Every student works at their own level, on a school device or the family phone. Vana explains when they are stuck, moves them on only when they have proven it, and brings back what they are about to forget.
The teacher stops picking and marking work, and spends the hour teaching.
One short session a day, in parts. Each student learns one skill at a time and moves on only after proving it, and what they have learned keeps coming back until it sticks.
Fifteen small facts against a gentle clock, until 7 + 5 and 13 − 8 come from memory, not from counting.
Working memory is small. If 13 − 8 takes five seconds of counting, nothing is left for the borrowing a child is trying to learn.
Baroody 2006 · Ashcraft & Krause 2007Sets of ten, one skill per set, with three levels of hint, a short video and Vana. A skill moves on when eight of the last ten are right, alone.
Letting a student reach mastery before moving on is one of the most consistent findings in education research. Vana follows where the student is. It does not run after the syllabus.
Bloom 1968 & 1984 · Kulik et al. 1990
Every proven skill returns for a cold check with no hints, after 1 day, then 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32.
Answering alone, days later, is what fixes a skill in memory. Mixed questions score lower during practice and much higher a week on.
Roediger & Karpicke 2006 · Rohrer & Taylor 2007
A skill that slips is retaught the same day it wobbles, not found at exam time.
Feedback works best close to the mistake and when it is followed by another try. Maths skills stack, so an error left alone becomes the floor for the next skill.
Kluger & DeNisi 1996 · Bloom 1984
Words from earlier days come back as a quick check. Does the child still know what “stand up” means?
Words met once fade fast. Meeting them again after a gap is what keeps them. It is the same rule as the maths Retain, applied to words.
Cepeda et al. 2008 · Roediger & Karpicke 2006
A few new words each day, like “stand up”. Each comes with a picture, the sound, and the Hindi meaning, so the child knows what it means, not only how it sounds.
Children understand a new English word faster when it comes with a picture and the meaning in their own language.
August & Shanahan 2006 · Paivio 1986
The child hears a sound and picks the word that starts with it: pen, book, fan or pin. Sounds come first, then whole words.
Reading needs two skills: sounding out words, and understanding what they mean. Teaching the sounds one by one is the best-proven way to build the first.
Gough & Tunmer 1986 · National Reading Panel 2000
The child puts words in order to make a sentence, like “I am Ram.” The Hindi is one tap away when they need it.
Following a sentence depends on how words fit together, not only on what each one means. Building sentences piece by piece trains exactly that.
Scarborough 2001 · August & Shanahan 2006
The child hears a short scene, like a teacher talking to a class, then taps the picture that matches. Short stories are read aloud too.
Children understand spoken English before they can read it. Listening to stories is also how they pick up many new words.
Hoover & Gough 1990 · Elley 1989English has two roads, Reading and Language. A child can be ahead on one and still catching up on the other. It follows the same rule as maths: one step at a time, and what was learned comes back. English is newer than maths, and the results below are for maths.
Vana makes learning feel more like play. Every time a child gets a question right, they earn leaves. The leaves work like money: they grow the child’s forest, bring new animals, and even a waterfall.
Vana Home is the school app for the evening and the weekend. It uses the same engine, so the child picks up exactly where school left off.
One link per child. Nothing to install and nothing to log in to. The child picks Hindi or English.
It opens with a warm-up and then a quiz of ten to fifteen minutes that finds where to start.
Quick facts, Retain and Fix, picked for that child. New skills are taught at school. English is one tap away in the menu.
Leaves earned at home count at school, and the other way round. After 25 minutes, the day is done.
In Hindi: what the child could not do at the start, what they can do now, and one question to ask at dinner.
A small pilot. One hour a day, five days a week, for six weeks. Students were picked at random and tested before and after on the same national test.
The fifth was already at the top of the test on day one. Of 15 classmates not using Vana, three moved up, eleven stayed where they were and one moved down. The odds of this gap being luck: about 1 in 130.
Ten class-4 students used Vana. Every one of the six who still had room on the test moved up a rung.
I have been teaching borrowing in subtraction for months, and this is the first time I see the children grasp it.
I have seen students go from drawing sticks to count, to counting in their minds.
Madhav is a Y Combinator and McKinsey alum who built and deployed AI-powered maths tools in the US. He moved to India to work on foundational learning, partners with non-profits and schools, and teaches in a classroom every day.
If you work in this space, write to madhav.mohan1227@gmail.com