About Slatedrop

Hi, I'm Ken. I teach maths, and I built Slatedrop.

For years I taught online with whiteboard tools that fought me the whole way — laggy, imprecise, a pain to draw a clean set of axes on, never quite letting a lesson feel natural. And every clunky little interaction is a tiny crack in a student's attention. When you're trying to hold a teenager's focus through a hard bit of algebra at 7pm, those cracks add up. So I started building the whiteboard I actually wanted to teach on.

The way I teach shaped every part of it. I believe students learn maths by doing — working through real examples and problems, thinking it out for themselves — not by watching someone else's hand move. So Slatedrop is built to make that fast and fluid: write, sketch, drop in a graph, hand the pen to the student, and get out of the way of the actual thinking. I wanted it to feel less like software and more like sitting beside someone with a good pen and an endless sheet of paper.

It began as a tool for my own lessons. It's now used by tutors and teachers in a handful of countries — from Europe to Australia — which still quietly amazes me. And because I'm still in front of students every week, it keeps getting better in the small, real ways that only show up when you actually use a tool in a live lesson.