Motion Math develops math games and an SDK that link in-app activity to student mastery of Common Core standards, using embedded assessments and analytics. Initial tests with thousands of students suggest the company can measure correlations between gameplay and mini-assessment performance. The startup received a $1 million grant from the Gates Foundation as a follow-up to a $348,000 grant from the Gates and Noyce foundations in December 2013 to continue building its measurement tools and to research how to raise student effort. Motion Math plans to make its SDK useful beyond games—extending to videos and other interactive activities—and to test the approach with many other digital math content providers to ensure rigor. By the end of the two-year grant the company aims to offer a single platform where students see patterns in effort, teachers find proven digital materials, and developers run A/B tests to improve efficacy. CEO Jacob Klein and Head of Data and Analytics Coram Bryant are quoted in the work, and Stanford professor Jo Boaler serves as an advisor endorsing the platform's promise. Motion Math builds a suite of educational apps that use touch and accelerometer-driven gameplay to teach kids fundamental math concepts, beginning with a live iOS game focused on fractions. The gameplay guides users along a number line and turns fractions into percentages and decimals to help students internalize relationships between representations. The founders, Jacob Klein and Gabriel Adauto, developed the concept from research in embodied cognition at Stanford’s School of Education and SSE Labs. The company aggregates gameplay data to surface learning insights and plans a parent dashboard to track progress and problematic skills. It has experimented with price points ($1–$2 for iPhone and $3–$4 for iPad) and currently uses Flurry for analytics while planning to build its own data platform. Motion Math plans Android releases later in the year and intends to use its seed funding to expand hiring and engineering efforts.

Total raised

$1M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Grant

Latest activity

Jun 2015