September 2026 Education & Child Care Grant Awarded to CalcMindset Innovations

We’re excited to announce the September $15,000 Business-Category: Education & Child Care. Congratulations to Dr. Kathryn Pedings-Behling and Dr. Amy Langville, founder of CalcMindset Innovations.

Recently, WomensNet Advisory Board member Marcia Layton Turner sat down with Kathryn and Amy for an exclusive interview. You can listen to their conversation and view the transcript below.

Video Transcript

Marcia: Welcome to a chat with our Business-Specific grant winners for September 2026: Amy Langville and Kathryn Pedings-Behling of CalcMindset Innovations. Our business-specific category for September was education.

I’m Marcia Layton Turner, and I’m one member of our amazing WomensNet advisory board. And every other month, I have the great pleasure of chatting with our winners and always learning something new from them. So, thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it.

Marcia: So, could you tell everyone a little bit about your company? What do you sell? What do you offer? Where did the idea come from? And how are things going?

Amy: So, CalcMindset Innovations came from the fact that Kathryn and I are educators. We’ve been teaching for over 20 years, and we teach calculus every semester. And we saw how that could ruin some people’s dreams. Half a million students take calculus at a high school level, over a million in college. And so we started putting all the best practices for math ed into our class materials, and we decided to make something called the “Deconstruct Calculus Journals” that was, kind of, like, the breakfast journal meant to be…it’s, kind of, like, the anti-textbook. It’s meant to be very readable. It’s written for the student, not the instructor. Students actually interact with it and manipulate it and visualize things. And we saw that this revived students’ dreams that they might have abandoned. Some students decided to transfer and start studying engineering because they had given up on it and thought they couldn’t do it. And now they realized, “Hey, I actually can do it.” And we saw those students seemed to have a very narrow view of what math is, and so we tried to broaden that. And I’ll let Kathryn talk a little bit about one little project, CalcuComix.

Kathryn: We were lucky to receive some interest in our CalcuComix graphic novel project. And so our goal, if you ask students “What is math?”, they have a very narrow vision of what that is. And our goal is to really broaden that, for a way for, sort of, math being formula and rules and sort of its own solitary thing to something more broad, right? Math is collaborative. Math is applied. Math is logical. All of these different things. So, our graphic novel CalcuComix came out this year as well, trying to show students just what different facets of math that there are.

Marcia: Amazing. Yeah, I remember my calc days, and they were not happy times.

Kathryn: Yes. That same story exists for many students.

Marcia: So, were there any resources that you found especially helpful as you were starting up, a book, a program, a consultant, an agency? Was there anything that you found helpful that you might recommend to people in the WomensNet community that are looking for some help?

Kathryn: Sure. So, our short answer to this is women. Amy and I, over 20 years ago, met each other in an academic setting and realized that we were effectively intellectual soulmates. And so we have figured out how to use each other’s strengths and how to split up things in a way that we each become experts on things that we can then teach the other. Our knowledge together is significantly greater than our knowledge alone.

Additionally, in academia, we have found it very important to support the next generation of women who may be interested in educational research and different ways to teach in a math classroom that people don’t tend to like to talk about. And so we have had multiple women come through our program and our company to work with us so that we can help them see that there are other ways to approach math and math education that they’ve never seen before.

Finally, two others that I’ll just briefly mention are Jo Boaler and Cathy Williams, who work at youcubed coming out of Stanford, are sort of superstars of the math ed world, and they are always willing to mentor us. And we have been very lucky to find a female-owned printer called Vervante. We have some weird things that we like to do printing with our textbooks because they’re unconventional, and she has never told us no. She has always said, “Well, figure it out.” So, at the end of the day, the answer to that is we have just surrounded ourselves by women who don’t take no for an answer, and they get it done. They know how to get it done.

Marcia: Excellent. So, now let’s talk about marketing. What’s been the best marketing strategy that you’ve used or maybe you plan to use in the future to spread the word about your company?

Amy: Sure, I’ll start with this one. So, we have some allies. Kathryn mentioned a few of them, so we put it out to folks that are prominent math educators that are fans of the work. We’ve also tried some social media. We’re navigating that, learning how to maybe get a little more targeted. We’ve gone to conferences that are for folks that are interested in math ed, like we did MathFest this year for the Mathematical Association of America. And in the future though, we plan, and this is a big part of the Amber Grant for us, is to take those funds and use them for this marketing. So, we’re learning a lot and just listening here, learning quite a bit.

But I think we’ll [create] some free content. There’s a site called Teachers Pay Teachers, but we’ll probably put something as next-to-free, teachers that are looking for innovative materials for the classroom. And then we’ll also probably have some ads that are targeted. And then we have some other ideas that are a little more creative, like again, people tend to think math is solitary and it’s done with speed, and that means you’re a good student if you can solve that problem quickly. But a lot of the problems in our book, we call our “challenge problems,” they’re like an “un-contest.” They’re the opposite of a contest. We don’t want you to do them fast, and we want to see how many different ways you can do a problem. There’s not one correct solution and one pathway to get there. There’s often many pathways, and so we might try some “un-contest” challenges and put it out and market it that way.

Marcia: So, last question: What’s one thing that the WomensNet community can do to show support for your business? Maybe that’s subscribing to a newsletter, writing a review, something else, but what’s one thing that you all would like to see?

Kathryn: First, we just want to say thank you. We have been very lucky in our path that when we get to points where we say, “We just can’t do this anymore. This is too much,” we have something come in like WomensNet, and we say, “We’re doing the right stuff. This is the right path. We’re on the right track.” We keep going. It gives us the motivation to continue moving forward. And I’ll throw that over to Amy to finish up the last piece of that.

Amy: Yeah. So, thank you. Again, thank you for this opportunity, and we would love if the WomensNet community would write reviews of these books. We’re deconstructcalc.com. CalcuComix is a graphic novel. It makes a great stocking stuffer, so I think reviews would help. And if you know any STEM folks, whether you’ve got a niece or nephew taking a class, or you have a brother that’s a STEM educator, point them our way. We love talking about education and STEM education.

Marcia: Thank you both for being here, sharing your stories, sharing your recommendations, and congratulations again on being our September Business-Specific grant winners.