Hi, I'm Sammi Siegel.
I'm a Senior Software Engineer at Duolingo.
And I'm so excited to be with you today,
to talk about Duolingo's newest angle.
The sum of a lot of hard work.
And that's our new math app.
I promise I'm almost done with the math jokes.
So stick with me.
Most of you know Duolingo through our language products.
So you might be wondering, why math?
Why expand beyond language into this completely new subject?
The answer is rooted in furthering our mission,
to improve people's opportunities in life through accessible education.
Duolingo was founded on the belief that learning languages
can open doors to education and employment opportunities.
And we're constantly improving our products,
to help our learners build and demonstrate those skills.
Now we want to double down on this progress
by increasing access to high quality education
in areas where it matters most.
And that's where math comes in.
So why math in particular?
There are a whole lot of reasons, but I like to start with a personal story
about why I care about math and why I'm so committed to this project.
Ever since I was a young child, math has always been my favorite subject.
To paint the full picture, I loved math so much
that I joined a logic puzzle club in elementary school with my friends,
so we could do math after school, just for fun.
As I got older, I started to feel more isolated
as one of the few women in my higher level math classes.
Math started to feel more stressful than fun.
Instead of learning in a safe and encouraging environment,
like with my logic puzzle club mates,
I started to feel the pressures of proving my place in the classroom.
I likely would've dropped out of math,
if I didn't have a strong support network from parents and teachers
telling me to keep going.
Not everyone has access to this level of support.
And that's exactly what motivates me to work on this app.
For students like me, who needed a safe space to learn,
for people with different learning preferences,
and people who just need math to be a little bit more fun.
I ended up studying math in college,
and I now use it in my every day life as a software engineer.
So gaining confidence in math was integral
to getting me onto this stage today.
My personal journey touches on two barriers to math achievement:
access and anxiety.
We know that math skills are essential to improving one's life.
Whether you decide to cite the increases in income
associated with math educational performance,
or the better health outcomes,
or simply the joy of appreciating one of my many math jokes.
But not all students have access to the math education they need.
This means they may go through school feeling uncomfortable with math,
which can lead to math anxiety and math avoidance throughout adulthood.
How many times have you heard someone say,
"I'm just not a math person"?
Maybe you've said it yourself, while you're calculating the tip at a restaurant
and all your friends are staring at you.
These are just some examples of math anxiety
and I'm sure a lot of us can relate.
To give you some numbers, in a recent survey
half of US high schoolers and 20% of adults suggested
they had very high math anxiety.
And math anxiety can have a ripple effect,
between teachers and their students, and parents and their children.
In fact, studies show that parents with high math anxiety
can negatively impact their child's math achievement,
especially if they help that child with their math homework.
So it's clear that there's an urgent need
to make math more accessible and fun for everyone.
Lucky for us, studies also show that apps are a really great way to help.
This isn't terribly surprising to us at Duolingo.
Our apps have made learning a new language more approachable and enjoyable,
for people who may have otherwise been too intimidated to try.
With motivating streaks and gamified lessons,
we know how to make learning fun.
And that's exactly what we're trying to do with our math app.
We've been focusing on elementary level math first.
So we can help students and children improve their math
at a pivotal point in their education journey.
And we're also working on a brain training course for older students and adults,
so we can help everyone
regardless of age or background,
gain more confidence in their math abilities
and break that cycle of math anxiety.
Now for the fun part,
showing you a little bit of what we've been working on.
We've assembled an all-star team of engineers,
learning scientists and designers
to build an app that teaches math the Duolingo way,
through bite-size lessons with delightful and interactive exercises.
Plus a streak to keep me motivated
and gamified features like timed lessons.
Similar to our language learning app,
math courses are separated into distinct units
with skills that teach you new concepts
and allow you to practice what you've already learned.
Users can start at any unit in the course,
so you can align the app with what you're learning in the classroom
or focus on areas that you want more practice in.
Lessons are also generated with randomized numbers,
so no two lessons will be exactly the same.
This allows you to replay each skill multiple times
and keep learning new things.
And just like our language app, concepts are learned by doing
and not by watching videos.
Each lesson features interactive exercises
that are uniquely designed to teach the specific math concepts.
There are so many exciting interactive challenges in the app,
but I'd like to highlight one of my favorites.
When teaching measurement,
we have an exercise that asks a user
to drag and rotate a ruler to measure a given line segment.
This simulates an activity that I remember doing in the classroom with a physical ruler.
But because everything on screen is generated dynamically with code,
the possibilities are really endless.
We can change the length of the ruler to teach adding piece by piece,
or we can change the object that we're measuring entirely.
In this example, we can ask the user to measure the width
or the height of the rectangle.
Or we can take it a step further
and ask them to measure the area or the perimeter.
All of these variations help our learners
better understand how ruler measurement works
and keeps them engaged.
This is known as embodiment in learning science.
Our physical experience impacts our thinking and vice versa.
That's why we have learners
physically move the corners of the rectangle
to produce a certain area.
This helps us understand the relationships
between the numbers we're seeing and the physical space they take up.
Another example is our writing exercise,
which utilizes some cool new technologies
to recognize your handwriting for numbers and fractions.
This is just some of what makes our app different
from any other math app on the mobile market.
The variability of the math content
plus the ability to manipulate shapes and space
in our exercises,
makes us stand out in terms of learning science and engineering.
And of course it wouldn't be Duolingo
without Duo and the rest of our world characters
lightly encouraging you to complete your math lessons.
But we had to give them a bit of a mathematical transformation.
For me one of the most interesting and unexpected parts
about developing this app
has been the math required to actually build it.
Everything you see in the app is drawn dynamically in code.
So we can show you all different kinds of shapes,
fractions, angles, and more.
But drawing all of these required figuring out some pretty involved geometry.
Math builds on itself.
So understanding the core concepts that this app is teaching
laid the foundation for understanding the higher level math concepts
I needed to actually engineer it.
I said earlier that one of our goals is to break the cycle of math anxiety.
By teaching these core math concepts in a fun and inclusive environment,
we're helping our learners build confidence
and laying the foundation for them to reach even higher in math
and education at large.
But enough from me.
Let's hear from Ellie.
Ellie is one of our beta testers.
She's a 2nd grader, who prior to this clip
had never interacted with fractions before.
And this is a video of her seeing fractions for the first time in our app.
I think you're supposed to match the pairs, whatever it is.
Oh, wait, no. I think this is the answer for these two
and then you're gonna put the last answer in there.
[woman] Okay, so what do you think that answer is gonna be?
[Ellie] Hmm.
I think, 'cause there's four filled up and there's like…
And there's like… Um… The…
If there was another one then that would be five?
So I think it's this one.
Hopefully, both Ellie and I have gotten you
really excited to try out the new math app.
We're happy to announce
that we're launching a beta version of the iOS app this summer,
which can be used on iPhones and iPads
and it's completely 100% free.
If you're interested in math brain training
or if you have a young student in your life,
or you're simply just excited to try the app for yourself,
you can submit your email to us at duolingo.com/math.
And stay tuned for announcements about our official app launch
coming later this year.
Thanks for giving me a fraction of your time
to go on this tangent about math.
We really can't wait for you to try the app.