Daily Homeroom livestream.

For those of y'all who are new to this.

This is our way of staying connected

in times of school closures.

Obviously Khan Academy is a not for profit

with a mission of providing a free world class education

for anyone, anywhere.

Over the last many years, we've been building resources

in math, the sciences, English and language arts,

the social sciences, to help you feel supported,

whether you're a student

who's learning outside of the classroom,

or whether you're a teacher trying to support students

in the classroom, differentiating instruction, et cetera.

But when we saw the school closures happen,

we realized that we have a fairly unique role to play,

to help keep people learning to support

all of you as parents, as teachers and as students.

And as part of that,

beyond just putting the resources out

that we've already had.

And the calendars, the schedules, the learning plans,

we've been running parent and teacher webinars.

We also wanted to do this

as just a way to answer questions,

feel connected and bring on some really interesting guests

who can give us more perspective on

how do we keep learning and the world as a whole.

And we have a really great guest

I'm going to introduce in a little bit.

I do like to remind everyone,

Khan Academy is a not for profit,

we only can exist through philanthropic donations

from folks like yourself,

I want to give a special shout out to several corporations

that have stepped up in the last few weeks

to to help our COVID response.

We were already running at a deficit before this.

And now we're seeing our traffic at about two to three ex

of what it typically is

and we're trying to actually accelerate

a lot of programs and do new things.

So special thanks to Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org,

Fastly and Novartis for making that happen.

With that, I'm excited to introduce our guest,

Laura Overdeck.

Laura, there's a lot of different,

many interesting things to talk about with Laura, today.

One of is, you know I have to thank Laura

she's a longtime supporter of Khan Academy.

She makes a lot of what we're able to do possible

hopefully all of you are able to enjoy.

And Laura, I don't know if I'm hearing,

I'm hearing like my own voice through...

Oh, it's fine I'll just power through it.

- I'm hearing an echo too, but...

- Okay, anything we can do to, on the echo side.

- You know what, let me, I'm gonna try one thing.

- That got rid of the echo.

- Is that a little better?

- That's a lot better.

It's still going on a little bit in the background,

but we'll power through this.

Anyway, as I was introducing Laura.

Laura has been a longtime supporter of Khan Academy,

through the Overdeck Family Foundation

we definitely sent her positive karma

for making all of this possible.

But also to this conversation.

Laura is the founder of Bedtime Math and Fun Factor.

And Bedtime Math and Fun Factor are very relevant

even before COVID crisis.

But I think in this crisis when a lot of kids

are learning from home and parents

are trying to figure out what are enriching activities

to do with them that are that more relevant.

So Laura, thanks for joining us.

I hope you and your family are doing all right

in these crazy times.

Tell us all a little bit about Bedtime Math

and now this new project, Fun Factor.

- Sure, so we...

Bedtime Math I started about eight years ago,

it really is truly one of those things

that started in the garage,

except it was in the bedroom,

although not that kind of bedroom, a kid's bedroom.

But basically, my husband and I

would read our kids a bedtime story

and then almost without thinking about it,

we'd give them a fun math problem

just something we'd make up on the fly.

And when we started sharing these

with other people, it grew really fast.

And I think that's because people

were very hungry for math to be fun.

And also to be real life for kids.

You know, a lot of times we take math

and try to make it fun.

At Bedtime Math, we find the thing

that's already fun for kids,

and then find the math in it

and that's a very different way of thinking about it.

Once we started that,

we have an app, we have a website,

the math problem goes out every day.

We also started an after school math club

called Crazy Eights, with hands on games.

And what's happened with this crisis

is we're actually now adapting those games

for teachers to use with their students from afar.

And that's what Fun Factor is.

That's our new initiative.

- And make that a little more tangible.

What age groups is this appropriate for?

I guess, you could say skill levels and what is it like?

Are these the standard math problems

that you might see as part of your curriculum?

Are they that plus other things?

- Yeah, so it really started off because

it was parallel with reading a bedtime story.

It's really for those ages

when you would read a book to kids.

So we say ages two to nine

two sounds aggressive, but it's not.

It's just that's our mentality

that people are like, "Ooh, math is tedious and dry."

It's not math is wonderful.

And you can totally start with a two year old,

which is what we did with our kids.

And the math problems are pretty different in spirit

from what you would find in a textbook,

because of course, we can talk about whatever we want.

We write them about pillow forts, ninjas, drafts,

chocolate chips, just stuff that kids love.

And then there will be three or four levels of questions

about what we just talked about.

And those range from like a Pre-K level question.

That might be, you know, giraffes or brown,

find three brown things in the room,

all the way up to third graders

doing multiplication and logic problems.

- I have to give a testimonial

I've been using you obviously

through you I learned about Bedtime Math

near the beginning, you know,

many many years ago and my oldest who's now 11.

I was using it with him when he was five, six, seven

years old and he definitely enjoyed it.

And I, you know, then used it with my daughter

and I'm using it now with my youngest,

so a personal testimonial for that.

You know, taking it one step above that,

you know, you are, given all of your focus and energy

and education generally and on Bedtime Math

and Crazy Eights and Fun Factor.

You know, I think you have a good lens

on how do parents deal with this type of situation,

especially with younger kids.

A lot of parents are worried

that maybe my kids aren't learning enough.

What advice do you have?

I know you have, your kids are a little bit older now.

But what advice do you have

for parents trying to deal with this scenario?

- So I would say this crisis has really,

I think shone a bright light on a lot of things

with education and we should

absolutely take advantage of it.

So one thing is that with kids now home

and liberated from their classroom,

you can see your child, where they're stuck

and where they're really flying.

And that's something that when kids

are all together with their classmates in our school system,

which mostly, unfortunately,

is fairly lockstep everybody does

chapter three on September 28th,

everybody does chapter four,

on October 2nd.

Kids have gaps.

And I know you've talked about this so much

the Swiss cheese learning where kids

have their own particular holes that didn't get filled.

Now that everybody's home, and they have more time,

'cause you're not in transit on a bus, between classes.

There's a real opportunity for parents

and kids to figure out where they could use more practice.

And there are so many resources out there

and of course, Khan Academy, I mean, likewise,

my kids of all use Khan Academy, we use it to learn things,

you can fill in any topic that you wanna learn more about.

And I just think that when I really look at what's going on

in our education system, we've really pushed kids through

when they are not ready for the next topic,

when they haven't mastered

and where I've seen this most acutely is,

I actually tutor in our women's state prison

here in New Jersey.

And the insiders, it's women who have a high school degree

and they wanna get their associates.

And I'm working on pre algebra with them.

I mean, someone's given them a high school diploma,

signifying that they have this mastery, and they don't.

And it's not right that we do that.

It's because they've been moved along

without anybody filling those gaps.

What's interesting is these women are so motivated

because of course, they've now got a double whammy.

They know it's going to be hard to get a job,

when they get out.

They've got another strike against them.

But when I sit with them, they do learn

so they didn't fall through the cracks

'cause they couldn't learn out.

They fell through the cracks

'cause there's something in our system

not filling those gaps.

And I'm hoping that with this crisis,

we can really tackle that.

- No that's incredible.

And Laura, I'm getting a message

from the tech team, you might have to tabs open

that are on Facebook or YouTube.

And so they're getting the live stream.

So they're saying if you could close all of your tabs

that are not this one,

that might be where the echo is coming from.

And I'll give a message while Laura is figuring out

if that is the case.

For any of y'all with questions.

We're seeing questions come on YouTube,

ask Laura and I anything

and we have team members who are looking at them.

And we're going to surface them.

And actually, I'll start with a question from YouTube.

And that did help.

Thanks, Laura.

So this is from YouTube. Nekeil Govender asks,

asks us both, but I'm more curious about your answer.

I'm happy to give a little bit as well.

"What was your inspiration to help others

"in terms of education?"

And I guess you know, why focus on education

of all the things in the world?

- Well, again, this was not terribly premeditated.

When we started Bedtime Math.

We were just kinda doing this for fun with our kids.

But when we shared the math problems,