At NumberClub we don’t count right answers or wrong answers. We don’t really ask math questions. We pride ourselves on getting students to think, so a wrong move can be just as valuable as a good one. A student making lots of quick, accurate moves might be thinking less than someone making more careful decisions. So what can we meaningfully measure?

Our best guess is thinking time. Not the time between logging in and logging out. The time between one move and the next. We don’t count any time when a move takes longer than 30 seconds; the student may have been distracted or talking. We just measure the time between a student executing one mathematical decision and another.

So when you log on to our Teacher’s Dashboard, one key metric is how long students have been playing over the last week, month, or year. It’s a valuable measurement: thinking time.

While others boast about the number of questions students have answered, we’ll boast that NumberClub has just passed 178,000 hours of total thinking time across all our students. EdTech is rightly taking its fair share of criticism at the moment, but for a young venture, 178,000 hours of mathematical thinking time is something I’m very proud of.