When my daughter was in 2nd grade, I signed her up for math contests as a last resort to spark her interest in learning math. It was a success - being surrounded by smart kids who earned medals for their hard work made her perceive being good at math as "cool." I started hosting math contests at my workplace for colleagues' kids, and my daughter eagerly participated in dozens of these through elementary and middle school, continuing to this day.

The hard part was helping her prepare. One-off sessions wouldn't work - I needed a long-term system. I had to source problems and solutions from past contests, track what we'd covered and what was left, ensure she solved problems systematically each week, answer questions, provide hints when stuck, and explain solutions in a way she could understand. It was very rewarding to witness her progress, but also demanding as it required discipline from us both. It was a huge help that my wife, who is a former math tutor, supported and helped me on this journey.

So, when the opportunity (aka tech layoffs) arose, instead of looking for a new 9-5 job, my wife and I decided to build MathClub, a place where kids prepare for and participate in math contests. So far, we have created weekly exercises for grades 2-8: https://mathclub.ai/math-exercises. The exercises feature authentic math problems from past contests and an AI assistant that checks students' answers for correctness, answers their questions, and provides hints if they are stuck. For younger kids, we have the problem statements and solutions narrated, and a speech recognition feature, so instead of typing their answers or questions, they can just click a button and say it out loud. Essentially, we have automated the way my daughter and I have been practicing math olympiads for the last several years.

Our goal is to expand exercises across K-12, get more customers, and try offering our exercises to schools and private tutors to enrich their teaching process. If you have any advice on that, I'm always up for a chat. And if you have kids, please have them try our free sample exercises. We'd really appreciate getting thoughts from the whole family.

Update: Here's a quick screen recording to give you a glance at the UI: https://youtu.be/Q0ZM7JX6I7g