ABOUT
A tutoring centre in Markham, now built into software.
Martian Lab came out of Elements of Knowledge, a tutoring centre that's been working through Grade 11 and 12 math with York Region students since 2005. Same people, same material, now built into software.
Twenty years in the room with students
Elements of Knowledge has been a one-on-one tutor for York Region students since 2005, teaching kids from Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Bayview, St. Augustine, St. Robert, Markville, Unionville, Upper Canada College, and Richmond Hill H.S. Two decades of the same pattern: a student sits down not understanding something, and by the end of the session, they do, because someone explained it in a way that actually made sense to them, and didn't move on until it did.
Martian Lab is that same teaching, built into software every student can access, not just the ones who can get a seat on a Sunday afternoon. Every lesson carries what twenty years of real students taught us about how a concept actually clicks, and it's paced so nobody gets left behind.
Elements of Knowledge opens in Markham. The first “ohh, THAT'S what it means” happens within the week.
Martian Lab prototype: one course, twelve students, twenty years of explanations rebuilt as interactive lessons.
Three courses live: MCR3U, MHF4U, MCV4U.
Grade 12 IB Math (AA & AI), in the lab now. waitlist open
FROM THE FOUNDERS
We built the thing we kept doing by hand.
The three of us met studying mathematics at the University of Waterloo. Between us we have spent years on the other side of the table at Elements of Knowledge, working through the same Grade 11 and 12 material with students across York Region.
The pattern never changed. A student arrives a week before a unit test, convinced they are bad at math. They are not. Somewhere in September a single idea did not land, the class moved on, and everything built on top of it has been guesswork since. Forty minutes of going back to that one idea usually fixes what a year of extra homework could not.
That does not scale, which bothered us. A tutor can sit with one student at a time, costs $50 to $80 an hour, and is gone the other six days of the week. Meanwhile the thing that actually made the difference, going back to the exact step where it broke and explaining it a different way, is something software can do at two in the morning the night before a test.
So we started with what we already had that nobody else does: two decades of real tests from real Ontario classrooms, and the explanations that have worked on real students. Everything on Martian Lab starts there. Not scraped from a textbook, not invented by a model, but the material we have been teaching from all along.
We are not trying to replace your teacher or your tutor. We are trying to make sure that when a student is stuck at 11pm and nobody is awake to ask, the answer is still there, and it still explains itself properly.
— Sofina, Qiuyi and Jeff, cofounders of Martian Lab