On June 1, 2025, in Miami, at the Hilton Aventura Florida, certified mental arithmetic trainer and Master of Education Natella Horodetska was named among the winners of the international American Business Expo Award 2025. She won in the nomination “Breakthrough of the Year” in the Inclusive & Special Education category. This victory became an international recognition of her original project dedicated to mental arithmetic as a tool for children’s intellectual development, including those with special educational needs.
The American Business Expo Award positions itself as a prestigious international competition aimed at identifying innovative ideas with a high level of novelty and significant impact, cutting-edge technologies, and socially meaningful projects in the global business landscape. In 2025, the award became a platform where projects from representatives of various professional fields and different countries were evaluated not only in terms of innovation, but also in terms of their practical value, social impact, and potential for further scaling.
It is also worth noting that the organizer of the award is the American Business Carnival—a strategic alliance of an IT company, a business networking platform, and international experts working in the field of conferences and professional communications since 2012. The technical partner of the award is Neuron Expert Corporation. Such a composition of organizers enables the event to be strictly focused on identifying innovations that genuinely impact industry development.
The significance of Natella Horodetska’s victory is further reinforced by the nature of the selection process. Participation in the American Business Expo Award is open to startups, entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and nonprofit organizations from around the world. The procedure includes a multi-stage application screening and public project defense.
Notably, in 2025 only a limited number of leaders in their respective niches became winners, including categories such as mental health, consumer goods, beauty, and wellness. Against this background, winning in the Inclusive & Special Education category demonstrates the high selectivity of the award and the strong competitive environment.
Traditionally, all projects submitted to the American Business Expo Award are evaluated based on five parameters: innovation and originality, impact and measurable results, industry relevance, scalability, and quality of execution.
It was precisely according to these criteria that Natella Horodetska’s project received high recognition from the expert jury. Her methodology was acknowledged as unique due to the integration of traditional abacus techniques with modern neuro-pedagogical principles.
According to the professional community, this approach allows mental arithmetic to move beyond being perceived merely as a technique for rapid mental calculation and positions it as a comprehensive tool for cognitive development for young children of early preschool age.
The strict jury placed particular value on the fact that Natella Horodetska’s exclusive methodology is adapted for children with special educational needs. In particular, more than 100 children with ADHD and dyslexia have successfully completed the early intellectual development program based on Horodetska’s method, with experts recording a 35% improvement in attention concentration, a 25% increase in abstract thinking levels, and a 20% rise in overall academic performance. Additionally, approximately 20 educators have been trained in Horodetska’s proprietary methodology.
These indicators allow us to assert that the unique mental arithmetic teaching methodology developed by Natella Horodetska represents a comprehensive system with proven results that can and should be implemented in broad educational practice.
In fact, this became the key argument in favor of awarding the talented educator the title of Winner of the American Business Expo Award in the “Breakthrough of the Year” nomination.
The evaluation of projects was carried out by a collegial body of experts formed from professionals with verified experience. In particular, the jury of the American Business Expo Award 2025 included:
- Olga Sokolova — international expert in education;
- Valentina Petrenko — psychologist and author of international programs;
- Patimat Alibekova — director of the publishing house “EuroMedia”;
- Alexander Litvin — innovation expert.
Such a composition of the jury highlights the interdisciplinary nature of the evaluation: the project was assessed simultaneously from educational, psychological, media, and innovation perspectives.
Natella Horodetska herself views this victory as confirmation that modern educational methodologies must be practically effective, especially when it comes to children who require a more nuanced and adaptive approach.
“For me, this award means that at a high expert level, mental arithmetic has finally begun to be perceived as a serious tool for children’s intellectual development. This means that the modern educational community values not loud formulations, but measurable results and depth of approach,” says Natella Horodetska.
According to her, it is fundamentally important that the core of her methodology is not a mechanical skill, but the development of a child’s thinking as a system.
“It was important for me to create a methodology that works not only with academic results, but also with the quality of a child’s thinking,” she says, emphasizing that for the field of general and inclusive education this should become a convincing signal that children’s intellectual development is an urgent and a high-priority task that must be set before educators.
