Almost Fun
By Lisa Wang (guest author)
As an after school math tutor, I often saw my students experience anxiety or dread when they were faced with a math problem. The mix of numbers, letters, and unfamiliar notation seemed to morph into an enemy, taunting them with the prospect of defeat. Watching my brilliant, chatty students shrink at the site of their math homework made my heart ache; math should be fun - it should spark creativity and joy, not fear.
Together with a small team of teachers and engineers, I set out to create a math resource that would use puzzles, games, colorful animations, and fun non-math analogies to help students find the joy in math. Today, these resources have now supported over 2 million middle and high school students.
After we released our lessons online, I tried a lesson out in one of my tutoring sessions. My student had long struggled in her math classes and shared with me that she would often sit in the back of the class with her head down. As she went through our website’s resources, she turned to me and said, “Wow miss, this is almost fun!”
And so, our non-profit had a name - Almost Fun. For the record, I believe math is just FUN, but I figured we’ve got to meet our students where they’re sometimes at 😅.
If you have students struggling to master pre-Algebra or Algebra I foundational skills, think of our resource as an additional supplement that you can point them to for added support. Along with interactive animations and games, we have step-by-step calculators (they do not just give the answer away), practice problems (we never use red X’s for wrong answers), and walkthroughs of example problems. And for students, everything is free!
We also recently launched lesson guides: these include animated 3 Act Task videos and an infinite set of practice problems that students can complete with step-by-step guidance or completely independently. These lesson guides come with a $9/month subscription to our website - but if your school doesn’t have the budget to pay (or it’s too difficult to navigate school reimbursement), reach out to me at lisa@almostfun.org.
We hope that we can aid you in bringing joyful math learning to your students! And be on the lookout for exciting partnership news ahead with our friends at Skew The Script!