“…The curriculum advantage should not be as much of an advantage as it is because reading and math are both basically solved problems.” Niels Hoven · The Tim Ferriss Show

Short version of how it came to be. Mentava started during the pandemic. At the time, my wife and I, we had three little kids. We both have full-time jobs. We're locked down in this 600 square foot one bedroom apartment. My kids want to learn. Like they're young kids. They're these little sponges. They want to learn to read. They want to do math. But I have a full-time job. I don't have time to teach them and be their teacher every step of the way. What I really want is I want them to be able to teach themselves, which aside from just being practical in that situation, is just this life skill that I feel is really, really important. So I started looking around for software or apps that could support my kids as they're learning. And there just wasn't very much out there. I found a couple of things that were okay and we made it work. And it was honestly surprising how well they were able to learn despite using software that really wasn't designed for having kids teach themselves. And so other parents noticed what I was doing. They asked me questions about it. I pointed them to the same software. And some of them had some success and some of them didn't. And really what I realized as all of this was going on was that the problem was in the design of the software. No one is designing software for three and four-year-olds to be learning on their own. It's not that it's impossible. It's just that it's really, really hard. But my background is in games. I spent a long time designing games and designing tutorials. And it's just design problems all the way down. And I felt like this is a problem that I could solve that I wanted to solve for myself that I wanted to solve for other people. And that's where Mentava came from.

And what's the magic sauce? Why does it work? Why is it better than the 12 other things that I've seen you rate from a scale of, I think, one to 10 in different ways and giving your reasons?

And this is on an iPad, typically a tablet.

Yeah, on an iPad. You know, just as an anecdote is where the bar is hanging in terms of low-hanging design. In one of the apps that I was using before we built Mentava to have my kids learn, if you have a two-year-old, if you have a three-year-old and they're using an iPad, they kind of brace it on their belly and they hold it there while they're tapping away at it. And a very common situation that happens is their little tubby toddler belly hangs over the edge of the iPad and you get all these extraneous touches at the bottom of the iPad. And in one of the apps that we were using, every time. That happened, the app would crash. It was just a tap there. And so you have this two-year-old constantly crashing the app. And so we take into account all these little things where you have a kid who doesn't know how to read and trying to use these educational apps. The other piece that we really bring to the table is motivation. I think there's a lot of people who really don't understand how sophisticated motivation design is. But if you look at video games, if you walk into a casino and you walk through the slot machine aisles, human motivation is kind of a solved problem. We know how to get people to do the things that we want them to do over and over. And it kind of, I'm not sure exactly how to say that.

You mean like variable reward, or how does the slot machine example map to motivation design? The