Georgy Nuzhdin

I'm Georgy Nuzhdin, a teacher — nephew, grandson and great-grandson of teachers. I was born and grew up in Russia, where the Mathematical Circles movement began: a tradition built on experimentation, on problems nobody explains the answer to, where the student is the traveler, the discoverer, the owner of their own learning. Thousands of children a year still grow up with this different way of doing mathematics. It's the tradition behind mathproblems.es, a project I had the chance to lead, modeled on the well-known Russian site problems.ru. And it was another Russian project, etudes.ru — beautifully animated, carefully written — that pushed me to create MathGames.

The idea is simple: teaching doesn't work if the student isn't interacting. They need to be able to experiment, try things out, manipulate, think, and answer easy questions that gradually get harder. That's what our labs are: spaces for experimentation that a teacher can launch and steer in class, but that can just as well teach a curious student on their own.

Games, problems, experiments and interactive labs are designed so students can explore, get things wrong, try again, and end up understanding something they won't forget — because they discovered it themselves. I'm also very interested in the other side of teaching: making teachers' work easier. A good tool can save hours of preparation and, above all, make it possible to do things in class that would be very hard to put together from scratch. Plotting a single function by hand takes a long time; a lab can let you plot eight of them in twenty minutes.

A little about me: I've had the good fortune of publishing 7 books and working with wonderful colleagues from whom I've learned enormously. I teach at U-tad (the Double Degree in Mathematics and Software Engineering) and at the Miguel de Guzmán School of Mathematical Thinking, where I still get to work with brilliant students — among the biggest challenges I've faced. This project brings together everything I've learned from my colleagues and students. But it's never too late to keep improving — I'd love to hear your advice and suggestions!