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OAKLAND - Bill Hadley had been teaching math to students in the Pittsburgh public school system for more than 20 years when he began creating his own curriculum out of frustration.
I thought I knew math," he said. "But a lot of my kids weren't learning. SO I said, 'Maybe it's me."'
In 1990, he began preparing math problems that teens might want to solve using real-world situations to unravel equations.
Then the stars aligned.
Carnegie Mellon University professor of cognitive psychology and computer science John Anderson approached Pittsburgh Public Schools math specialist Diane Briars with an idea he had worked on for 15 years. His research had created a computer program that identified how students learn and tailored the lessons specifically to the way each student understands and solves problems. Ms. Briars connected the men.
Enter Bob Longo. A former teacher himself, he had...