This company pays kids to do their math homework Mohamad Jebara
For as long as I remember,
I’ve loved mathematics.
Actually, it’s not 100 percent true.
I’ve loved mathematics for all
but a two-week period
in senior high school.
(Laughter)
I was top of my class,
and we were about to start
the Extension Maths course.
I was really excited
about this brand new topic coming up,
complex numbers.
I like complex.
My teacher was priming us for the concepts
with some questions about square roots.
Square of nine – three;
square of 256 – sixteen.
Too easy.
Then she asked the trick question:
What about the square root
of negative one?
Of course, we were all over it –
“Come on, Miss!
We all know you can’t take
the square root of a negative.”
“That’s true in the real world,” she said.
“But in the complex world,
the square root of negative one
is the imaginary number i.”
(Laughter)
That day,
my entire mathematical world
came crashing down on me.
(Laughter)
“Imaginary numbers?
Seriously?
But mathematics is a source of truth,
please don’t go abstract on me.
I would have studied art
if I wanted to play
with imaginary numbers.”
(Laughter)
“This is Extension Maths,
let’s get back with our program!”
She didn’t,
and over the next couple of weeks,
I reluctantly performed
meaningless calculations,
(Laughter)
finding imaginary solutions
to quadratic equations.
(Laughter)
But then something amazing happened.
We began finding elegant solutions
to real-world problems
we previously had no answers to,
starting with the complex world
of imaginary numbers.
So some mathematician 500 years ago
decides to have some fun
and make up these imaginary numbers,
and because of that we can now
derive these amazing identities
with applications in the real world,
in fields like electrical engineering.
Wow!
I gained a whole new level
of appreciation for mathematics.
And after my brief mistrust,
I was now in love
with the subject more than ever.
Francis Su, the mathematician,
sums it up beautifully when he says,
“We study mathematics
for play, for beauty,
for truth,
for justice and for love.”
But if you ask a student today,
you’ll probably hear a different story.
You might hear “difficult” and “boring.”
And they might be right about difficult.
But it’s certainly not boring.
In fact, I’d say being difficult to master
is part of what makes it beautiful.
Because nothing worth doing is easy.
So we need students to stick around
long enough through the difficult parts
to appreciate the beauty
when it all ties together.
Much like I did for that brief
couple of weeks in high school.
Unfortunately, our school systems –
we move students through mathematics
in a lockstep process.
So those who fall a little behind
find it near impossible to ever catch up
and appreciate that beauty.
But why is this a problem?
Why should we care?
Well today, more than ever,
our world needs every citizen
to be skilled in mathematics.
With the advent of artificial
intelligence and automation,
many of the jobs we see today
will either not exist
or be transformed
to require less routine work
and more analysis
and application of expertise.
But we’re not producing
the extra mathematics students
to fill these new roles.
This graph shows the number of students
taking Standard Mathematics
and Advanced Mathematics
over a period of 20 years in Australia.
It’s clear that while we have demand
for mathematics skills rapidly increasing,
supply is in steady decline.
To put things in perspective,
half of the students
completing high school today in Australia
are not prepared
to understand any argument
about rates of change in data.
In this digital age
where fake news can influence
election results,
this is very concerning.
Let me give you a concrete example.
Let’s take a closer look at that graph.
Can everyone see what I’ve done there
to stress my point?
If you can’t, let me show you now,
with the vertical axis
starting at zero, where it should be.
There, you see it now, right?
It’s the exact same data
but I’ve manipulated the representation
to influence you.
And that’s cool, that’s my job up here.
(Laughter)
But in all seriousness,
unless we do something
to drastically improve
student engagement with mathematics,
we’ll not only have
a huge skills shortage crisis
but a fickle population,
easily manipulated
by whoever can get the most air time.
So what’s the solution?
There are a lot of things we have to do.
We need curriculum reform.
We need our best and brightest
encouraged to become teachers.
We need to put an end to high-stakes tests
and instead follow a mastery-based
learning approach.
But all these things take time.
And I’m impatient.
See, I’ve been thinking about this
for eight years now.
Ever since I left my job
as a derivative trader
to build a web application
to help students learn mathematics.
Today, our app is used
by schools across the globe.
And we’re seeing big improvements
for students who use
the program regularly.
But here’s the thing –
we’re only seeing it for students
who use the program regularly.
And most of them don’t.
So after years of developing
and refining the application,
our biggest challenge
was not so much product related,
our biggest challenge
was motivating students
to want to work
on their gaps in understanding.
You can imagine
in today’s attention economy,
we’re competing against Facebook,
Snapchat and PlayStation
to try and get these students' time.
So we went back to the drawing board
and started to think about
how we could make it worthwhile
for students to spend
some of their “attention budget”
on their education.
We tinkered with gamification elements
like points, badges and avatars,
and we’d see a temporary
spike in engagement
but things would go back to normal
as soon as the novelty wore off.
Then one day, my cofounder, Alvin,
came across a study of students in Chicago
led by the behavioral
economist, Steven Levitt,
where they paid students
who improved on their test scores.
He started telling me
about some of the things they tested for
and the interesting findings they had.
For instance, they found
that incentivizing students for inputs,
like effort,
worked a lot better
than incentivizing for outputs,
like test scores.
They found that for younger students,
you could win them over with a trophy
but for older students,
you really needed cash.
(Laughter)
And the amount of cash mattered –
10 dollars was good,
20 dollars – even better.
But perhaps most importantly,
they found that the rewards
had to be instant
rather than promised at a later date.
They went as far as to give
the students 20 dollars and say,
“Touch it, feel it, smell it –”
(Sniffing)
“It’s all yours.
But if you fail,
I’m going to take it back.”
And that worked really well.
I immediately got excited
about the possibilities
of implementing this in our program.
But once the excitement settled down,
there were a few concerns
that crept in our minds.
Firstly,
was this ethical?
(Laughter)
Secondly, how would we fund this thing?
(Laughter)
And finally,
would the results be sustained
if the students were no longer paid?
Now, let’s look at the ethical part first.
I’m a bit of a mathematical purist.
So I’d be one of the first people to say
that we should study mathematics
for the sake of mathematics.
Remember – for play, for beauty,
for truth, for justice and for love!
Not for money!
(Laughter)
As I struggled with this,
I came to see that,
while it’s a way I look
at mathematics now,
it’s only because I studied it
long enough to appreciate it.
It’s very difficult to tell a student
struggling with mathematics today
to work hard for a payoff
in the distant future.
And it’s not so much bribery
that’s at work here,
because I could bribe students
by telling them about my big bonuses
in my derivative trading days
as a reward for doing well at maths.
But it doesn’t pay off
for a very long time.
So it’s practically naught.
Behavioral economists
call this hyperbolic discounting.
And Levitt goes as far as to say
that all motivating power vanishes
when rewards are handed out with a delay.
So, from a purely economic point of view:
if we don’t use immediate incentives,
we are underinvesting in student outcomes.
I took heart from that,
and came to see that as a society,
we’re actually quite used
to financial incentives.
Whether it be by the government,
by employers or at home.
For instance, many parents
would pay their children
an allowance or pocket money
for doing chores in the house.
So it wasn’t really
all that controversial.
As I thought about that,
it started to answer that second question
of how we were going to fund this.
Naturally, parents are the most invested
in their children’s education.
So, let’s charge them
a weekly subscription fee
to use our program,
but –
if the students complete
their weekly maths goal,
we’ll refund the subscription amount
directly into the child’s bank account.
We chose three exercises completed
over a one week period
for a 10 dollar reward.
That way we’re incentivizing effort
rather than performance
over a short enough period
and with a substantial enough payout
for the students to care.
Now, I remember when I first told
my wife about this new business model.
If she had any doubt left
that I’ve gone completely mad,
that pretty much confirmed it for her.
She said to me, “Mo …
you realize that if everybody
does their homework, which you want,
you’re not going to make any revenue,
which you don’t want.
Great business model.”
(Laughter)
I say it’s more like
an antibusiness model,
it’s free if you use it,
but you pay if you don’t.
Now, I knew from experience
that not everybody in the country
was going to jump on
and do their maths homework every week.
And if they did,
sure we’d go bust pretty quickly,
but hey, we would have solved
the country’s maths skills crisis.
(Laughter)
As a company, we’ve always run
a double bottom line,
looking to both make
a return for investors
as well as improve student outcomes.
We know that our path
to long-term profitability
is through improving student outcomes.
So our dual objectives
should never be at odds.
So we’re always looking
to make our product decisions
around helping students reach
their weekly maths goal,
effectively ensuring that they get paid
and not us.
Now you must be wondering:
How is this crazy business model going?
You’ll be glad to know
we’re still in business.
We’ve been testing this now
for the last five months
on just our personal
home users in Australia
before we think about
rolling it out to schools.
And here are the early results.
The green represents students
who are completing their weekly maths goal
and the red those who aren’t.
You can see a lot more
completing their homework than not.
In fact, as our user base has grown,
we found the percentage
to be pretty steady, at around 75 percent.
So on average, we receive
our weekly subscription fee
once every four weeks,
and the other three weeks,
we’re rewarding the students.
Now of course we’re leaving
some money on the table here,
but guess what?
It turns out these students
are 70 percent more engaged
than students not on the reward program.
Check.
From a business perspective,
they are less likely to churn
and more likely to refer friends,
so we’re hoping to trade off
a lower revenue per user
for a bigger and more engaged user base.
Check and check.
Now for that final question.
Would they keep coming back
if they were no longer paid?
Mathematics is so much more
than just a subject you study at school.
It’s a human endeavor.
It’s what helps us to understand
the world around us.
And the more you know,
the more you want to know.
So yes, we’ve triggered initial engagement
with a financial reward.
But in the long run,
the money won’t matter anymore.
Because in the long run,
the wonder of mathematics
will be the incentive
and understanding it
will be the reward.
Thank you.
(Applause)