I am grateful for so many people in my life from whom I have learned so much. It is hard to choose just one person or just one story. Recently, I have been most grateful to my thesis advisor and mentor Dr. Richard N Ball. He was an extremely eloquent lecturer and was awarded for his capabilities to captivate an audience with mathematics, and he is still a world-class researcher working with some of the greatest minds on earth on infinite mathematics in algebra and topological spaces.

I have a lot of great memories, but one that stands out right now is the way we were able to choose the topics for my thesis. He asked me what I liked from the courses I had taken in graduate school so far. There was a topics course I had taken with him that was taught from the book The Equivalence of Some Combinatorial Matching Problems. It created a mathematical duality between graphs and groups and proves the equivalence between five matching theorems which happen within the different spaces.

This idea of duality is beautiful because it philosophically expands into life via analogy. From here, Rick helped me discover a duality between lattices and topological spaces with an order. At the time it felt random, I had studied lattices earlier in my career and so it seemed like a good fit. Looking back now, I see that there is order in the madness. He was letting my curiosity take the lead for the research. In life, especially for topics of scientific research, it is important to have a motivation or driver. In a Ph.D. program for mathematics, there is no monetary reward for the goal. The goal is discovery which can only be reached through curiosity. For this I thank him, and at the same time, this methodology for choosing a path in life has also served me well. The advice to any entrepreneur is to follow their passion and I believe that curiosity might be the seed to any passion we develop.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Where there is a will, there is a way” is what my mother always used to say to me. However, I would change that to the belief in one’s own capabilities. I talk about this a lot in Treating Mathematics Anxiety and the reasoning is a little bit too involved for this space but one of our overarching strategies for working with students is to first believe that the student can do it and to tell them that. We want to make sure students are landing on the “I can” side of mathematics rather than the “I can’t.” I had my mom saying “ if there is a will, then there is a way,” and it helped me in those times of fear that causes procrastination to keep moving forward. Everyone needs that voice. As we develop as human beings, our belief systems are forming and we lean on the people around us to help add meaning to the events happening in our lives. These ideas work for mathematics, but also for other things in life.

You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?

Integrity is doing what you said you would do. It is making a promise and coming through on it. It is one of the most important aspects of teamwork in general because everyone on a team needs to understand the “play” and be able to execute it as it was designed. When I started Elephant Head Software, I was writing an interesting piece of software that I had to deliver a prototype on. It was supposed to mimic a cloud drive as an iTunes music library and also stream via uPnP to televisions or other AV equipment.

Commitment is staying with your promise until it is completed. We were able to deliver the above software product on OS X. Because the base Objective-C was the same for iPhone and OS X, we convinced the client to allow us to port the software to iOS which only required UI changes as the base underlying system was designed independent of the UI. We made a crude UI prototype on top of the base system to show the client how close we actually were. The iPhone version was extremely successful because it basically allowed you to stream a music library from the cloud. This became obsolete or unnecessary when Spoitfy came out and Apple switched to their subscription accounts years later. If we had not been committed to the success of our client, they may have missed this opportunity and that amount of effort caused the client to create a version for Android.

Accountability is accounting for the commitments that are required to accomplish a goal. Typically, if you are hitting 70–80% of your commitments you are seeing success. If you are hitting 90% or above then it is a high performing team. The aim is to get all of the items that the organization is accountable for completed.

Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our educational systems. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?

It turns out that 4 out of 5 students start kindergarten unprepared for the kindergarten curriculum. Specifically this is problematic with mathematics because it turns out that preschool mathematics scores are a better predictor of 3rd grade reading scores than preschool reading scores. Preschool math scores predicted overall performance in 5th grade, and 8th grade mathematics scores predicted whether a student will drop out of high school.

High school proficiency rates in mathematics are dropping due to the pandemic, but even before the pandemic they were not impressive. In 2019, only 24% of high school students were proficient in high school mathematics according to NAEP data. All of this is occurring in a world that is more mathematically driven than ever before.

In 2007, it was measured that 69% of STEM majors switched to a major with less mathematics. In 2007, that used to be a business degree. From the perspective of the student, they had opportunities to earn money. Because business is now extremely statistically driven, professors are having a hard time explaining topics that were non-mathematical such as Marketing to students and many students move to humanities where incomes after college are much lower. Combined with student debt and rising costs of college, it is no wonder that the government is looking to forgive this debt.

All of that happens due to a language gap for students coming into Kindergarten. The prerequisite for kindergarten is being able to count to ten. For kindergarten that means “Can you give me ten items?” and the student is able to slide over 10 items. For most parents including myself when I learned this, it is just saying the numbers sequentially from 1 to 10.

Students that start behind tend to stay behind. The good news is that the students that came in with the ability to understand the teacher, actually improved over time. Which means that the education system in America works if the student understands the teacher.

In the United States, we tell children you can grow up to be anything you want to be, but statistically speaking, it was over in preschool. More than that, if one does not understand the language of mathematics, the mathematics they are learning becomes useless. The way the new standards define proficiency in multiplication is being able to use multiplication to solve a real life problem. This is typically tested within the school via word problems.

The skill is, “Can you identify from the problem which two numbers to multiply together to solve the problem?” If a student can demonstrate proficiency by solving these types or problems with a calculator, they are much better off than the student that has memorized their multiplication tables but are not performing on the word problems because of the proliferation of computing devices.

The challenge we set out to solve was to close that language gap allowing the student to participate within the classroom at their grade level.

How do you think your technology can address this?

On average, children in our system learn 1.5 years of mathematics over the course of 10 weeks using our system just 30 minutes per week. We started with preschool and kindergarten curriculum from research on the most effective activities for teaching these topics. A student that is 3 or 4 years of age can come into our system and learn to count to ten at an extremely rapid pace. Most students see this progress within a month or two, effectively solving that challenge for students entering into the education system.

We have also recovered students that are struggling at a rapid pace. We have seen 12 year olds that are testing at a third grade level recover within six months. Older students that have had mathematical experiences but did not understand the underlying language tend to learn quickly because all of the experiences become relevant. We have all had that experience where “suddenly everything makes sense.” We are happy to help provide those aha moments to students that are currently struggling.

We cover counting through Algebra and now have topics such as Personal Finances and plan to add more curriculum in the near future through grant funds we are applying for from the Department of Education.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about education?

I am a life-long learner with a Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science. Having said that, what intrigued me about this project was this idea I was noodling with from an Entrepreneur group talk that I had attended. The CEO of a company called Plastic Bank shared his experience about how he created the Plastic Bank.

The idea behind the business is that people in India could pick up plastic as it washes ashore and deposit it in the plastic bank which would then engage in plastic recycling. What was extremely interesting about this business is that the profit motive becomes the driving force behind ecological change. They were recycling plastic at 9 cents and claimed to be a 200 million dollar company. Philosophically speaking, the system is designed so that everyone involved benefitted as the environment benefited.

When we started Elephant Learning, we found out about the above challenge and then began working to resolve the issue. The passion was in being able to utilize technology to solve a real-world problem.

How do you think your technology might change the world?

We have already had 160,000 students complete our placement exam, and we have nearly taught 200,000 years of mathematics. We have parents that have come back to tell us how their students went from hating mathematics to loving mathematics class. The definition of mathematics is problem-solving. It is the foundation of STEM, and humanities future.

When I think about this question, I am reminded of this show I saw before I started Elephant Learning called Big History, and in the last episode called “The Big History of Everything” they made this profound point about how the Universe is basically chaos. Randomness. The exception to that is humanity. We add order to the Universe, and the primary method we use to do that is mathematics.

On the surface, it may not seem like it, because the conventional notion of mathematics is calculation. When you watch a movie like “Oppenheimer” and the physicists say “I’m not good at math” it is honestly heartbreaking! They were not good at the calculations, they were running the formulas that they were handing to those running the calculations!

When you look at the breadth of the problems that are considered mathematics, from the formation of modern computers to the formation of quantum computing models, game theory where we can break down many of the things happening in politics and society, probability theory, and all of our physical sciences and medical sciences which are dependent on the people who understand statistical models. The engineers that send humans to mars and the physicists diligently finding out the secrets of black holes are all utilizing mathematics.

The conclusion of that episode of Big History also brought another idea of thought to mind, which is that the speed of human knowledge is expanding and is accelerating now exponentially. With the internet, our models of collaboration have accelerated, and while some believe the pandemic will cause a slowdown in the near future due to the scores declining, the truth is that because of increased collaboration and communication, overall we will see the greatest surge of creativity known to man to date.

I would be happy to contribute to that by facilitating mathematical communication. Our Algebra curriculum’s introduction is called “The Introduction to the Language of Mathematics” because Algebra is in actuality that. Prior to Algebra, students mainly perform calculations, but once variables and functions are introduced, we can now have conversations. Our game changes from playing with objects to identifying true and false statements.

If we can get more businessmen and politicians communicating in the same language as the engineers and scientists, there is no end to what humanity could accomplish.

Keeping the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Not all human beings have intentions that align with our values. All technology and learning products have that challenge.

How do you envision the landscape of education evolving over the next decade, and how does your technology fit into that future?

The landscape of education is going to move towards more automation as teacher shortages require the student to teacher ratio to increase. If we are able to create the understanding required through automated methods, teachers can focus their attention on students that may be struggling or that require one on one attention without diminishing the returns of the other students.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1 . Understand the challenge — In order to really solve a problem mathematically, and remember technology is based on mathematics, one has to understand the problem. Inside of Elephant Head Software, one of our guiding standards is that a person attempts a problem before speaking to a manager for help. The reason is that we have found that the person does not understand the problem, so when the manager communicates a solution, it is also not understood. What we found was that if the person attempted the problem first, even if they were unable to come up with a solution, when they heard the solution, they understood it as a solution because they played with the problem.

This pattern has repeated throughout my career whether it be marketing, software development, mathematics, communications, education, or business. There are different ways to have people receive the experience of the problem, and attempting it is the most effective way because it is first hand experience.

2 . Understand the solutions — In order to technologically implement a solution, the engineers have to really understand the solution. As the leader, you also need to understand that solution. Whatever it is that you come up with as a solution needs to be communicated to the outside world in ways that are effective. In my experience, engineers tend to complicate, marketers tend to simplify. If we can switch it around it would work better, but that only works if the marketers understand the engineers.

3 . Focus on results — So many times, especially in education, people get caught up with the shiny. Before Elephant Learning, there was this project called Kids Play Math, which involved several professors from the University of Denver and University of Northern Colorado. They were so enamored by the games they were creating that they were blinded to their results. When I joined in, not only did we start over, we focused on results and amplified them so that children learned an average of 1.5 years in the same amount of time.

When one becomes creative for the purpose of being creative, they may lose sight of the goal. If you are out in the weeds, ask yourself, is what I’m focused on important?

4 . Implement best practices for teamwork — Teamwork requires a framework or structure of systems in order to function properly. Processes and measurements of KPIs with transparency on the scoreboard is important, just like it is in sports. When everyone knows the score and what to do next, it feels like a game that everyone is playing together.

5 . When everyone is saying the same thing, listen — One way of sourcing information is to present a problem or idea to all of your friends to see what their feedback looks like. Take for example this piece of advice: “Find and focus on your niche.” I’ve heard some versions of this advice presented by three or four different speakers from different business groups.

Elephant Learning is a product that could fit any parent. Every person has some relationship with mathematics and any parent would want that relationship to be a healthy one. Having said that, we have identified niches, such as homeschool parents, who get more benefit from our program. Specifically, we help students understand the teacher better in the classroom, so for the homeschool parent that is them! The student understands them better. So those parents are ecstatic when they tell other parents about their results.

When I say listen, I mean do not just blindly follow the advice, but pay attention to it, see if you can understand what is true if it does not seem true on the surface.

In the realm of EdTech, there’s often data collection involved. How do you ensure the ethical handling of user data, especially when it concerns students?

Philosophically speaking, the examination of the data is a consideration of the harm that could be done by the release of the information. Therefore, best practice is to only collect the information that is necessary for the system to function thereby minimizing harm. Sometimes, more data is necessary for the experience to feel right for the end user and therefore may also be optional entry.

Elephant Learning does not release the data, but we do have case studies that have been anonymized. For students, we only require the first name, and a birthdate. The birth date helps us display one decimal point on the student’s age to compare to the score which we call our Elephant AgeTM.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

Anyone can find a way to make money, but those that can find a way to do it while making a positive impact feel wealthy.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Bill Gates. Would love to hear what they are working on in this space.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Checkout Elephant Learning at https://www.elephantlearning.com

Follow me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityanagrath/

Check out Treating Mathematics Anxiety: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQRN5ZSP

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.