Teaching K-12 Math Online: Reasoning Mind CEO Alex Khachatryan (Part 2)

SM: What year did the math camp occur?

AK: That was around 1998. It was a Spartan moment in my thinking. If it took that much effort for my wife and I to get our son interested in mathematics, including paying $3,000 for a summer camp, which is something that not every parent is going to be able to do, what chances do other kids in different environments have?

My initial thinking is that there is a lot of hidden talent in this country. There are a lot of kids who go to good schools, who are really smart, and have high energy but they never discover that math and science might be an extremely interesting thing to do in their lives because they never got exposed to it.

That is when we came up with the initial idea of creating an Internet-based club that would model something like a math camp. Kids could meet online, compete with each other, and meet with mathematicians. They could interact, play mathematical games with each other, and listen to lectures. The goal was to get them excited about math and science.

From the very beginning I wanted to do this under a non-profit umbrella. I wanted to do something meaningful and helpful to the country. I went to a good friend of mine, Ernie Cockrell, who is a well- known philanthropist in Houston. We presented the idea to him. Ernie is not easily swayed, so it took us about a year of going back and forth and doing all kinds of homework he assigned to us, including writing a 150-page business plan and meeting with a whole bunch of people whom he sent us to. He made us validate our idea and bounce it off of people who knew more about the space than he did.

At the end of the year we sat down and he said, “I see that you are on to something. If you have the fire in the belly and really want to do it then I am going to help you.” That is how the project actually started, but by that time the project actually morphed into something different. Through all the discussions with educators and philanthropist in Houston we discovered for ourselves that although helping kids like our son would be noble and useful, there was actually a huge underserved population in our country. These are disadvantaged kids who did not really get any kind of education. If we really wanted to make a difference, we were told to figure out how to help those kids too.

We were also told if we wanted to raise money and get the philanthropic community in Houston to fund us that we would be able to do it if we targeted economically disadvantaged students. I thought that it was an interesting thing to do.

SM: Doesn’t that change the curriculum you were planning to offer? Catering to someone like your son is vastly different that catering to economically disadvantaged children.

AK: Absolutely. At the time we thought that it would be important to build a system that would be very adaptive. We wanted to base the system on artificial intelligence and expert systems. I had some experience building expert systems in my prior career working in the petroleum community as an applied mathematician. I knew the computer science/IT part of it and how I could really extract expertise from experts and build a system that would stimulate their expertise.

I also felt that I had competitive advantage in the US because I was raised in a system that did a better job of teaching math and science than is done on average in this country. Teaching and working with the gifted and talented population is vastly different than working with disadvantaged low-achieving kids. I felt that I could build a system that could cover a very significant segment of the population even if it could not cover the very top talent in the country.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Teaching K-12 Math Online: Reasoning Mind CEO Alex Khachatryan
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