Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlchemistCamp | Hacker News Reader

IMO, the clear choice for this is Math Academy. It was started by a very, very early Uber contractor who built the early versions of their dispatcher, their profiler and also the grid system that helped them scale and pretty much saved them during new year's in 2013. Since becoming wealthy from Uber's IPO, he's been pouring money into hiring experts and building the curriculum.

The first step was a non-profit program started as part of the Pasadena public school system's offerings that other schools are free to adopt. It's taken students from basic arithmetic to calculus by 9th grade and through a fully undergraduate curriculum by the time they finish high school. His son was one of those students and must be part of why he's been willing to invest so heavily for so many years.

There's now a commercial online version open to the public. The founder hasn't done any marketing of it yet, but I found out about it through a mutual friend / podcast co-host. Math Academy is very comprehensive and the most streamlined way I know of to learn, or in my case, relearn an undergraduate applied math curriculum. It's not as polished, but the content and the actual academic results make offerings like Brilliant.org look like a joke.

I requested a life-time deal last year for access myself and intend to make the most of it, likely in binges between busy periods at work.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/ap-calculus-e...

https://www.mathacademy.us/beta-test-information

Good morning, HN! It's Jason (the founder). My wife (co-founder and co-conspirator) just woke me up to alert me to a sudden spike in demo requests, so I'm a little blurry-eyed at the moment (was up late last night trying my best to get the marketing site functional), but I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have.

My biggest worry with these kind of programs is that the questions are invariably multiple choice ones. How would we practice proofs or questions where the answers are not "seen"?

We started with the multiple-choice format as it's a good 90-10 solution in terms of technology, but we now have free=response questions that are automatically evaluated and can handle fairly complex mathematical expressions - man, was that a lot of work!

But we've found the concern over the multiple-choice format to be overblown. People like to believe they can outguess a multiple-choice question by being clever, but that's not reality on our system or elsewhere such as the AP exams, the AMC exams, or the GRE Mathematics Subject Exam.

Later this fall we're going to be introducing a UI for constructing proofs that's looking really cool and should take things up a notch for the more abstract subjects like Abstract Algebra and Real Analysis. Teaching university-level proof techniques is extremely challenging and time-consuming process (most never really get it) even for undergraduate math majors at university, but I think our new tech will make it much less painful and with a much higher success rate.

> free=response questions that are automatically evaluated and can handle fairly complex mathematical expressions - man, was that a lot of work!

Wow, that's excellent. I can imagine that would have been a lot of work.

> People like to believe they can outguess a multiple-choice question by being clever

Personally I think it adds a bit more complexity and toughness if I can't see the answer in advance. But that is purely my individual style and opinion and I have not seen any research either proving or disproving my hypothesis.

Hey Jason, would also like the idea to have a lifetime subscription model for working folks who can use the platform based on time availability.

It's funny you bring that up as it seems to be a common request from adults interested in leveling up their math. I'm sure we could come up with something reasonable.

You are going to spoil Jason's HN announcement post Mark :)

jeez, what kind of 11th and 12th grade curriculum teaches topology, real analysis etc...? Is this a syllabus for math whiz kids?

The "High School" Curriculum is basically an undergraduate mathematics degree.

I can't tell if they believe they have cracked the code that makes learning these concepts accessible or if they are suffering from a severe case of expert syndrome, totally unable to put themselves in the shoes of a novice.

Through trial and error and the application of some rarely employed, but highly-effective educational strategies like active learning, distributed practice, mixed review, mastery-based learning, interleaving, layering, etc., you end up with a pace of learning that's a little shocking. I realize it's hard to believe -extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and all that, but that's what got us started having our 8th-graders take the AP Calculus BC exam as as an outside, objective measure.

Opt-in educational programs of all sorts are usually heavily selection-biased toward students that are well-motivated and generally exceptionally easy to teach—good support from home, probably above-average SES, above-average IQ, et c.

Which doesn't mean such programs are useless, just that they're typically far less effective if you try to apply them to a representative slice of the overall student population.

It's true that the students in the school program are high-aptitude, but something like 70% of the students in the middle school where this all started are on the federal free and reduced lunch program (low SES) along with a couple of the top kids in the original cohort, who I taught personally and they were amazing.

> 70 % of the students in the middle school where this all started

but

> a couple of the top kids in the original cohor

Are their parents from a tight-knit immigrant community, highly educated in their previous country, with economic prospects in the US dimmed by language barrier and professional certifications that got dropped at the border?

Yeah, pretty close, although it's not like most universities will allow students to skip straight to graduate school. Our first cohort of students just graduated this past year, so we're just now getting a sense of how this is likely to play out.

My son, who's majoring in CS, is starting with 300 (junior-level) courses in both math and CS - although the departments were happy to allow him to start even deeper in the curriculum if he wanted. Another student, who collaborated with one our our math PhD instructors on some original research that's about to be published, is starting with at least one graduate math course this year (the last I heard, anyway).

Well, it turns out that when you have mathematically-talented students completing Calculus in 8th-grade, and move on the Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus in 9th, you eventually reach Real Analysis and Topology by the end of high-school - although, we haven't gone quite as deep in those particular subjects as the others mentioned. But we do comprehensively cover Differential Equations, Discrete Mathematics, Probability & Statistics and Abstract Algebra.

Honestly that looks like superficial rushing for rushing's sake. There is so much advanced and deep elementary math kids could learn.

I understand why it might seem that way, but it's really not. We've just put a premium on learning efficiency, and most math classes are highly inefficient - whether K-12 or university.

Just imagine how much more quickly a student could progress through a course if they were to work one-on-one with an expert tutor 5 days per week. Quite a bit more quickly in most cases. Well, our system effectively serves as an expert AI tutor and based on our calculations is on the order of 4 times more efficient than a traditional math class.

But I get the skepticism. I'd probably be skeptical myself.

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