A startup focused on “combining the East Asian philosophy of mastery through repetition with the curricula of all 50 states,” The Factor Tree is a supplemental and adaptive e-learning platform for children in pre-school through sixth grade.   

The Factor Tree was founded by Frank Gu, Daniel Wang, and Jiafan Lu in May 2010 and offers a way for parents to help their children truly master the fundamentals of mathematics.  According to the Factor Tree website, the service takes the best of Western and Eastern learning methods—it emphasizes the West’s method of rigorous examination as well as the East’s method of practice and repetition.

The student’s journey begins with an evaluation test. From the results of that test, Factor Tree creates a customized curriculum including problem sets of approximately 30 minutes in length to challenge the student at his or her own pace. As the student learns and progresses in the platform, the curriculum will adjust the difficulty and pace accordingly.  

A Factor Tree subscription costs $20 a month, and parents also play an important role in the process as they are able to monitor their child or children’s progress with the Parent Dashboard. Parents can also view statistics such as test scores and test history. Advanced filters allow parents to get more insight into their children’s strengths and weaknesses by topic. As the Factor Tree website suggests, the service lets parents take a more active role in their children’s learning, an invaluable thing to many students.

Factor Tree, of course, does not seek to replace classroom learning or even tutoring, but to provide another outlet for students to practice and master mathematical concepts.  Factor Tree is designed to make learning fun and applicable. In a recent blog post, the team even wrote about how math (arithmancy in the Wizarding World) was important in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. If this startup can make learning math interesting, who knows where e-learning will take us next?