Magma Math is a digital math platform leveraging handwriting recognition technology that allows students to show their work the same way they would with pencil and paper. The platform enables teachers to apply best practices for mathematical instruction, reduces the amount of time spent on lesson planning, and allows teachers to focus on providing differentiated support based on real-time, qualitative, and quantitative data. Creating assignments is simple and intuitive. Teachers can design lessons, formative assessments, and activities from a library of over 40,000 standards-aligned problems for K-12 math, as well as create their own problems.
With Magma Math, ALL students are empowered to see themselves as doers of mathematics. Students get to work through rich problem-solving tasks with multiple entry points deepening their conceptual understanding. By promoting reasoning, discourse, and making room for everyone to engage and build math confidence, Magma Math also makes math fun and alive, revolutionizing the mathematical journey of each student.
Formats/platforms:
Magma Math operates on all operating systems – iOS, Android and Windows – and on all devices – Chromebooks, laptops, desktops, smartphones, iPads and Android/Windows tablets.
Primary URL:
Problem solved:
Math as a Verb
Magma Math’s student interface creates opportunities for students to express themselves mathematically (show their work!), and experience math as a creative subject. Students receive immediate feedback, giving them autonomy as learners.
Promote Math Discourse
Magma Math encourages students to listen to one another and provides space for all students to be seen as experts, making Magma classrooms centered around joy, collaboration, and productive struggle.
Increase Mathematical Confidence
93% of Americans experience some level of math anxiety. By anonymizing students' work, Magma Math can help increase participation in mathematical discourse. Making math fun, alive, and debatable makes room for everyone to engage and build math confidence.
Grow Your Teaching Practice
Magma Math enables educators to provide differentiated support for each and every student using qualitative and quantitative data available at their fingertips in real-time. With best practice, research-based mathematical instruction, and automatic grading teachers can
refocus their time to facilitate deeper math learning, promote mathematics as a living practice, and center students' voices in every lesson.
Remote learning made easy
As Magma Math enables educators to distribute assignments, follow students’ work and learnings progress, and support students in real-time regardless of students being in the classroom or working remotely it is perfectly designed for remote learning and homework.
Grade/age range:
K-12
Subjects/standards:
Mathematics
Content, activities, and assessments are aligned to Common Core State Standards
Lesson time needed:
For the greatest impact, students should be assigned approximately 20 independent practice problems per week - which is between 40 and 80 minutes of Magma Math usage per week.
Pricing models:
There is no minimum order requirement for the purchase of an annual Magma Math student-user license. There is, however, a requirement to purchase an annual Magma Math student-user license, to receive free annual Magma Math teacher-user licenses. Magma Math would consider a free-pilot promotion period for gathering purchase orders or Letters of Intent and setting the price based on district orders.
What makes Magma Math unique?
Magma Math is a digital math tool as it should be. It provides all the advantages of digitization while maintaining the creativity and freedom of using paper and pencil. This unique combination helps unlock the superpowers of educators, enabling them to create dynamic, student-centered classrooms where all students are challenged and supported appropriately.
Characteristics:
Key UI / UX features
Teachers
Assignment creation
Clear and easy assignment creation process where the educator in a few simple steps can create, assign, and send out a new assignment to a selected class or students. The educator can also select if students are allowed to look at the answer and can also enable exam mode.
Solution heatmap
The solution heatmap provides a matrix view of students and problems for a specific assignment. The educator can with a quick glance get an overview of all students’ progression and easily identify the most difficult problems as well as students that need extra support.
Problem solution deep dive & anonymization
By clicking on a single problem in the solution heatmap view the educator is provided an overview of all student solutions and can in a few simple steps anonymize and pin selected solutions to share and discuss with the full class.
Students
Problem area
When a student has entered a given assignment the left-hand side of the screen features the problem area. Here the student can see the specific problem as well as access theory and
videos relevant for the problem and request teacher support if needed.
Drawing area
The majority of the screen in the student problem view is made up of the drawing area. This area provides students the flexibility to solve the given problem by hand. Only the student’s creativity and imagination set the limitations.
Answer area
The bottom part of the screen in the student problem view is made up of the solution area. In this area, the student writes the answer to the problem by hand and the platform uses its handwriting recognition technology to interpret and grade the solution entered.
Instructional design principles
The instructional purpose of Magma Math is to provide a technology that supports equity-focused instructional best practices for the teaching of mathematics. Specific goals include facilitating student-centered mathematical discussions and simplifying the differentiation of instruction. Promoting student discourse in the math classroom represents one lever towards advancing equity, by affording stronger access for every student. Magma Math addresses this by capturing every step of student work, providing teachers a heat-map view to determine correct solutions at-a-glance, and allowing teachers to select, sequence, and share anonymized student solutions in ways that will help students to make connections among the different solution approaches – as part of a large group discussion that will allow students to discover the learning objectives of the lesson.
Magma Math also simplifies the differentiation of instruction – by providing content that is aligned to the same learning standard but is tiered in levels of difficulty (easy, medium, and
hard). This allows teachers to have all students work towards the same learning objective, while quickly differentiating to offer students work that is at an appropriately challenging level of difficulty.
As a supplement, the purpose of Magma Math is to integrate seamlessly with any core instructional program by offering a bank of standards-aligned problems and allowing teachers to add any content they wish to assign to their students. With full alignment to the Common Core State Standards for grade 1 through to high school Geometry, Magma Math is easy to use as a supplement to any Common Core-aligned elementary through high school level core mathematics program. If, however, teachers wish to focus on problems they have developed for their students – they are easily able to input those problems to be offered via
Magma Math’s digital technology.
When used as part of an intervention strategy, Magma Math’s purpose is to support a data-driven approach to mastery learning. Magma Math supports the administration of diagnostic pre-tests and provides real-time user-friendly reports to help teachers quickly identify areas in which individual students (or small groups of students) need additional support. Students can continue to make multiple attempts to solve an assigned problem until they arrive at a correct solution. Students are then able to make formative and summative assessments to document their progress towards mastery of the course content.
Here’s what users are saying:
Teacher Reviews:
“With Magma all students are challenged on their individual level. It creates a sense of calm in the classroom and a strong feeling of accomplishment amongst the students as they are challenged according to their ability. Especially students that usually are struggling in math class show higher engagement.”
“By being able to anonymize, look at, and discuss the class’s different solutions together, the students get “aha experiences” as they understand the other students' way of solving a problem!”
“The students quickly started to realize the benefits of Magma with the instant feedback they get to their solutions. Several students have also expressed that they feel more in control of their progression as Magma also provides a great overview of how they are doing in the longer run.”
