Helping Students Ace Math with AI: Dong Zhang on Personalized Learning, SAT Prep, and Confidence

Parents, is your teen college ready? Are you feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, or excited about your teen applying to college? Do you know what colleges are looking for? And if your kid gets in, do you know what you'll pay for it? College admission has never been so competitive or expensive. Shellee Howard will take you on a journey to help you and your teen get college ready. Now here's your host, Shellee.

Well, hello again, parents. This is Shellee Howard, the founder and CEO of CollegeReady. And today I have an amazing guest. Mr. Dong, welcome to the show.

Hi everyone. Hey Shellee Howard.

All right. So Dong, can you please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? How did you get into tutoring and why math? And give us some background.

Yes. I know I'm a founder of AceRocket. AceRocket is an edtech company to leverage AI to help kids and the students to better in math. And the science. Before I found this company, I was AI scientist at Amazon and IBM. It, um, did AI for big tech. It was very good experience for doing that, but I think probably because my passion is in education domain, I want to leverage my domain knowledge like in math and science and AI to help kids and also help parents. So in academia, I got my PhD in astrophysics. Astrophysics, which use physics to study astronomy. So like what's the Big Bang theory? How can we see so many stars and so many galaxies in the universe? So I was PhD in that and have domain, so that's I have a lot of experience in math and physics. And also I tutor because I like to talk to people and help people. So I already have tutoring experience for more than 20 years. So I think, so yeah, I'm a pretty good tutor with a solid background in math, science, and AI. And then now I'm just ramp up, start my own business. As I mentioned, it's AceRocket. I start with some other people for the math part. If everything looks good, definitely we will ramp up to other domain and field like AI and science.

So good. So parents, if your child, your teenager, need support in those subjects, you definitely want to lean into this because Dong's going to share some stuff that you definitely want to know. So the first question I have, Dong, is when you were in high school, did you know that you wanted to be an astrophysicist?

Yeah, I have very— not saying already define myself as astrophysicist, but, uh, when I was in high school, I really loved math. And science, especially physics. And so when I go to college, went to college and asked teacher, hey, is there any major I can learn math and science at the same time? Told me you should apply for astrophysics or astronomy, basically that same term. So that's why I pick up and select astrophysics as my research field.

Amazing. And now you're circling back to what you love and that's teaching. And so that's so commendable. So how are you different from other tutors? So as a mom of 4, right? My first went to Harvard, second went to University of Alabama, third to San Francisco State, fourth went to Europe and studied in the Czech Republic of Prague. I have all these amazing kids and we've obviously used tutors. How are you different or better than maybe some of the ones I've tried?

I think the most important thing for tutor is to build the connection with your clients, like students. And the one term really important I want to highlight is personalizing. Different students have different understanding level and different goals. We want to build a personal connection and help them to get what they really want to. Get. For example, some kids, some students, they only want to pass exam and they're only like few months, 2 months, 1 month before the exam, they would panic and they think, oh, so they are overwhelming, a lot of materials we need to learn. So tutors need to help them to find a very clean personalized path for them. And some students probably they don't have the pressure from exams, standardized exams. They just want to learn something. And we can help them to build something for their lane. So I can give you one example.

Sure.

So one kid, his goal was to like learn political science and history in college, but he very interested, he is still interested in calculus. He want to learn something calculus. So that in that case, we are not going to give them like hundreds of questions, let them practice because they don't want to become mathematician and engineer. They just want to know why there is a subject called calculus and why it's important for many people. And so I build some global picture for him and told him something about the history of calculus from very ancient time, like Greek time to Newton and Leibniz or something like that. And he's So, yeah, feedback is that that's very interesting. Even he didn't want to become mathematician or engineers, but he still learned something very good, interesting in calculus. So this is one example of how tutors can build a connection and teach students.

So good, right? Connection with teenagers.

Yeah.

You can accomplish a lot. They understand why you're on their side and why you want to help them. Very valuable what you're doing. So let's talk about math. A lot of students may not think they're good at math, but they really want to do, I don't know, like, um, a career in pre-med, right? And they, they're not sure because they're not really good at math if that's a good field for them. So how do you help the student who maybe is really good at other subjects, but math is not one of them? And how do you bring their confidence and their test scores up?

Yeah, so that's a great question. That's, we do something. The first important thing is to let students have more confidence, to build the confidence for learning math. And many students told me and told us they're not good at math. But when we ask them, what are you good at? So probably someone, they can still handle some algebra. And even geometry question, some people, they can even not handle pre-algebra questions. They don't know what's their understanding level. So the first thing is always help student to find their, we call ground truth, the benchmark. So where is their foundation and the ground so they can know where they can build something on the top of that and where's the gap. For example, so we teach one student, he said he got totally lost in math. Basically, he hate math. But when we give him some assessment, by the way, so the assessment should be no pressure. And I'll say, I just give you an overwhelming exam on day one. When we gave him assessment and he found he actually can do pretty good in algebra, or 50% of algebra. The only thing he got confused is some advanced math and quadratic equation. Forgive me, I gave some terms in math, the full geometry. So we can say, hey, so this is your skill map and you're really good at some part and probably you have a gap in somewhere else. So that's not— you can make a decision. Do you want to fill the gap? But we can actually make a roadmap for you. And I think so that way is make many students Especially their parents to be very happy because parents are not expert in math or math education and their kids told them, I'm not good at math. They have no idea what's their kids understanding level in math. We can help them to build a map and see where they already master and where they need to probably do some more practice and learn better. So their parents have better idea And for the kids, even they can build the confidence. Oh, so I thought I didn't know too much about the math. Actually, I already learned 70% of the math. The only thing I can put effort on that is the rest of 30%. I think that's pretty good for them. So again, so this term is called personalized learning. Some people also call it adaptive learning, but from my personal thoughts, it's basically same thing.

Okay, excellent. When you think about students, what, what can you help and what subjects can you help in? So give our listeners a little idea of, you know, who's the kind of student that you can help and what are the subjects?

Yeah, so that's very good question. So I just want to clarify, we have different levels of and different service and we can have a very wide range of students. First of all, we offer tutoring, so like one-to-one and one-on-one for students, and probably two students for one teacher. And in that case, we can have a lot of different subjects. For example, math from very beginning elementary math, school math, to middle school, high school, and college calculus. And we can also help with physics. Physics is something like from the school physics and the AP physics to physics department physics, like very complicated. We see quantum physics and general relativity and advanced quantum physics. We can help them with all of that. So this is the first layer of service, the tutoring service. The second layer is we have the platform, which is, I mean, it's AI-powered assistant platform. On that platform, students can do some active learning because I know not every single student want to have a tutor. Some students want to control their own time, own pace. So they want just to do some practice and see what's the next step they want to do. We have such a platform and as I mentioned, we just build a platform, it's less than 1 year. So on that platform, we have SAT Math, ACT Math, and AP Math, which is like AP Calculus AB, BC, and the Statistics. Definitely we want to build more on that, but for that platform, this is what we have now.

So let's talk about the platform for a minute. What would a student or parent expect from this platform? A student says, you know, I really want one-to-one. I want to work at my own pace. Do they sit down and does this guide them through? How many hours? Like, what does that look like?

Yeah, so the platform is called AceRocket. If parents and students are interested in, they can explore. So the web link is called acerocket.com. Ace, like A-C-O-Z, exam, rocket is rocket, right? AceRocket.com. And so what's our difference from other platforms? For example, Khan Academy and College Board. I'm not sure how many parents heard that term College Board. So they have a lot of questions. And they have thousands of questions. For example, College Board have almost 4,000 questions for just for SAT Math or PSAT Math. And, uh, what's the difference between us is that we want student to leverage all the resource and find what's their roadmap. We want to make the best plan for them. So right now, so there are so many resources. Probably 10,000 questions. Students will have no time to practice all of them, but we can help them to find the roadmap and to make the path. The logic of the philosophy is always first do the assessment, and then we can make a plan for students. We are not just want student to stick on our platform to practice thousand questions. We want to recommend them some questions which is best fit for them and to reduce their time to get the best results. For example, so I used to work in Amazon at the AI centers. When if you, some people bought something from Amazon, Amazon will recommend some item for customer and some customer say probably that's not relevant. I don't want to buy all the item recommend by Amazon, but some items probably they are really good. And the parents— sorry, the users and clients can buy something together on the Amazon website. The philosophy here is something similar. We have like more than 3,000 questions, but these 2 questions or these 3 questions are the most relevant. I think we believe you practice those questions, you can fill the gap. If you only have 5 minutes or have 1 minute, so this is exactly the question we want you practice., or these are some resources we want to review and better understand the concepts. So again, so we had that. So this is roadmap and the plan we want to make best for you, not say a lot of new questions when you practice.

Outstanding. AI has now come into tutoring and, um, do you think it will ever replace you?

Yeah, so that's, I heard this question and many people discussing on that. So AI replace teachers, replace tutors. I think so. From my— probably it's my personal thought, but personal bias, I think AI can never replace tutors and the teachers. The very important things like engagement or motivation. So AI can never let students have very high motivation or to get engaged to practice something. It's always human to human. And the teachers to students, parents to students, or probably students' peers can have that motivation to practice, to know something. So that's my personal thought. I know right now there are a lot of companies and they are working on AI tutoring. So let's have some chatbot or machine to help you learn something. And I have no idea how to do this math question and they will give you for some bad case, for example, ChatGPT, you can copy-paste the question, it pop up all the answer for you, something basically like cheat. But some good AI tutor, they can give you some step-by-step hint. So, hey, so probably you can try this direction. Can you think about recall some concepts and how can you apply this concept to this question? Can you try that? So this is some better AI tutor. But it can still not replace tutors. So because tutors will have, have something personal and emotion with students. So that's my personal opinion.

Sure. Now I know you're up, uh, I believe you're in Seattle, correct?

Yeah. Yeah. I'm in Seattle.

So where can you help students? Are you able to, are you online or are you strictly in the Seattle area?

That's a good question. So basically say it's across the United States. We can have people all across the United States and probably even international students because when we launch our platform, we see some other international students are practicing on our platform to prepare SAT, like students from India and South Korea and even Mongolia. So they use— they are using our platform. Something we can definitely offer the platform and combine with tutoring with students. Right now, our priority is to, uh, help students in United States, so that's why we enable SAT, ACT, AP, not other like exams like in European countries and Asia.

Sure. So as you're, um, meeting with families, you know, at CollegeReady, we have a very strategic way of helping families and it's not one size fits all, and I'm guessing you're very similar. So my question to you is, if you have a student and— or I have a student and they have already completed Calc AB by their sophomore, maybe their junior year, when do you recommend that they take the SAT or the ACT?

Oh, so I think so that's really good they already took AP Calculus because SAT is SAT. So they just assume students took Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry, and then they can go to SAT. So the AP Calculus is beyond the scope of SAT. So if some students already took AP Calculus, so I definitely recommend them to take SAT. I would like to say ACT. It's not a simple, much more simple, but more straightforward than AP questions.

Okay. Yeah. So I want parents to hear that you don't have to wait until a child is in their junior year or even their senior year to take the SAT or the ACT. For my own son who attended Harvard, I often say, you know, he was, he started in Algebra II his freshman year. And if he would have waited until his junior or senior year, he would have to teach himself all of that math all over again because he hadn't had it for so long. So when do you find is the best time or the best path for a family to find you? Is there a certain, you know, benchmark or, or how would a parent even know to start?

Yeah, so that's great question. For SAT and ACT, I always recommend the students to try, not say need to be like best, excellent, but at least try that in sophomore. So not senior, not junior, but sophomore. They already lot of, I think enough Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and geometry, and they can take exam. I know a lot of students take SAT in their even freshman and sophomore. They did pretty good. And for the AP Calculus, I think so probably it's like the junior year is the best year to take AP. I know some students, they are aggressive, didn't took AP Calculus AB, they just directly took BC. Then they said, because there are huge overlapping, I'm not sure if students here understand that there are huge overlapping between AB and BC. BC have additional 2 chapters. So some students think it's waste their time to take two, like, calculus classes. It just took one. But for most, I would like say 60 to 70% students took AB, then took BC, and can be sophomore, junior, or junior and senior. But for SAT, I always recommend to prepare early, and some students, they first took PSAT, just even in their middle school, they took PSAT and then they go to college. Sorry, they go to high school and the first year and the second year sophomore, they took, uh.

So good. So parents, you know, preparing for college is definitely a planning situation. You don't want to wait. You want to have a strategy when to take it, how to take it, how many times to take it. And then working with Dong, you can actually help accelerate your child's success. Dong, if families wanted to reach out to you and learn more about your program and Rocket Tutor, Rocket Ace, what was the name?

Ace Rocket.

Ace Rocket. I was close. If they wanted to reach out and learn more, how can they do that?

Yeah, so there are multiple ways to reach out to me. The first is we have email. I'm not sure if we can type that, but it's called Dong, my name, D-O-N-G. @acerocket.net. So this is my email. Can always find me there and also text me. So my phone number is 614-397-5173 to text me. This is the two major way to reach out to me. Also, some parents, if they are on LinkedIn, they can always find me on LinkedIn, send me message. And another direct way to reach out to find me is that we have website. Strokit.net and their contact information. Actually, so there's a box you can put something in, like the email console, and just send me email or reach out to me.

Excellent. So parents, just know that it takes a village. They need you, they need your support, they have tutors like Dong. They really, um, need a plan. And so if you are in search of how are we going to get them accepted into college, how are we going to get them the big scholarships. Last year, our students earned over $10.3 million in scholarships. And over the last 18 years, we've earned over $80 million. And it's working with people like Dong to bring up your test scores so they could become an AP Scholar. There's so many wonderful things that will, will come from doing well on testing. So Dong, are there any last words for families that you would like to share?

Yeah, so I would like to say thank you again for all the parents and students listen to our podcast. I think math is really good, amazing. I know some students are really afraid of math, but don't be afraid. Math is really interesting and just, uh, we can help you to reduce anxiety, to find the math is great and help you to ace your math exams. Yes. I love that.

Yeah. Well, Dong, thank you so much. And parents, remember, if you have any college admissions questions, financial aid, scholarships, go to college-ready-plan.info, college-ready-plan.info, and we will absolutely get you the resources that you need. Thank you, Dong, for being on the show. And parents, you've got this. Thank you.

Thank you, Shellee Howard. Thank you, parents and students.