Justin;

If you depend on a massive base of learners, most of whom are unserious, that puts hard constraints on how you teach. You have to employ ineffective learning strategies that do not repel unserious students.

When I tell people I work in math edtech, it’s initially kind of embarrassing.

They think of edutainment videos or arithmetic games where dinosaurs dance in front of you for answering 2+2 correctly.

Now, I’m fortunate enough to work on a learning system that’s pretty hardcore. Every decision we make is based on the science of optimizing student learning. It’s like quantitative finance but instead of optimizing return in the stock market, we’re optimizing learning efficiency in students’ brains. We go all the way up from 4th grade to university-level math (like, serious math major math, well beyond calculus).