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I think the author of this makes some good points to this effect. I believe that the best approach is a bit inverse of what the author is saying however. I think that Math Academy should be the base, where 80-90% of your time is spent. The remaining 10-20% should be used to supplement this. Either with lectures, textbook / edutainment reading or other ways to develop more of that intuition.
if learning mathematics was like body building, traditional classes would be the equivalent of going to a traditional classroom where you get a lecture on the various pathways to build muscle strength. its on you to spend your off ours going into the gym and doing the work. Progress might be slow becase your feedback on your "problem sets" comes back a few days later.
Mathacademy on the other hand is like having a trainer at the gym. every day they take a look at you and tell you what exercises to do and to set the difficulty. You might not know exactly how all the pieces fit together but thats ok. you're getting stronger. you are seeing progress in your ability to just power through problems.
I personally have found my algebra skills to have improved substantially. I remember factoring to be a struggle for me when I was in high school. after a few weeks of mathacademy its pretty easy now. Does it mean I have a great conceptual framework for solving real world problems? probably not but I'm in a much better position to learn that skill as a result of mathacademy.
BTW math academy guys, if you're reading this. Id LOVE a class on circuit analysis!
https://www.justinmath.com/why-is-the-edtech-industry-so-dam...
In contrast, I don’t know anyone who’s put 10 hours a week into Math Academy for multiple years but those I know who have done it for 6 months have made considerable progress, sometimes the equivalent of years of course work.
Duolingo’s flashy animations and casino-style gamification techniques are actually a negative signal for an educational product.
I agree that the other articles mentioned didn't seem to give much of a chance. The Perhan thread has a comment chain between the author and the MA director [1] which is easy to miss. It's notable to me when users complain of negative XP, I've been working on MA every day for six months and got my first negative XP today! I've gotten 0 XP plenty, but if someone's getting negative XP often, they're half-assing it.
> I also wish they had a mascot and a streak feature.
I believe a streak calendar is coming based on the developers' Twitter. I dislike streaks but I imagine they will be optional as leagues are. I edited it out but my previous comment on this thread said "the day they get a cute mascot is the day I quit forever!" Maybe that was too harsh ;) But I do like the serious tone of the site as an adult learner.
1. https://pershmail.substack.com/p/math-academy-wants-to-super...
(At the time I recommended my son start doing Math Academy, I had done 3722 XP myself, which is about 60 hours' worth.)
It's true that there's a stronger emphasis on procedural fluency than on conceptual understanding. But honestly I think that's good: there's so much good material online for conceptual understanding.
Imagine you're studying linear algebra: use Math Academy for rigorous introductions to topics and exercises and feedback, and watch 3Blue1Brown videos for conceptual understanding.
For younger kids (my son is 8.5yo) I wish Math Academy had some animated or video explanations. For example, the prealgebra course includes the product rule for surds. It was hard for my son to grok based on reading the written explanation. Not because the explanation was bad, but because my son has the attention span of an 8.5yo. So I spent a few minutes walking through that same explanation with him, using a paper and pencil to guide his attention.
I also wish they had a mascot and a streak feature. Those features on Duolingo somehow help to motivate my son.
I went to a university where the upper-division undergraduate math courses didn't have much in the way of prerequisites.
A foreseeable consequence of this approach is that the first several weeks of each ten-week class are spent covering material that's shared with other classes, because that material is relevant to both classes but isn't included in the lower-division prerequisites. This is very bad as a matter of curriculum design, but good if you're more interested in making sure students never have scheduling conflicts.
Another example of dependency graphs is that when my sister signed up for Portuguese classes, she took "Portuguese 1 for Spanish speakers" rather than "Portuguese 1". You can learn Portuguese from an English perspective, or you can learn it from a Spanish perspective, and those are both approaches that can work, but they're not approaches you'd want to combine. In this case, one of the approaches is clearly superior - if you can relate Portuguese to your knowledge of Spanish, that will work better than relating it to English - but even where no particular dependency structure is preferable to another, it remains true that the plan for going from A to B isn't the same as the plan for going from B to A, or the same as the plan for going from nothing to B. So the curriculum needs to rely on a dependency tree.
I think the article gives the impression that MA is like Duolingo, but it's not. There's no flashy animations, sound effects, or mascots, the interface is spartan like Hacker News. It can't be (effectively) done in five minutes a day. It requires total concentration and a lot of time commitment.
I'd check out resources like csprimer and Math Academy and Frontend Masters to get a solid foundation. After taking an algorithms course, you can start productively studying leetcode on sites like neetcode.
I've be working to relearn math and there happens to be a large group of others also doing the same with Math Academy and sharing daily updates on X.
I found this inspiring (especially as the lessons got harder) so I tweeting my updates too. But I also wanted a way to independently track my progress across math and other areas to see progress over time, even if I changed tools or stopped tweeting.
So that's the reason I built app on X: So my tweets get logged in a GitHub-like habit graph to show progress over time. It just pulled my bio/profile from X (login with X) and tracks my habit tweets. It's super simple, but meets my needs perfectly. My habit page: https://xtreeks.com/gabemays
I understand the questions around the long-term stability of the API, but I'm optimistic.
Anything in the soft sciences, or biology/organic chemistry, or comp sci. I know there are a lot of courses for the latter especially, but I'm looking for accredited ones.
- 5th grade math
- prealgebra
The book does look high quality. But I'm surprised it covers these fundamentals, given it's for a university course.
Math Academy does what every good application or service does. Make things convenient. That's it. No juggling heavy books or multiple tabs of PDFs. Each problem comes with detailed solution so getting them wrong doesn't mean looking around on the internet for a hint about your mistake (this is pre ChatGPT era of course, where not getting something correct meant putting down MathJax on stackexchange).
> better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc
The convenience means you are doing the most important part of learning maths with most ease: problem solving and practice. That is something an LLM will not be able to help you with. For me, solving problems is pretty much the only way to mostly wrap my head around the topic.
I say mostly because LLMs are amazing at complementing Math Academy. Any time I hit a conceptual snag, I run off to ChatGPT to get more clarity. And it works great.
So in my opinion, Math Academy alone is pretty good. Even great for school level maths I'd say. Coupled with ChatGPT the package becomes a pretty solid teaching medium.
Their marketing website leaves a lot to be desired (a perk since they are all math nerds focused on the product), but here are two references on their site that explain their approach:
- https://mathacademy.com/how-it-works
- https://mathacademy.com/pedagogy
They also did a really good interview last week that goes in depth about their process with Dr. Alex Smith (Director of Curriculum) and Justin Skycak (Director of Analytics) from Math Academy: https://chalkandtalkpodcast.podbean.com/e/math-academy-optim...
"Take a minute to ponder what this means. Cantor’s Theorem shows that given any set, there is another set which is 'larger' in the special sense of being a bigger kind of infinity. Hence, there can be no 'largest infinity' either! The kinds of infinity are therefore 'infinite!"