Listen to instruction, practice exercises at home from a thick book. This is how a lot of teaching has been done for years.

But that traditional method of teaching is under pressure: the number of students has continuously increased. While this improved access to education is a positive sign, educational institutions have been unable to keep pace and expanding class sizes without equally expanded resources are placing strain on traditional in-classroom education. Furthermore, with the internet, teachers are no longer the only source of knowledge and students are likely to receive their (mis)information from other sources. Students, too, are changing. Nowadays, every teacher has to compete for attention with mobile devices and highly addictive social media.

A wave of change is now sweeping through education: blended learning, personalised education, learning analytics. No shortage of buzzwords.

We do believe that this change is happening; it needs to. In order to best support students, education needs to leverage all available tools and methodologies available in the modern age.

You might be surprised to hear this. Although we are an internet education company, we do not believe that real learning can happen solely online. We believe that you need to combine the best of both worlds. Online learning is best for direct instruction and practicing exercises. Not only can students learn at their own pace and in their own ways when instruction and practice are done online, completing these elements virtually opens up class time for activities best completed in groups. This time can be spent motivating students, providing personalized attention, putting ideas into practice, having discussions, and making the concepts relevant with hands-on learning.
We want to support teachers with the online part, so that you as a teacher can spend your energy on all the crucial work that needs to happen offline.

Students learn maths and statistics best by doing. We believe that everyone can master these concepts with enough practice.
Practicing from a physical book can be arduous. Often, you only know the correct answer, not what you were doing wrong. If you think you cannot do maths, this is not very motivating.
We believe practicing is a major component of learning. Our exercises (called Challenges) start off easy and keep getting more advanced. Furthermore, our innovative feedback tool gives specific and actionable feedback on incorrect answers, reminding students where they may have gone wrong and suggesting ways to improve on the next attempt. This builds confidence and shows students that everyone can master maths and statistics. It just takes a little practice and guidance.

In an ideal world, you would hear a concept once and remember it for the rest of your life. This makes for a nice fairy tale, but it is not how people work. One of the most well-researched phenomena in education is the Forgetting Curve or the Use It or Loose It Principle. It shows: if we do not use knowledge, we tend to forget it.
You can learn to remember things forever. This just requires repetition. We use the Testing Effect and a lot of repetition to help students cement the new knowledge into their brains. It might not be sexy, but it does work: repeat, repeat, repeat.

Ever played (or watched someone play) a video game? Notice how concentrated these people are? This is the state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed 'flow'. This state of intense focus, which people can maintain for hours, also makes us really happy. Requirements: a clear goal, hard but not too hard, and direct feedback.
Could you ever imagine your students getting into that same flow practicing maths and statistics? Well, they can. Our platform gives students direct feedback, a constant stream of new challenges (hard but not too hard) and clear goals (finish all the lessons on the lesson map, for example). We see in the data: students sometimes spend hours on the weekends practicing maths and statistics, even weeks before the exam! Now that is flow.

We spend a lot of time thinking about learning and teaching and discussing this with all the teachers we support. Want to share your experiences or opinions? Please feel free to email us at support@grasple.com