Bedtime Math is a non-profit organization focused on mathematics education for young children. Its founder, Laura Bilodeau Overdeck, launched the venture in February 2012 with a website and a daily email, followed by a mobile application, that provide a playful daily math problem for kids to do with their parents, much like a bedtime story. The organization has been featured in The New York Times parenting blog, USA Today, and National Public Radio ; its books have been featured on NPR's Science Friday and reviewed in The Wall Street Journal. News outlets hailed its fast-growing following as "heartening news for educators who bemoan the state of science, technology, engineering and math education in the U.S." There are a quarter million followers of the daily math problem. In 2015, an article in the journal Science reported on a randomized trial that found use of the Bedtime Math iPad app improved performance of first-graders in math at school, especially among those whose parents had high math-anxiety. In 2018, the published new findings that showed the gains in math achievement of children who used the Bedtime Math app persisted through the end of third grade, even if they decreased or stopped using the app. In March 2014 Bedtime Math launched its free nationwide after-school math club, designed to make math truly recreational for kids. Within months, the organization had received over 2,000 orders for free math club kits serving over 30,000 kids in grades K-5. In 2018, researchers at Johns Hopkins University released results of a study that found its Crazy 8s math club significantly reduced children’s feelings of math anxiety after eight weeks of participation in the club. The effect was more pronounced among younger kids in the kindergarten through second grade club.
Offerings
Nightly math problem: Bedtime Math's core offering is its daily math problems for elementary school-age kids, broadcast by email and posted daily on the website's homepage and Facebook page. The mental math problems are designed “to promote both giggles and mathematical thought” as a means to “increase ‘math awareness’ in our everyday lives.”
Apps: The organization delivers the same daily riddles via a free mobile application for Android and iPhone OS.
Books: Based on the daily blog’s popularity, Overdeck has also published four children's books
After-school math club: Seeing the need for repeat experiences to reshape kids’ perception of math, Bedtime Math developed , a free kit that any school or library can use to host 8 sessions of a weekly math club. The nonprofit received orders for nearly 1,000 kits across the U.S. within weeks of announcing it. There are 10,000 schools and libraries across the country who have participated.
: To reverse the well-documented “summer slide” in children's math and reading skills, Bedtime Math created 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 now exclusively offered by Bedtime Math.
Videos: For Math Awareness Month in April 2013, Bedtime Math produced for both kids and adults to enjoy. The videos have garnered over 155,000 views combined.
