Mattecentrum
Marketplace: Who else is addressing the problem outlined here? How does the proposed project differ from these approaches?
Johan
Wendt
Sweden
I grew up with a mum and dad that both are teachers, obviously I got a lot of help and attention as a kid during my upbringing. After senior high school I moved to a larger university city and during my studies there, I helped kids in the neighborhood to do their homework in mathematics – all for free. This gave me so much energy and happiness – something that could be hard to understand unless you haven’t tried it yourself.
Education is an essential ingredient in a working democracy and it should be for free, giving everybody equal opportunities to succeed in life.
I would say that I have the entrepreneurial skills since I this far has succeeded in building up an organization that at this point has 50.000 youngsters studying with us without paying for it. Also I was selected the social entrepreneur of the year in Sweden 2011.
Mattecentrum
, ST, Stockholm
, XX, All of Sweden
The information you provide here will be used to fill in any parts of your profile that have been left blank, such as interests, organization information, and website. No contact information will be made public. Please uncheck here if you do not want this to happen..
Mattecentrum offer free help in math for all children that need or wants our help in two ways.
39 times a week in 14 cities in Sweden we arrange free tutoring sessions to everyone that wants or needs our help. All students, irrespective of school, gender, age, origin or knowledge are welcome. To help them with their problems we have 220 volunteers that spends one night of their week to increase the student’s knowledge of math. The volunteers are all people with great knowledge of math and most of them have a Master of Science. The students that visit these sessions have all kinds of background and knowledge level, but all have in common that they want to increase their chances in life. We have students that come four times a week in three years’ time and you can see the change in them over time. By learning little by little by people that are not teachers, but that have an understanding of math and work with math every day the students both increase their knowledge but also increase their confidence in themselves. They experience a whole new world and realize that they can do everything they want and solve problems they never thought they could. We have students that have initially come to us saying that they hate math and which their course will finish and then after completing the course chooses to continue studying math because they have realized it can be fun. 2.200 students regularly visit our study sessions.
Every May we arrange Sweden’s largest math lesson in the middle of Stockholm the day before the national tests. We gather 300 students and 70 teachers and practice for 3 hours. As always the education is free but we also manage to provide all the students and teachers with free lunch and energy drinks. Similar events also take place in Gothenburg and Västerås.
To reach all of those that for some reason can’t come to any of our study sessions we developed the online study tool www.matteboken.se which is a math book online which covers all math that is taught between the ages of 12-19 in Sweden. The site includes theory, examples, forums and 400 video lessons that have been seen over 1.5 million times. Over 50.000 students study with Mattboken.se every month which is approximately 17% of the target group. On Matteboken.se you can also find what we call celebrity math where a lot of Swedish celebrities and government officials shows the solution to a specific math problem.
To be able to help even more children we created www.mathplanet.com which is an English version of matteboken.se and based on the American high school-courses. The site have had visitors from all over the world.
Last year we started our first tutoring session on international ground in Copenhagen, Denmark. Today we offer 4 tutoring sessions every week to Danish youth.
Operating for 1-5 years
In the four years that Mattecentrum have existed we have helped thousands of children in Sweden to increase their math knowledge. Over half a million of people have studied with us online (can be measured by Google analytics). Last year we collected written statements from students that had studied with us during the whole upper secondary school where they give witness to the change that our activities have made in their life. Every year we let the students in our study sessions take part of an evaluation where they grade both their own progress and our activities. On a scale from 1-4 we last year got an average of 3,78 on the statement “It has helped me to attend Mattecentrum’s study sessions”.
Mattecentrum is a youth organization and as such we get funding from The Swedish National Board for Youth Affairs annually based on the number of members in the organization. This funding is given each year as long as the organization exists.
The organization has an increasing impact in our society. We have since the start continued to grow and every time we expand to a new city we are keen to make sure that the local organization is viable and sustainable. We only choose cities that have a large enough population to be sure that there is always a supply of students and volonteers to make sure that the study sessions will continue over a long period of time.
By giving the youth of Sweden a meaningful after school activity where they can increase their knowledge and meet other children from different parts of the city we help make this society better. By having well educated people that offers to help out for free as volonteers the students not only get help to increase their math knowledge they also get in contact with people that are willing to do something where there is no financial gain. These encounters help to provide a better social environment in our society.
I don’t only see it as something contributing to the improvement in developing countries; I see it as a something that could take the lead in the change making process. The success with social entrepreneurship is not measured in hard cash but rather in the social impact.
I have several times traveled in third world countries, the first time it was a big shock but still my living conditions were westerns. This time as I understand it I will be living with the local people on their conditions. This will probably be challenging but hopefully also very rewarding in the sense of gaining insight in the circumstances of how people in Uganda actually live.
Still – the most rewarding will probably be working with the local people in their strive to work with their projects and applying my entrepreneurial skills on their problems.