About Math Anon

Math Anon is AI math tutoring for kids, kindergarten through 12th grade. I’m Jon Sterling. I built it in Vero Beach, Florida, and my four year old was the first person to use it.

Why I built it

She’s ahead of where she’s supposed to be. That sounds like a good problem to have, and it is, but it comes with a real one. A classroom moves at the pace of the room, and a kid who is ahead spends a lot of the year waiting. I wanted to give her a head start on what was coming next instead of hoping the timing worked itself out.

We tried flash cards. Then I looked at what the tutoring centers here in town charge, which is $300 to $400 a month for two sessions a week, in a group, on a schedule that isn’t mine.

So I built her a tutor. It works out where a kid actually is and teaches from that point. The same thing that lets it run ahead of a four year old is what lets it drop back three grades for a ninth grader who never really got fractions.

Then I gave it to a dozen friends to test, mostly hoping they would tell me what was broken. All but one asked to keep using it with their own kids. That is when this stopped being something I made for my daughter.

Math at the dinner table

My mother writes math books. Her titles are in the For Dummies and CliffsNotes series. My father spent decades as a financial advisor. Neither of them reached for a calculator in front of me. We ran the numbers out loud so somebody could catch a mistake, and I still work that way.

Sophomore year geometry

That habit got me in trouble. I was doing the arithmetic in my head and writing down answers, and for a while my geometry teacher was convinced I was cheating. The answers kept coming out right, which did nothing for my case. I learned to write out the steps the way the school wanted them, after the fact, so someone could check a calculation I had already finished.

I think about that whenever somebody asks how this is different from a homework app. Math Anon will not hand a kid the answer. It asks the question underneath the question, the way somebody at my dinner table would have.

What the research says

Tutoring works, and it is not close. One adult, one child, one gap at a time, and forty years of studies keep landing on the same finding. What never worked was the price.

In December 2025 El Salvador handed an AI tutor to more than a million public school students. By June 2026, students in the pilot schools sat the OECD’s PISA for Schools assessment and scored in line with Germany and Sweden. The approach works at national scale. Math Anon brings it to one kitchen table at a time.

We’re based in Vero Beach, Florida.