Q&A Part 1 | Vivian Tan

So right now we have a playable game, but our ultimate vision is to create an immersive world in which you can eventually design your own games to fit into any level of math learning, and then it would be an infinite playground in which you can continue learning tougher subjects or scaling back and revisiting older concepts. So that is kind of the basic gist of how Math Breakers came to be. And I didn't have like a very formal plan talked out today because I love Draper University. I'm sure lots of people have lots of great insights, so I wanted this to be more of a conversation. So I wonder if anyone has any questions or input. Sure, go for it. Are you planning to expand to other subjects and topics too, or what's your vision, I guess, for the future? Right now we're covering grades 1st through 6th, but that's really so we can focus on the subject areas and get the foundational math down. So you probably saw from the game there's a lot of arithmetic going on, and that's our basic building block. But what we really want to do is take this all the way up to to the college level, maybe even post-grad, but that's further out in the future. One of the things we like a lot is what we call the math labs where we have mathematicians send in— they would call us or email us with a challenge like, hey, can I build a Turing machine using your platform? And then we would brainstorm with them and figure out, okay, here's some— How would you do that? Higher math, can we use the same components of the game in adding new mechanics, build something like that? So we have— yeah, I think we have a choo-choo train in there we call the Turing Train. And we also have— one of my favorites— Set Theory in a Suitcase. You use suitcases as a representation for creating sets, and then you would pop it in a machine and break apart the sets.

So—

So we've tested that, and so we know that the platform itself is capable of handling more advanced mathematics.

Sure? How has your modernization of this platform or this product changed over time, and how much? And how do you— I guess, how do you evolve that based on— I'm trying to imagine who you get feedback from. I mean, both from the students and the schools too.

That is a really good question. We used to have a whiteboard up. that says days since— let's see— number of days that's gone by since our monetization plan has changed. And that number is almost perpetually zero because there's so many different parties of interest, I guess, here. You got your parents, you have teachers, you have administrators, and we also face this tricky situation where, you know, really your users are the kids. But the buyers are somebody else. So that part was really tricky because schools have very different needs. Parents have very different needs. And I think one of the funny things that we also faced is that we almost marketed exclusively to the US because we kind of figured, oh, it's within our immediate vicinity. We know the school system's better. That would work better. But instead, we kept getting requests from international schools abroad. So I think we had schools in Kenya, schools in Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Sweden using our product. And with the US, it's been very— purchases have been slow. But then we realized that's really the nature of the school system where decisions are being made so slowly that even when we set a really affordable price point for teachers, It's still a very slow system. Now, with parents, it's a lot easier, to be honest, selling to them directly. But yeah, to answer your question, our pricing model is constantly evolving. And we're looking to do another major change. Because right now, the game is downloadable. And parents, you just pay a one-time fee. Schools, we have them on a subscription service. But what we really want to do is to be able to bring more content to every grade level and be able to provide some sort of subscription service. Like, I think that the one company, the one ed tech company that I admire a lot and I keep going back to is Club Penguin. I think they had a great way for engaging parents and kids and be able to provide quality content at a good price. Saw some hands back there. All right, I already chose from this area, so you first.

Yeah, actually, thank you very much for sharing that. I see that with platforms that kind of improve people's knowledge, people's intelligence, it's quite hard to completely showcase the value added by making quantifiable metrics. How do you show to teachers or to students How do you tell parents that, yeah, this is how it helps your children at this moment?

That is also a really good question and that's something that comes up a lot because, as you can imagine, if you just go up to people saying, your kids will learn, or, your kids are gonna love this game, it's a hard sell, especially because it's mathematics. And so collecting data on that had been difficult. And we talked to a lot of professional game developers who collect data on a regular basis, and one of the questions that keeps coming up is like, how do you measure fun? I'm like, I don't know, how do you measure fun? They're like, we have data points that show how long people play. I'm like, that's just length of time you're engaged with the game. That doesn't necessarily show how much fun you're having.

Mm-hmm.

For us, one of the things we do is we provide an introduction level to the game for free, but then everything after that you have to pay for. So by seeing how many people complete the first level and continue playing the game after the trial has— after— sorry. The trial usually lasts longer than the first level. But probably no more than 2 levels. So after you complete the first one, we measure like how long you continue playing. And because most kids get introduced to this in school, but they continue playing from home, so even if the school doesn't purchase, but if you see some— something that got started in the classroom, but then the gameplay time extends well beyond that, you know that these are kids going home to their parents saying, hey, can we please buy this because our school won't? So, I hope that sort of answers your question. Oh, sorry, no, that answers one part in terms of if they're engaged. But in terms of whether they're learning, that is more difficult and hard to quantify. So what we're doing right now is working with WestEd. They're an organization that does efficacy studies, and we're really looking forward to a big study that's gonna launch next school year, and then we'll be able to provide more data points on that. But we do get a lot of cool emails from principals saying, hey, you helped my 6th graders get over her fear of fractions. She loves it now. She's willing to learn. We have parents send us emails saying, I couldn't explain negatives to my kid, but then after 2 hours or so with Math Breakers, It's starting to come together now.

Yeah. Go ahead.

I wanna know, like, at what stage did you raise funds? Did you start raising funds? Was it like when you built a prototype that was like completely functional or like after you tested on the kids and actually got like, I guess, some feedback back?

We did a lot of testing. And we haven't raised our seed yet. We've been bootstrapping most of the way just so we could retain a lot of creative control over the project. That was— that decision was in part— partly because we really want to stay true to the vision of the immersive 3D world, and apps were becoming so popular at the time. Like, every investor we talked to was like, why don't you make an app that's easier to use? It's like, okay, we want it— we want something that encourages long-term learning, and the only way we see to do it is to build an immersive world.

But we did—

we raised funds on a small amount on Kickstarter, and then we joined the Zynga Incubator at CoLab. If you guys want to check it out, great place. They focus exclusively on educational games, and they've incubated lots of really cool companies. So we had some funding from them as well. And then you had a Kickstarter. But before we launched this, we pretty much tested at least once every month or once every 2 months with a group of 20 to 40 kids in classroom settings and also at kind of maker fairs and hackathons for kids. So we got a lot of feedback to get a general sense of direction of what kids really want. what parents really want, because they're the ones shelling out cash for Kickstarter, before we launched the campaign.

Yeah.