About Us
My name is David Sterling, and I am a software developer at Microsoft. My son, Gavin, has inherited my passion for programming, and SterlingWare was started as a means for me to teach him about software development.
After giving Gavin a steady diet of programming books and small projects, I decided that we needed to take the next step and build a commercial application together, complete with testing, user’s manual, installer, etc…. As a result, Sterling Math Facts was born. One of the goals of SterlingWare is to help Gavin see the inefficiencies in life and how they can be simplified and improved on by software. After identifying such inefficiencies, he can then turn such opportunities into streams of revenue.
So why a flash card program? Good question – there are certainly a bunch of them out there. As a family, we utilize the Robinson Homeschool Curriculum and I appreciate Dr. Robinson's thoughts on learning math facts. While the principles behind addition, subtraction, multiplication and division certainly need to be understood, the process of memorizing related tables of information is artificial. In the real world, you don’t encounter a math problem that is made up of a bunch of multiplication facts from the same fact family. You will encounter a mix of operations. Such facts need to be memorized independently from one another, as that is how you will encounter them in the wild.
There were a few features that I felt really needed to be in a math flash card program that would work for my family.
- Easy enough for a user to run without parental intervention.
- Able to track multiple users.
- Both horizontal and vertical orientations as you will encounter both in the wild.
- Ensure that the student covered ALL of the math facts, even when spread out over multiple sessions and multiple days.
- Reinforce missed problems
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By immediately showing them the correct answer and requiring them to type it it
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By adding missed problems to the end of the session list so they would encounter that same problem again in the current session.
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By adding text-to-speech which will read out the problem and the correct answer for additional enforcement of the concept.
- Timeout mechanism so that my children would not rely on finger counting.
- Provide parents with a *quick* way to determine if the children had complete their daily work.
- Provide both daily reporting as well as long term trends/progress.
- Ability to generate sets based on those problems a student is struggling with.
Building Sterling Math Facts has been a profitable experience for Gavin and we are excited to begin work on our next project which we hope to unveil here in a few months. We hope that our efforts here will be beneficial to you and your family. Let us know if you have any questions or comments.
David and Gavin Sterling