Our founder developed MathFactLab because he could not find a true math fact fluency program on the internet. While the others may claim to develop fluency, they are, at best, only drilling for automaticity through memorization.

Automaticity is just automatic recall, like knowing your phone number; it requires no understanding. Fluency, on the other hand, is flexible, efficient and based on a foundation of reasoning and understanding.

Fluency can’t be developed through rote memorization and drill, which is the approach used by our competitors. Students develop true math fact fluency when they explore the basic math facts through a variety of strategies, continuously being challenged to find the interconnections and relationship between the various facts and their inverse operations. MathFactLab was built to do just this.

MathFactLab was created by Mike Kenny, a working fifth-grade math, science and social studies teacher. The idea for MathFactLab sprang from a master’s project completed when he was a student in the Vermont Mathematics Initiative.

He had been frustrated by the absence of any commercially-available math fact program that actually aligned with the research, so, for his project, he developed a large set of strategy-based flashcards for his students to use as they practiced their math facts.

As there were so many flashcards, the students struggled to keep the sets organized in a way that was effective, so Mike eventually moved the program online using Google Slideshows. This made a huge improvement and Mike began to truly see the effectiveness of providing a range of strategies for students to develop true math fact fluency.

Google Slides, however, lacked the interactivity and memory of a true webapp, so after seeing first hand the potential of this strategy-based approach, Mike began the long process of building a website, with the hope that this approach could be used not only by his students and those in his school, but by students around the world.

Yes, Mike Kenny, MathFactLab’s creator, is happy to meet with teachers via Zoom to help them get the most out of MathFactLab.