KNOXVILLE – What started as a comment on a math company’s Facebook blog turned into a welcome surprise for a West Hills Elementary School fourth grade class and teacher Amy Bzorgi. Based on her post, where she took the company’s Co-founder, Shimon Schocken, to task over an article he wrote about a recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report, the company was so moved that it decided to donate tablets and full-access to Matific, the company’s math content designed to make math fun for students, to Bzorgi and her students.

“My kids are very excited. We felt very honored and grateful for this opportunity," Bzorgi said. Her students will have full around-the-clock access to Matific’s library of interactive activities. The mini-games are aligned to curriculum standards and supplement the lessons that students learn in the classroom. “They can actually have access at home, and they think they're playing games,” Bzorgi said.

Schocken, who is also a computer science professor, was not surprised by the findings of the OECD report which stated, “even countries which have invested heavily in information and communication technologies (ICT) for education have seen no noticeable improvement in their performances in PISA results for reading, mathematics or science.” His response to this report frustrated Bzorgi so she decided to share her frustrations with the company. Her comment was, “The author is sadly deluded if he thinks we teachers have ANY control over technology in our classrooms....I would LOVE to engineer my ‘own locomotive and take the train to where I want it to go…' however, my district does not provide the technology nor the necessary training - for myself or my students! Teachers do the best they can with what they have.”

The comment caught the attention of Matific Co-Founder & CEO Guy Vardi. “We said, this is a teacher who is very passionate about what she's doing,” said Vardi. “She really cares about the kids, and we need to find a way to support her.”

Matific contacted Bzorgi with an offer to donate tablets and the software her students needed to excel in math, as well as the support and training that she and all of her colleagues needed to implement Matific in their school. Vardi hand delivered the tablets and gave a workshop to the teachers to ensure that they could take full advantage of the Matific software.

“If you ask kids what subject they like the least, they're going to say math," said Vardi. "If they hate math, they're not going to go into science; they're not going to go into engineering; they're not going to go into programming. Math has such a huge impact on future careers, and without instilling a love of math in students at a young age, you will limit their potential."

Published November 30, 2015