MathFacts Rollout Pulse

Weekly reach grew from 248 to 3,808 students, and the share using it doubled

Adding students and getting them to practice are separate steps. On Aug 31, 18% of added students had practiced that week. By Oct 7 it was 37%, even with new schools joining the denominator almost every day.

It's a school-day tool, and each week climbs from Monday to Friday

Weekends barely register (11–20 students on a Saturday). Labor Day shows up as a single student. Within each week, active students rise day by day. In three of the last four weeks, Monday came in below the Friday before. Some of the climb is new rosters arriving mid-week, but every week has the same shape.

Ten times the students, the same session

Active students went up about tenfold, but what each one does in a day barely moved. Since mid-September, a typical student averages 50–65 practice events and close to one level-up per day. That steadiness suggests the app behaves the same under load and that newer schools use it the way the early ones did.

Peak load is still small, and it lands at two times of day

The busiest minute so far was Oct 7 at 14:50 ET: 736 practice events, about 12 per second. The most students in one minute was 141, on Oct 1. Since mid-September, the busiest minute has held about 7–11% of the day's active students, so peaks scale predictably with adoption. Busy minutes cluster in a late-morning block (≈11:10–11:30) and an early-afternoon block (≈13:50–14:20). Those are probably math blocks, and they'd be useful to know about before the full-network launch.

Grades 3–5 carry the program. K–2 are rostered but mostly idle.

About 46% of added 3rd–5th graders practiced this week, compared with 12–20% in K–2. Grades 3–5 make up 58% of added students and 72% of active ones. Whether K–2 should look different is a curriculum question (fact fluency expectations, teacher-led practice), but the gap has held steady since Sept 14.

Teachers who click are quick. Many students never get the click.

Level 24 is the end of addition and subtraction. Moving a student into multiplication and division takes a teacher's click. A direct query on Oct 8 tracked every student who has reached level 24.

The longer students wait, the more of them stop practicing. Everyone who has waited five school days or less practiced this week. For students who have waited 6–10 days, it drops to two in three, and past 10 days it's about half. Some of that drop could be whole classes pausing, but the pattern lines up with the wait.

Teachers seem to know the button exists, but it's easy to miss a student. 92 of the 163 waiting students have a teacher who has already advanced at least one classmate. Because the click is per student, a teacher would need to notice each one. Another 37 teachers, with 71 students waiting, haven't advanced anyone yet. For comparison, levels 17–21 are usually passed the same school day they're started, level 22 takes about one day and level 23 about two.

Moving students on automatically after a few school days (about 3, just past the typical click time) would cover the students who get missed. Teachers who click promptly would barely notice the change. A gentler option is to show teachers a "ready for multiplication" list.

About 7% of all practice network-wide last week happened at level 24, most of it while students waited for the click.

For context, the level-by-level view below shows how much practice students pile up at 24 compared with every other level. Levels 8–10 show a smaller version of the same heavy-practice, few-attempts pattern. Since there's no section hand-off there, it's a separate question.

A school's usage is set early. It doesn't build over time.

Each school is placed by how long ago its first students were added. Schools onboarded in late August are no more active than schools that joined last week (median 36% vs. 37%, Spearman ρ ≈ 0.1). If a school will use MathFacts, it tends to start in the first week or two. That makes the onboarding moment the place to focus, not later reminders.