Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles - Hello, everyone, welcome to the Khan Academy 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