Rob Alvarez Bucholska
0

Aditya Nagrath Creates Real Personalization in Math | Episode 363

 

If you’re struggling to keep people engaged and loyal in your product or business, check out my FREE gamification course to learn how to do just that: bit.ly/freegamificationcourse-web

We discuss how to use gamification to help students overcome math anxiety. This is how Dr. Aditya Nagrath, founder of Elephant Learning Mathematics Academy, makes education engaging and effective through gamification. By incorporating engaging and playful elements, Elephant Learning enables students to expedite their math learning significantly. This episode highlights how gamified educational platforms can make challenging subjects more approachable, motivating, and less intimidating for students.

Dr. Nagrath helps students overcome mathematics anxiety. Aditya is the creator and founder of Elephant Learning Mathematics Academy which helps students learn years of mathematics over the course of a few months using their system just 10 minutes per day, 3 days per week. With a PhD in Mathematics & Computer Sciences, Dr. Nagrath has spent over 30 years in the industry as a software engineer, author, leader, speaker, and serial entrepreneur working on everything from atomic clocks to iOS and Android apps to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. As the Founder of Elephant Head Software, which won the prestigious JD Edwards Innovation Award in 2015, he has also done software projects for Pearson, Verizon, Telefonica, JD Edwards (Oracle), and other billion-dollar companies.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Guest Links and Info

 

Links to episode mentions:

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, this is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez, a consultant and the founder of Professor Game and a professor of gamification and games based solutions at IE business school, EFMD, EBS University and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, if you’re struggling with engagement in your business and are looking to find out how to make sure your users stay with you, perhaps you will find our free gamification course useful. Find it for free in the links, in the description. Hey, engagers, and welcome back to another episode of the Professor Game podcast. And we have. Aditya. Is that a good way to pronounce your name? Yeah.

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah, that’s it.

Rob:
Fantastic. Welcome, Aditya. We’re here with you because you have some fantastic stuff to discuss, but before we get started, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah, I’m happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

Rob:
So, Doctor Aditya Nagrath helps students overcome math anxiety. So, mathematics anxiety. He’s a creator and founder of Elephant Learning Mathematics Academy, which helps students learn years of mathematics over the course of a few months using their system. Just ten minutes per day, three days per week. He’s a PhD in mathematics and computer sciences. Doctor Nagrath has spent over 30 years in industry as its software engineer, author, leader, speaker and serial entrepreneur, working on everything from atomic clocks to iOS and Android apps to Amazon’s Kindle Fire. And as the founder of Elephant head Software, which won prestigious JD Edwards Innovation Award in 2015, he has also done software projects for Pearson, Verizon, Telefonica, JD Edwards, Oracle and other billion dollar. So plenty of exciting stuff going on in your world at Edia. Thank you very much for taking your time to be here with us. Is there anything that we’re missing that we should know before we dive into the questions?

Aditya Nagrath:
No. Thank you for that wonderful introduction.

Rob:
Brilliant. Fantastic to have you here, but with all these fantastic things and we know you’re doing great work. We also like to land a little bit on daily life. What does it look like if we were to be in your shoes? What will we feel like? What will we be doing these days at Edmonton?

Aditya Nagrath:
Well, that’s a great question. So, I don’t know. I spend a lot of time on meetings. We have maybe six or no, seven or eight customer success type people, math coaches, customer success, and we have marketing people. We have. So, like, there has to do meetings to keep everything going and then every now and then I’m twiddling around with some software here or there to try to get maybe some extra stuff in, or we’re trying to rewrite our framework right now so that it infuses artificial intelligence a little bit.

Rob:
Nice, nice. Good stuff, good stuff. So, Aditya, let’s dive right in. We’ve all done some interesting stuff. We’ve also had some moments where we’ve not had the best of successes and we want to dive a little bit into one of those moments. Call your favorite fail or first attempt in learning, especially if it has anything to do with introducing games, gamification into these math courses or anything else that you’ve done in the past, because that’s the main topic that our audience is usually focused on. So do you have a story of a first attempt at learning that you can share with us? You don’t have to share any company names if you don’t want to. That’s perfectly fine.

Aditya Nagrath:
I know what you mean. Well, yeah, so for a little while we had this skip button that we added into our games. And so, like, what we had seen was that someone had somehow potentially guessed their way out of a subject because they didn’t understand maybe the next materials that had come across, not through an entire subject, but in the placement exam. So in placement mode, so they only got like four or five correct to close the subject. And so what we did was we added a skip button so that during the placement exam, if a student feels like it’s too challenging, they could hit the skip button, therefore indicating to our system that these materials are challenging for them so that they wouldn’t get moved on. But what we found out was that actually a lot of the students that are either in gifted programs or ahead were, you know, like, the games are supposed to start easy and then get harder, right? So they were hitting skip because they were like, yeah, this is too easy. Skip, skip, skip. So then they were getting placed at a younger age and that was upsetting them because, you know, they’re like, well, I’m ahead, I should have an older age. So that was a learning because it took like a year or two years of gathering data and talking to people to figure out that’s kind of what was happening and that more of that was happening than people being able to guess their way through the placement exam. So we ended up removing it. That was a fail.

Rob:
Interesting, interesting. And looking back, of course, it’s always 2020, right? But with this information, if something similar came up and you were going to implement, again, not the skip button, necessarily, but you were going to do something similar without knowing. When people, for example, talk about sometimes Facebook and their whole responsibility, I’m not taking any away, but of course, when they started many of the consequences of what they were creating, they had no idea. Maybe now they know better and so on. But at the time, how would you ever know all these things would happen? So without having the ahead information of what’s going to happen, would you approach it differently? Would you do something in a different way? Or once it happens, would you do something differently? We’re thinking of some of the key lessons that you might have taken from this experience.

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah. I don’t know if in this particular situation coming into it, I could have figured out anything different to do because, like, a lot of times you’re trying to react to customer and, and, I mean, the real challenge with reacting to customers, a lot of times they don’t really know what it is that they want.

Rob:
Yeah.

Aditya Nagrath:
You know what I mean? They can just, if you can get them to describe the problem, then you can try to figure out a solution. But the challenge is, is what happens if, you know, like, some customers are experiencing one problem, some customers are experiencing another problem, and, like, you don’t have both of the challenges there in front of you at the same time. So that’s kind of like this situation where it’s like, well, by adding this skip button, we introduce this other problem. So maybe in retrospect, we would have watched it so that it didn’t take a year. Like, if we could just maybe somehow, like, see, well, are the elephant ages are coming in lower now that we’ve added the skip button or something like that? Some sort of average or something. But, yeah, it’s a tough one.

Rob:
It’s a tough one. Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking, like, initially, my first, like, my brain always sort of starts jumping into, you know, what are the things that could have been done? Like, my first reaction, again, I don’t know if it’s accurate. It makes sense, was, you know, if it took a year, you know, one of the things could have been, again, I’m not in your shoes. I wasn’t in your shoes in any way, but could have been that, you know, people were getting frustrated, but you, you were having a hard time figuring out why. Was that the case that they didn’t know what was happening to these gifted students, or were you trying to balance out one need with the other?

Aditya Nagrath:
So we kind of knew that that was starting to happen because, like, that’s exactly what the parents are saying, it’s my kid’s ahead.

Rob:
What’s going on?

Aditya Nagrath:
So I explained to them, like, hey, this skip button’s there. And what it does is this. And, like, what you can do is just let the student know that if they hit skip, they’re indicating to the system that this is too hard, and we’ll put them right back into placement mode right where they left off. So, like, the system itself, with this test out mode was adaptive enough to kind of conform to them. It’s just like, when the number of complaints of that was like, yeah, okay. But we’ve had, like, three complaints of the other thing, and we’ve had, like, 100 complaints of this. It’s better than take it away.

Rob:
Yeah, no, and then in that case, what it seems to have been happening is in ux Ui, these things they always talk about, if you have to explain a feature, there’s something that can be. That can be changed somehow. If the skip feature needed to be explained, then there was something that, again, I have no idea what the solution could have been. It’s a complicated.

Aditya Nagrath:
One of the options that we had was to put too hard there, but we didn’t want the students to feel like it should be hard.

Rob:
That was my first one, like, oh, too hard. But then, you know, how does it make the student feel at that time if math is already something they’re anxious about? Right?

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Rob:
Interesting. Interesting. That was gonna stay in the back of my head for a while, I can tell you that. That’s an interesting, you know, that it’s one of those problems where, you know, I don’t teach math. I teach, you know, more in business schools. And there’s usually when you teach cases, right. There’s no, it’s hard to find a final, definitive. This is the right solution, of course, without all the facts of the after case. But with the facts in the moment, you have choices, and choices mean that you have trade offs. So what is the trade off? That you chose one, which I’m sure was with the information at the time, and even at this time, thinking about it again is the best one you could have taken. But it’s that kind of thing that’s still in the back of the head sometimes for me, it’s like, could there have been something else that we just. We didn’t think of at the time? It’s one of those things that is. It’s tricky. Right. And it’s hard to let go sometimes. Sometimes it’s, you know, this is the best that there is right now. And we just have to let it pass. Right. Interesting. Yeah, interesting. All right, so let’s dive into the next question. How about instead of going for a fail moment, let’s go for a success, one of those things that makes you proud. And, you know, this is a success story. So, you know, we want to. We want to be there, perhaps look at some of the success factors that you might think helped you come up with a solution or whatever, whatever that looks like.

Aditya Nagrath:
Well, I mean, elephant learning itself is one of those things because we were doing contract software engineering, and what we decided was, we’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to focus on empowering children with mathematics. And the system was built off of a prior project called Kids Play Math. And so that was, like, out of the University of Denver, and that only covered preschool and kindergarten. So they, they only got through maybe counting and maybe some addition, but we had to extend this. And so, like, what we did was we kind of redesigned, rebuilt everything from scratch. So, like, the idea was that, like, with kids playing math, they were really, like, trying to build games. It was a unity based system in flash, which was kind of disappointing because it’s like, yeah, look at this. I mean, like, it’s basically dead already. And I needed to basically find a way to be able to get the researchers or the mathematicians who had read the research to be able to design the activities themselves, because what was happening was that their production process, their build process was they would come up with an activity. They would hand that to the developer. The developer would program that activity. It would take a month, and then inevitably there’s a, like, okay. And then there’s these mistakes and then.

Rob:
Two weeks, never ending cycle.

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah. And that’s per an activity. But, like, there was thousands of activities that we had to be able to represent in order to get through algebra, which is what we’re doing now. And so the system and all the decisions that were involved to make it, in fact, were, is kind of what you’re describing, because, like, even beyond that, it was like, how do we. How do we build the dashboard in such a way that the parent can understand the progress? Because the standards are so complicated that most, most of the teachers have a hard time understanding it. And how do we. How do we make it kind of, like, choice based? Right? So, like, the characters and et cetera. So there’s a lot of stuff that went into it.

Rob:
Cool. Cool. And what’s, like, I hear from what you’re saying that one of the success factors could have been how to involve the content creators and part of the quote unquote here development process. Right. Not turning them into programmers, but making the process such that without needing programming, they would bring a result that would have typically been that of them working with a programmer. Does that make sense?

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah, yeah. So we built an activity builder is what we did, and it’s not visual as yet, though one of the ideas was that we could make a visual builder and try to resell it to education departments.

Rob:
But yeah, well, for now it works, right? The whole just working on the math.

Aditya Nagrath:
Has been good enough for the last seven years.

Rob:
Fantastic. It sounds, sounds incredible. And if I may ask again, I don’t know how proprietary or internal this is, what is a liberty that they have there? Is it just that they create an equation that needs to be solved? Because again, I don’t know the intrugula of the system, but how much do they create? How much space do they have to do different things and make choices? Or is it just like a very straightforward thing for the ones creating these.

Aditya Nagrath:
Activities, different types of options is what we had to create so that like they are able to kind of have a wide variety because, for example, counting might look like, give me five things, and the student slides over five things. And then we check, were there five? Right. Did they click on five? That kind of stuff. But towards like the end of this stuff, like with fractions and etcetera, like we might show them an area, we might split up the area into different boxes of different sizes and they’d have to figure out like how much of that area it is. And. Yeah, so like there’s a wide variety. And what we had to do was, yeah, we had to figure out what are the sub activities that they’re going to be interested in and see, like how can we make it completely dynamic, basically.

Rob:
Nice, nice. I like it. And with all this experience you mentioned, you’ve been doing that for the past seven years, perhaps with involving this, because I do feel like it’s, from your description, it’s a game based activity or a gamified learning of math. Would you say that there’s some sort of process for creating stuff within your realm? How does that look like? If there were a process, what does it look like? Or if you were tomorrow, they tell you, look, this is fantastic. You created something great for math. How about we do it for physics, which is kind of related, might be useful. Would there be some series of steps? Would something like that make sense? Could you describe that pace?

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah. So like if someone wanted to put a physics curriculum into our system. One of the things that they’d have to do is they’d have to find the dependencies on the ideas because one of the things that we’re doing is we’re doing adaptive algorithms. So like the adaptation kind of figures out, like, from this map, what are the ideas that feed into this idea that you need to understand in order to understand this idea? And then basically after that, we’d look at the activities that they’re trying to do, and we might have to have some developer support, right? Like, hey, we’re trying to build an activity like this. And then that’s where then our developers would break it down and say, yeah, okay, but then you’d be able to create all these other activities as well because we’re going to build you this and we’re going to build you this, and we’re going to build you this. And it kind of boils down to options that they could kind of plug into what would be a visual editor, or in our case, like, it’s just the JavaScript object notation that we’re kind of working with because the mathematicians were able to do that.

Rob:
So from what I’m hearing, it sounds like you’re sort of building it from the ground up. Right. You would have to, like you did with, with math, and I’m guessing that comes as well from that process.

Aditya Nagrath:
You have to start with might already be supported. It’s just that, like, there’s probably some different.

Rob:
No, what I mean from the ground is you do, you know, sort of math 101 is the first thing you have to do. You cannot start with the last class of math and then do it from your side because since it’s adaptive, you say, well, you don’t know this, then it’ll teach you this other thing. So you say, oh, well, if I start with this, well, actually I have to start with this. Oh, but if you don’t know this, you need this other thing, right? In the end, you’re going to start with, you know, the actual lesson. Zero. Zero is the one that you need to start with that thing where, you know, if, if you don’t know this, well, there’s nothing we can do, or I’m gonna teach it to you. There’s nothing you need to know before knowing this. Does that make sense? The way I’m putting it, what you’re.

Aditya Nagrath:
Saying is almost accurate, right? Because, like, theoretically speaking, a student will come in, they already kind of know so much. So our system works on adapting and finding. Okay, what’s your level? Of understanding through that placement exam, for example. So, yeah, for like a physics course. Right. If the student has never seen any physics, they’d have to start at zero, but if they’ve seen some physics, we might be able to find their level higher than that.

Rob:
Interesting, interesting. I like it. I like it very much. It’s, you know, we always hear and some of. Some even talk about all these trends of adaptive learning and use AI, but it’s usually, you know, in what I’ve seen, at least going to many educational conferences and so on, it’s a lot of people saying a lot of things and fewer people doing a lot of things. So kudos to that. I think it sounds really, really exciting work that you guys are doing. Aditya, with all this experience that you guys have had in learning and this adaptive learning and using these gamified approaches, is there something that you would say, again, not a silver bullete, but something that you would say, well, do this and your path is going to be at least a little bit clearer or better or easier, whatever. That’s going to look like a best practice, perhaps.

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah, I mean, one of the most important things is just the score. Right? So that elephant age that we designed, which is the one number metric for how your student is performing, that was kind of a big deal because it took all of the complexity of the standards and the interlocking, interlinking ways that the standards are designed and kind of turned it into one number.

Rob:
Nice, nice. So making sure you sort of find a place and some form of a metric where you are able to decide where in the knowledge tree people are and that’s where you start. So you can keep growing. Yeah.

Aditya Nagrath:
Right. But being able to reflect that score back to the student. Right. Because that’s where then they see the gains themselves and they’re building confidence.

Rob:
Absolutely, absolutely. It’s a key, key thing in gamification, we always say it is. There’s no. And we learned this from games, right. There’s no interactive media, there’s no interactions. So if you don’t get feedback, there’s nothing. You know, it’s a movie. Right. It’s a typical lesson where somebody stands up and speaks. Right. For it to be something different, for it to be interactive, there has to be feedback. And this feedback that you’re describing, I think is extremely useful. Right. You know where you’re at, you know how you’re growing. The progress bar, so to speak, is fundamental. It’s been used with success in so many different ways that I think it’s, you know, it’s a very, very good one to keep in mind. Thank you for that.

Aditya Nagrath:
Sure.

Rob:
Aditya, you’ve heard, you know, now most of the central questions that we have here. Is there somebody that comes to your mind that perhaps you’ll be interested in hearing, answering these questions? Sort of a featured guest for the podcast, you say, well, I’d like to hear this person because maybe they can bring in at least for you, you’re curious about their perspective on the subject.

Aditya Nagrath:
That’s a great question. I mean, I’d love to hear what Steve Jobs would have to say.

Rob:
Fantastic. Fantastic. I had somebody talking about Miyamoto from Nintendo as well. So Steve Jobs is not here anymore, but it sounds like a very interesting perspective from, I think with early AI they were talking about, they made these discussions between plateau and socrates or plateau with Steve Jobs. What would a discussion look like? So it might be interesting to see what would Steve Jobs have to say about all this? Maybe in the future it can be a very, very strong AI model that is able to have that discussion. It would be very cool.

Aditya Nagrath:
It would mimic Steve Jobs at least.

Rob:
Yeah, of course, it’s never going to be Steve Jobs, but there’s so many public appearances. There’s so much, he said that there’s, you know, there could be a certain level of accuracy, whatever percentage that looks like, but it could be, could be something interesting to see what he would, he might think and keeping up with those recommendations. Is there a book that you recommend people to read on, you know, whether it’s math or learning in general, gamified instruction, whatever, whatever you want to go for or just general inspiration on how to do these things.

Aditya Nagrath:
There was a book, but I don’t know if I can remember the name now. Might be in my kindle. Let’s see here. Oh, yeah, there was two books. One was influencer. It’s by the same people that wrote a crucial conversations. Let me see. I can’t see the name. It loaded up into the middle of the book. Well, it was influencer. It was by the same people that wrote crucial conversations. And it basically talks about, like, what are the four pillars that are necessary in order to create social change. The other one was hooked by Nir Iyal. So that one was kind of also helpful with making choices for Ui.

Rob:
Nir is a past guest, if you’re interested. He is episode 100 or 100 or 102. I’m not sure at this time, but I think it’s episode 100. I can link that to the show notes, but definitely a fantastic read with Nir, he has another one which we talked about on the podcast at that time, which is what indestructible is. His latest one very, very interesting as well. It’s sort of the opposite of hooked. It’s how to actually get unhooked of all these apps that call our attention so much so we can really focus. So it’s not really the opposite. He’s not sort of undoing his work in that sense. But it is interesting how from. From creating these habit, creating products, it goes towards, you know, how to, you know, separate yourself from where you don’t want to be sort of driven into that habit. And I find that very interesting. There’s. There’s another one, somebody else who sort of went that, again, not exactly opposite routes, but kind of. It might feel that way.

Aditya Nagrath:
I mean, detoxing from digital is kind of big right now, but. Yeah, and even then, like, when I was designing elephant learning, I didn’t want it to be something that the students are in all the time. It’s effective in ten minutes a day. And that was kind of the point, was that we’re not going to try to trick them into staying 20 and.

Rob:
Then 30, you know, and monetizing how much time they spend in the app.

Aditya Nagrath:
There’s some. There’s some games out there that are like, oh, you’re going to play the game, but then to, like, cast the spell or to fight or something, you do do the math problem. Whoever does the math problem faster or something like that. So that’s like tricking the student into doing math. They really want to be playing this other game, but there’s math in it that’s not the same as the gamification of mathematics itself. And, yeah, like, I mean, at the end of the day, we wanted to have an effective system. So, like, the book was very useful in helping us figure out, like, how do we keep them engaged while they’re there? But then, yeah, like, the whole point was, can we make it more effective so they don’t have to be there?

Rob:
Totally. I love it. Love it. And, you know, in that same sense of recommendations, instead of talking about great things other people are doing, what would you say is your super. That thing that you do in this world that at least. At least better than most other people, it doesn’t have to be unique. Right. There’s many superheroes that fly. Right. So what will be that thing that you do that you feel is something that you do great and you bring to the world?

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah. So, like, one of the things that we’re that I’m able to do that. I don’t know if it’s unique, but, like, it’s like, mathematical training is like, you got to be able to hold all of these facts in your head and then ameliorate them into truth, basically. So it’s like, in business, this kind of plays out in that. Like, yeah, okay, here’s all these factors, but then here’s this path that just kind of gets us through that. And so that’s kind of helpful.

Rob:
Nice. Very, very interesting. And we get to a difficult question now. You know, the other ones have been sort of relatively easy because they’re all in your mind and easy to access. But if I ask you, what is your favorite game? That’s something that some people find it a little bit more hard to make a choice. Right.

Aditya Nagrath:
I know what you mean. I’m a. I like the Skyrim. I used to play that quite a bit, though. Like, I don’t think they’ve made one for a little while now. They’re hard to make, probably because, like, every new version had to wow people and, like, last one was pretty, and then the world had to get bigger and, like, how do you keep coming up with the same stories? I’m amazed that they keep, like, rewriting it. That’s kind of a weird thing to do.

Rob:
Cool. Cool. So, Aditya, we’re super thankful and excited to have had you here on the podcast. Is there anything else you would like to tell the engagement, any final piece of advice? And then, of course, tell us where we can find out more about you elephant learning, or wherever it is you want to. You want to lead us?

Aditya Nagrath:
Sure. Which direction would you like the advice to go? Is it business advice? Is it life advice?

Rob:
Whatever. Whatever you think you know, it’s. It’s up to you. This is your time.

Aditya Nagrath:
Yeah. Well, I had a professor once that told me, like, when he was watching me, he said, like, what was happening was it was a computer algebra course. And, like, we were working programming up the integral, and I had said something to the person I was working with, like, we should just try this and see what happens. And he was walking by at that moment, and he said something like, hey, this is computer science, not computer guesswork. I want you to try to think about what would happen if you do that, rather than just guessing and seeing what happens. And I think that’s something that people could apply in every profession or in anything that they’re trying to do is like, yeah, if I. I just think about this for a little bit. If I just maybe look two, three steps ahead. I’d be able to figure out where this is going and I think it’s very helpful. People do that.

Rob:
Fantastic. And where can we find out more about you and your work? And, I don’t know, wherever you want to lead us.

Aditya Nagrath:
Sure. Everything about us is on elephant learning. You can find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, elephantlearning.com dot. That’s the best place to get started if you want the software. We also just released this new book, Treating Mathematics anxiety, that’s on Amazon. So like, that talks about like, the underlying factors of mathematics anxiety and the techniques that our coaches use to help people overcome them.

Rob:
Brilliant. So thank you again very much for being here, for sharing your experience, your knowledge, you know, everything that you’ve been doing. However, Aditya, however, engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over.

Aditya Nagrath:
Hey engagers.

Rob:
And thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you are into gamification and game inspired solutions, how about you go into the free gamification course that we have for you? Just go to professorgame.com freegamification work course, all one word, professorgame.com freegamificationcourse and get started today for free. After that, we will also be in contact and you will be the first to know of any opportunities that professor game might have for you. And remember, before you go on to your next mission, before you click continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of professor game. See you there.

End of transcription