BASD elementary students are solving math problems that baffle most adults, thanks to a new partnership formed this year with Dr. Robert Sun, creator of the online program First in Math (FIM).

Since 2002, FIM has been using the power of digital gaming to help students in grades K to 8 build core mental math skills. The program has since helped more than 20 million students and is being used in 5,000 schools in the U.S. and abroad. The board of directors listened to Sun present the staggering impact the program has made in BASD classrooms so far this year at the curriculum committee meeting April 3.

An engineer by trade, Sun explained that learning math has two parts just like any other acquired skill. First is understanding a concept, which schools are responsible for teaching, and second is practicing the concept until it is a mastered skill, which students must do on their own. FIM is a practice tool designed to motivate students to take ownership of their math skills as they do other skills in sports or music, Sun said.

“In sports and music, we have the benefit of our physical senses giving us immediate feedback, so we get engaged. When we enter the mental realm, unfortunately, we don’t get that same feedback,” Sun explained. “Technology, however, has solved that problem.”

FIM integrates instructional videos and digital games to facilitate students’ learning, practicing and mastering foundational mental math concepts centered on fact fluency, including basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

“Without a firm grasp on [these kinds of] foundational facts, students find it nearly impossible to work through higher order mathematics, such as algebra,” explained assistant superintendent Dr. Jack Silva, who has endearingly referred to Sun as the Derek Jeter of math education.

Each new concept builds on the previous one and is followed by a game for practice. The students must prove they’ve mastered a concept before being allowed to move onto the next and students cannot skip ahead or go out of sequence.

“This integration allows us in a very strategic way to build these [skills], layer by layer, in the proper sequence so that any time a concept is presented, it can be absolutely certain that there is a solid foundation of skills already mastered without putting it all on your teachers for testing and so forth,” said Sun.

Upon analyzing 10 years of FIM user-performance data last year, Sun discovered that most students were struggling the hardest with subtraction, and that this struggle was hindering their overall math performance. To address the issue, he identified only 16 facts that students must memorize to be able to subtract any two-digit numbers. From there, he designed the newest FIM program, the Very Important Facts (VIF) System, focused on building automaticity of these 16 facts.

The VIF program is divided into two modules. To successfully complete the modules, students must correctly solve a series of nine subtraction problems of two-digit numbers in under 10 seconds, each using only mental math, something most American adults cannot do, according to Sun.

BASD introduced the VIF System last year in all 16 elementary schools for grades K through 5, with the lofty goal that 70 percent of all grade 3 students would complete the modules by the end of the 2016 – 17 school year. At this point, eight months later, 56.4 percent of these 923 grade 3 students have completed the modules and schools that have already achieved the 70 percent goal are Asa Packer, Calypso, Donegan, Hanover and Miller Heights. According to Sun’s analysis, BASD students have solved a staggering 27 million FIM math problems correctly.

The district is targeting a gain of 10 percent more students each year completing the VIF System, with the goal of achieving a record 90 percent by the end of the 2018-19 school year.

Sun reported that 1,040 of the 2,954 students in grades 3 to 5 have also completed the VIF System. Moreover, they did it in an average time of 1.5 hours for the most proficient students and less than six hours for the weakest students, proving the program’s scalability to meet the needs of a diverse student population.

Students who complete the modules receive a certificate signed by their school principal, Dr. Silva, Superintendent Dr. Joseph Roy and board president Michael Faccinetto.

Sun also noted that 11 BASD schools are among the 100 top performing schools in the state and that three players from BASD are among the top 100 performers in the state.

Families of participating students are given one other complementary account on FIM that any family member can use to participate in the program. Because of this, seven participating family members of BASD students are also ranked among the 100 top performers in the state.