Bedtime Math was founded in February 2012, initially as a website. In March 2014, Bedtime Math launched Crazy 8s, a free nationwide after-school recreational math club.[2]
In 2019, Bedtime Math created Fun Factor, a K–5 curriculum developed in consultation with Teachers College, Columbia University. It features math activities.[3]
Products
Bedtime Math's main offering is daily math problems for elementary school-age kids, broadcast by email and posted daily on the website's homepage and Facebook page.[4]
Bedtime Math: This Time It's Personal (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, March 2014)
Bedtime Math: The Truth Comes Out (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, March 2015)
How Many Guinea Pigs Can Fit on a Plane? (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, June 2016)
Crazy 8s: The free program provides a kit of materials to help host eight sessions of a weekly math club.[7][8] As of 2019, there were 10,000 schools and libraries across the country that had participated.[9]
Fun Factor: Compared to Crazy 8s, Fun Factor activities are standards-aligned for grades K–5 and geared towards small-group differentiated instruction.[10]
Summer of Numbers: A summer math incentive program for libraries, in which kids track their daily math using gold star stickers on a calendar. The program, once offered through the Collaborative Summer Library Program, is currently exclusively offered by Bedtime Math.
For Math Awareness Month in April 2013, Bedtime Math produced four short math comedies.
In 2015, an article in the journal Science reported on a randomized trial on the use of the Bedtime Math iPad that the "app provide limited support for the effectiveness of the intervention" with "no significant improvement in math performance for the experimental group compared with the control group".[13][14][15] In 2018, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and University of Chicago psychologists claimed that the app "has long-lasting effects even after children stop using the app".[16]
In 2018, researchers at Johns Hopkins University released the results of a study that claimed that the students who took part in Crazy 8s reduced their math anxiety, with the art club students not experiencing a significant reduction in math anxiety.[17] The effect was more pronounced among students in the kindergarten through second grade club.[18][19]
It was named one of the best online learning math apps for kids by The New York Times,[20] and one of the Outstanding Apps in Early STEM Learning for Children by the Brookings Institution.[21][22][23][24]