ATU737 – Modmath with Kate Birmingham

Hi, this is Kate Birmingham and I am the head of partnerships at ModMath and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 737 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on July 11th, 2025. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome Kate Birmingham from ModMath on to tell us all about how this tool can help individuals with math equations and other math needs. We also welcome back BridgingApps to the show with an app worth mentioning. We also want to reach out to you, listeners. We always enjoy getting your feedback. You can give us a call on our listener line at (317) 721-7124 or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. If you’ve got an idea for someone, we should have on the show, a question about something from one of our shows, a question about assistive technology, a comment or suggestion for something that we could do better.

We are always here to listen and love to get your feedback. So don’t forget, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. We look forward to hearing from you. We thank you for listening today. Now let’s go ahead and get on with the show. Next up on the show, listeners, please join me in welcoming back BridgingApps with an app worth mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps, and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Trello: organize anything! Trello is a great resource if you’re looking for an app that helps you organize projects, whether in a team or solo. This app is a collaboration tool that helps you organize your to-do’s, projects and other lists onto cards and boards. This tool helps the user see what projects are in progress, who is working on what, and how far along each project is. New features include document scanning, ability to toggle between multiple accounts and dark mode. The users who trialed this app were a team of teachers who were working on a professional development unit during the school year. Users commented that it was helpful to have a collaboration tool which they could use on the go on mobile devices and that they felt it helped them to stay accountable and up to date on next steps and to be aware of priorities.

Trello is also a good tool for students, especially when working on group projects, to help them with timelines and organization of task. For students who need and thrive on structure and knowing timelines, Trello is a great tool to add to your organization resource library. Trello is currently available for both Android and iOS devices and is free to download for more information on this app and others like it. Visit bridgingapps.org

Listeners today, we are super excited to welcome Kate Birmingham, head of partnerships for ModMath, to the show to tell us all about how their program can assist individuals, with different disabilities, access, learn and excel in their math studies. Kate, welcome to the show.

Hi. Hi Josh. I’m excited to be here.

I am excited to learn more about ModMath and how it can help folks. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so I’d love to. So I have a teaching background. I’ve worked in different types of classrooms including special education classrooms, and I’ve done a fair amount of, what I like to call, bureaucracy busting. So supporting children in getting the services that they need and deserve, and that means working through committees and the state, in my case, the state of New York, to ensure that those services were accurately and correctly given. So yes, I’m now a part of the ModMath team and very excited to be here with my educational background, just bringing my perspective to the table.

Awesome. And I’m sure that’s a great perspective, just being able to advocate for the students, knowing how it affects the teachers and everybody, so I’m sure it’s a great perspective for them. So I guess we’ll start with the big picture. What is ModMath?

Great question. So ModMath is an assistive technology application. It is available across different types of platforms, and I can get more into that later. But at its core, it’s an assistive tech app that serves the needs of many different types of children, including those that have dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyspraxia and dyscalculia. And it supports them by providing a digital interface or digital graph paper that allows them easy input methods for mathematical equations. Our mission at ModMath is to provide assistive technology so that everyone, regardless of their learning needs, can write math equations.

Nice. And you said it’s kind of a digital graph paper, not to completely oversimplify it, but just how does that help me with my math studies to get everything in there?

And No, it is a good oversimplification because that’s really what it is at its core. So for anybody who’s familiar with graph paper and how it can be helpful, it’s not to oversimplify this, but graph paper is helpful because it provides parameters and limits. So one of the biggest barriers for children and not just children that have diagnosed disabilities, this is just a child that has, for example, illegible handwriting, is the fact that when you write math, it’s really hard to space and write those numbers correctly. And it’s incredibly difficult when you start adding things line by line because if your lines are not added up correctly, if I’m adding 15 plus 72 and they’re on two different lines and those lines are not adding up correctly, you’re not going to get to the right answer. If you can’t write the equation, you can’t solve the equation, our motto.

So graph paper helps by creating those limits, those parameters so that you’re coloring within the lines, so to speak, with the numbers that you’re inputting and you’re staying organized. And the digital interface obviously means that you’re able to do this with just touching a keypad.

Nice. And what kinds of math can it assist with?

So all sorts of different types of mathematics. I would say at its core we are probably most suited for children in younger grades. And that’s because children in younger grades, let’s say grades two through six, I’m being general here, but that’s where you’re really learning basics of numeracy and algebraic thinking. And when you start getting into things like calculus, trigonometry, geometry, we do support those different types of mathematics and we have those symbols on our keypads. I would say our ability to support geometry is a little bit limited right now, but it’s on our roadmap. But we find that the majority of users that we have tend to be in the younger grades because they’re leveraging those algebraic expressions when they’re using the digital interface.

Oh, for sure. And like you said, once you build those fundamentals, the rest of it, I don’t want to say easier, I still remember calculus class and how terrible it was. But once you can build those, at least gives you some confidence and some skills to be able to function in those other higher level maths.

Absolutely, absolutely. And having said all of this, we have users that are adults that are still leveraging this technology and using it, so it is really suitable for everybody. But yeah, I would say best suited for algebra.

Awesome. And I guess I’m jumping around a little bit here, but can you tell me why was ModMath started?

Yes, it’s a really good story and it predates my involvement with ModMath. ModMath was created by the two co-founders of ModMath. So Jonathan Rose and Dawn Denberg, they co-created ModMath because Dawn’s son… And if you look at our website, we have the story on there. It’s a beautiful story. Her son has dysgraphia and dyslexia and she was really looking for a tool that she could leverage to use because she was scribing his math homework at night and it was a very onerous and tedious process and she was looking for something that would help him build independence so that he could do it himself. And so Jonathan is a technologist, he was an app builder and he was like, “I could probably build this for you.” So they created the first version of ModMath specifically for this one child.

And because of the fact that it seemed to work as well as it did, the idea dawned on them, “What if we just made this? What if we threw it up on the app store and made this available to the public?” Keep in mind there was no marketing strategy, there was no advertising, there was no, there was nothing. There was a really basic website, a really basic Facebook page. It was put up on the app store. And long story short, it has since been downloaded over a million times with no marketing strategy in place. So clearly there is a need for it, people are desperate to find it, and that’s the origin story of ModMath and why we decided to keep it going.

We talked a little bit beforehand, but math always seems to be a challenge for so many folks, so I’m sure that when folks just looked up assistance for math, being able to see something and find something probably absolutely made their day and really just probably life-changing for a lot of folks. You mentioned that ModMath works on different kinds of systems, what devices or operating systems support ModMath?

Yeah. So we’re very pleased to announce that it is a much larger number of systems than it used to be available on. It used to only be available on iPads. It is now available on Chromebooks, Android tablets, MacBooks, iPads, and I think that’s it.

Nice.

Yep. That’s it for now. So the one that is really missing, just so that it’s clear which is not covered is we don’t have a web version of the application yet. It’s definitely on the roadmap and we’re aware of the fact that a lot of schools that use Chromebooks, particularly overseas, they need that web version, but for right now it is not available. So you can get it by downloading it either through the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store. Those are the two places. Sorry for the lengthy explanation here, but schools obviously have very particular needs around managed devices because they’re centrally managing devices and pushing them out. So it is available through the private app distribution for Apple App Stores and Google Play in what we call the enterprise version of the application. So it’s specifically for schools.

Nice. I’m glad you thought of that to have it available. When you mentioned all those, I was like, “Well, I guess it is good to have them.” And I didn’t realize that Chromebooks, especially overseas, needed that web version, but at least you got it available to where most students should be able to hopefully assist them, either on their school devices or maybe on one at home to be able to help them out with what the family maybe already has.

So one thing I forgot to mention that we do get asked a lot is whether or not ModMath will work on phones. A lot of people are accessing the app stores, either Google Play or Apple App Store on their phone and they’re looking for ModMath and they reach out and they say, “Hey, I can’t find it.” That is normal. It is not available on your phone. So even though we are in the app stores, it’s only going to work on tablets. So again, that’s iPads, Android tablets, Chromebooks, and it does work on MacBooks because there’s a compatibility with MacBooks and iPads. I won’t go into the technical details there. But the reason we do not support phones is not because we want to not support phones, it’s because of the fact that the ratio size is not going to work.

So inherently for children, we believe that there needs to be a certain amount of screen real estate in order to get those numbers into the graph. So it would just make it incredibly difficult for entry into a graph paper that fits onto the size of your screen. So, just wanted to make that clear.

That’s awesome. And you mentioned that you’ve expanded and been able to get on some newer operating system. Is there anything else new with ModMath?

Yes, there’s a couple of new fun features. I will say that, fundamentally, the application feels very similar in its simplicity. Again, not to oversimplify things, but it is sort of a theme of this podcast today, but I think the beauty of ModMath is that it is relatively simple. It’s a clean interface, there’s not a lot of bells and whistles, but having said that, we did make some changes. We expanded the keypads, so we now have keypads that expand the range of mathematics that it can support. To your question earlier around mathematical subject areas, so trig is now supported, calculus, some geometry, et cetera. So that’s an expansion. We also have what we call the index tool. You might be thinking, “What on earth does that mean?” But it’s a tool that gives you the ability to work within what I call the sub-cells of the cell.

So if you picture graph paper, when you use ModMath, you type numbers and they appear within the graph grids, but there’s a need to type within those grids as well. So picture where you put a decimal point, or where you put an exponent, or when you’re crossing out a number and then you’re replacing it with another number, that has to go somewhere. So there is a series of tools that allow you to place your exponents, your decimals, in the place that you wanted. Now that is not entirely new functionality. Some of that existed in the previous version, you’ve always been able to include exponents, but in the last version, for example, for negative numbers or decimal points, they took up the whole cell, which is really clunky and awkward. If I write 5.0, I don’t want the decimal point to take up an entire cell by itself.

It’s going to look really weird. So we’ve fixed that and it now sits and hugs very closely to the five, or wherever you want it to, you can play around with it. So yeah, I would say that’s some of the biggest functionality updates. Our notes are also new updates, so we now have a note function that actually functions correctly, you can print those notes. That was a big issue with the last version, and we have the ability to highlight and lots of other small things like that. I won’t go into too much more detail, but I think those are the biggest highlights.

The big ones, yeah. And I know you said that oversimplification is the theme, but whenever it comes to math, oversimplification sounds like the goal too, just trying to make it as easy as we can or easy to grasp and get those concepts and everything. So I think that’s a good theme to definitely keep. Okay. You probably have quite a few of these, but could you tell us a story about someone’s experience using ModMath?

Yes. There’s been so many beautiful stories, but I would say when we were conducting our Zoom interviews, we conduct interviews from time to time to make sure that the product development and the roadmap, if anybody’s familiar with how products get developed or how they should be, part of that is having good user feedback. So it’s important for us to talk to users. One of the Zoom interviews that we were on with a teacher, we heard a really amazing story. There was a child, he sits in a general education classroom, but he’s part of… Well, it’s an ICT classroom that has a mix of both ICT and general education students as it is mandated to be. So he’s in this mixed class and this particular child has dyslexia and dysgraphia and some other difficulties with motor skills, maybe also some attention difficulties as well, if I’m remembering correctly.

And he was really struggling to be able to complete any type of math assignment on paper, as well as in the Google Sheets that had been given to him. So digitally, the structure wasn’t there with the digital interface that he had been given. So this teacher found ModMath through some miracle. She did a really deep dive into Google and found ModMath, which was not easy at the time, years ago, got it onto an iPad, gave it to the child, and he was able to complete the assignment completely independently and also at such a rapid speed. People don’t talk about this a lot, but also it’s the speed component that is really, really helpful, because children want to feel like they’re included and that they’re doing things alongside their peers. So this child was able to complete the assignment in the class while still sitting next to his peers, just on his own device.

And not only was he thrilled about it, but all the other kids in the class were like, “I want to use an, that thing looks so cool.” So instead of it being this sort of stigma of, “Why does he get an iPad and I don’t.” It actually sparked a lot of interest among the other kids and it was seen as really special. And so he had a great experience, the other kids were talking about it, and the teacher and parent both told me that it was the first time that they felt that he was able to independently participate, which is just leading him to feel more confident. So I just thought it was a great story and I love this idea of a child sitting with the rest of the children, but just with his own tool.

And especially like you said, a tool that’s not foreign, I guess, to everyone else. You know what I mean? It’s a tool that they kind of understand in a lot of classes, a tool that they’re using as well. I mean as far as the device and everything else, and then just using a tool on there that’s maybe a little bit different and that maybe could even benefit some of those other students too. And I love it, you brought it up a few times, the independence part. The being able to do it without a scribe, without having to have that kind of assistance, just because, not just building confidence, but also, I mean, that’s kind of the goal of all assistive technology, is to be able to do things independently without needing other folks’ assistance as much for those kind of things. So, awesome story. Kate, if our listeners want to find out more about ModMath, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Well, we have a nice new website that I hope is quite informative. So if you go to www.modmath.com, you can see not only links to download ModMath, but also testimonials, information about what ModMath is, what it isn’t, also very important. Yeah, that’s probably the best source. The other thing to note is within our website, because I’m a former teacher, not to nerd out here, but I feel very strongly about the need for tutorials and really clear help desk documentation. There’s nothing worse than using something and then you run into a problem and you don’t know what to do. So we do have a very extensive help desk center. If you click on the help section of ModMath, you will see many, many video tutorials. Every written tutorial has an accompanying video tutorial about all the features, what’s new, what’s changed, how do I download, I have an issue, what do I do, and you can also submit a ticket there. So we would love to hear from any user that is having difficulty or has any feedback, we’d love to hear from you. Check out our help desk center.

Awesome. Kate, you brought up a good point there. We’ve talked so much today about what ModMath is, what isn’t ModMath?

So it’s not a calculator, and I think this is a really important distinction. I mean, maybe that’s obvious, but you’d be surprised. I do get some questions about it. So sometimes people, when I tell them what ModMath is, they’re like, “That’s it? You just write the problem, it’s not doing anything? It’s not calculating?” No, it’s not calculating on purpose. So the idea is that it is a one-for-one replacement to whatever else, to pen and paper, or to the Google Doc where your teacher has assigned you to. So the idea is it’s not assisting you in actually solving the equation, it’s removing the barriers so that you, yourself, are able to build those numeracy skills. So it’s not going to do that work for you, on purpose. And we’ve been asked, “Is there any plans for us to eventually add that in?” And the answer is probably not.

I mean, we do have plans to add in other types of assistance. We’re very interested in the world of speech-to-text because that’s another barrier to entry. What if I can’t use the touchpad? How am I supposed to put my equations in there? But even with, and sorry to go on a tangent here, but even if we had speech-to-text, a lot of people ask, “Well, what about things like there’s the tool, Equatio. Equatio already has speech-to-text technology.” Yes, it does, but it’s going to solve the equation for you. And more importantly, it’s not facilitating mathematical notation. So it’s not supporting the step-by-step-by-step learning that builds numeracy. And that’s what ModMath is specifically designed to do, is to support children in step-by-step-by-step. Here, I’m crossing this out, I’m lining this up. So there are other tools that will notate math for you, but that’s not the goal that they have in mind. So we believe what we’re doing is filling a very specific need in the simplest way possible.

Most definitely. And thank you so much for making that distinction, because yeah, I think some people think, “Oh, it’s going to solve it for me.” Or even from the other side, they think, “Oh, I can’t let the student use it because it’s going to solve it for them.”

Right.

And I think it’s to make that, and I can tell you from somebody who can just remember how many countless times I probably got something wrong on a math problem because I didn’t line stuff up right. And I’m sitting here thinking of that as I am listening to you, I’m like, “How many times did I carry the one correctly, but I put that darn one in the 10th place.” Or something else as I was trying to write out and rush through things and thinking how helpful that can be, especially to the folks that you mentioned and with the different needs. But yeah, thank you for clarifying that because I’d hate for somebody to start using it and be like, “Well, it’s not solving it for me.”

That’s not the point. That’s definitely not the point. I’m sure, as someone that comes from education, it’s probably much easier for you to get on board with a tool that helps folks be able to, like you said, learn, master those numeracy skills without being spoon-fed answers, I guess is kind of a win. So I like that. I like that a lot. So thank you so much for clearing that up.

Yeah, so I would add to that that I think there’s also a tendency in education for us feeling like we have to solve for all challenges at the same time. I use and like a lot of assistive technology and educational technology, and there’s definitely a lot of room for over-engineering and trying to accomplish a lot of things with one tool. So we are very consciously trying not to introduce too much into this product, we want to keep it clean and simple, and maybe if we have more technology in the future, maybe it’ll come out as a separate product so that we’re not diluting the simplicity.

Yeah, I don’t know how many times, and especially depending on the individual, the disability, the needs, the other things, where some tools, it’s like, “Yeah, this is great. It does this, this, this, and this.” And as you talk about, it’s like this is going to be an even larger barrier than maybe not having the tool at all because there’s just too much. Like you said, if you can keep it simple to where it accomplishes that need, then it’s a little bit easier for folks to be able to use to focus on, and hopefully to learn, which has been the goal all along. Well, Kate, thank you so much for coming on today for telling us about ModMath, the story of ModMath, what it can and can’t do, and how it can really help folks with a lot of different needs, really be able to be much more successful in math. So thank you so much.

Of course. Thank you so much for having me. This was lovely.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on assistive technology update? If so, call our listener line at (317) 721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter at INDATA Project. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or InTRAC. You can find out more about InTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted, and fought over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your assistive technology update. I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.