Built for my nephew, in 2009

From F to A in seven days.

My nephew Scotty was failing fourth-grade math. The school proposed retaining him a year. I built him an app over Christmas vacation. The next Friday he scored 100% on the timed test and was the first kid in the class to finish. Total study time: two and a half hours.

Math Katas is what that app eventually became. One Kata a day, every day, for a week.

Get Math Katas Read the founder's note

One Kata a day. Every day. For a week.

In thirteen years of classroom use, I have never seen a student fail to get an A on the timed test if they completed one Kata a day for a week. I have also never seen it work on a once-a-week schedule. Kids forget too much between sessions.

Why daily, not weekly →

You are not memorizing 144 problems.

You are learning eight rules — and the fifteen problems not covered by those rules. That's the move that flips a kid from "this is impossible" to "this is doable."

Browse the eight rules

The protocol, in three steps.

There's nothing clever about it. The discipline is the daily rhythm.

1. Sit down with the kid.

Fifteen minutes. No TV, no music with words, no siblings doing something more interesting in the room. More on setup →

2. Run one Kata.

The Kata has 144 problems. Most kids answer about 200 their first time through. Hard ones come back; easy ones don't get repeated to death.

3. Do it again tomorrow.

Same time. Same setup. Six more days. The daily rhythm is the protocol.

The numbers.

2.5 hrs

Scotty's total study time across the seven days. Not per day. Across the entire week. He went from 50% to 100% on the timed test.

13 years

Madelia Public Schools used the web version in their fourth-grade classroom. Hundreds of students. The same protocol, the same one-week arc.

16 years

Scotty's retention. No practice in between. Sat down cold and completed a Kata in under ten minutes. The facts were still there.

White through red. The belts are the kid's evidence — visible proof of the work, day by day.

Read before you start.

Seven short reads on how the protocol works and how to set your kid up so it actually does.

Why daily, not weekly

The most important page on this site. Read this first.

Why the whole Kata

Why "just practice the 7s" doesn't work — and what to do instead.

97% faster than writing it out

The defensible math behind the time savings.

All seven articles →

Built for Scotty, in 2009.

My nephew Scotty was failing fourth-grade math. The school proposed retaining him in third grade. We refused. I'm a programmer, so over Christmas vacation I wrote an app I believed would work.

He went from 50% (F) to 100% (A+) on his multiplication timed test in one week. The full version of the story — the conversation I had with him before he started, the Marines, Madelia, the sixteen-year data point — is on the founder's note page.

Read the full founder's note Browse the eight rules

Get Math Katas.

For iPad and iPhone. Android version in development.

Download on the App Store

I have a small number of free promo codes for parents whose kid is failing the multiplication timed test and who'll commit to one Kata a day for a week. If you'll do the protocol, email me and I'll send you a code.