Is MathAcademy Worth It? Thoughts After 2k Experience Points (XP)
jonathanwhitmore.com
jonathanwhitmore.com
I was previsouly trying using Susan Rigetti's "So You Want to Study Mathematics..." guide. It has been posted here a few times, but it's so easy to get lost in doing tons of problems that are too easy or too hard for your level, especially when you already know quite a bit of math, but there are some things that you never really mastered and some things you've forgotten, but you don't know what. Identifying those areas can be really hard, but MathAcademy helps you do it.
I don't really like their gamification system, somehow the way they deal XP points feel non-rewarding when I get points and it feels like I get punished when I answer something wrong, maybe that's just me, but the gamification of other online learning apps like Brilliant feel more rewarding, but those apps are just much less efficient and complete overall.
I also wish the mobile experience was a bit better. I need to keep the phone in landscape mode just to see the page. It would also be nice with an "on the go" feature that would show only problems that can be done mentally, to make it easier to do some 5 minute session on the go when you don't have pen and paper nearby.
It's really a must for anyone who wants to self-study math to fill in gaps, learn machine learning, physics or just for fun, especially if you want to master it and not just learn it on a superficial level.
As a customer who spent a good amount of time on the app a couple of years ago, I don't think a mobile app would be very helpful. The website is perfectly usable from an iPad, but you should have a pen and scratchpad available while working through the exercises. On an iPad, the notes app works fine for this, but a phone just isn't the right form factor IMO.
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IMO, Brilliant isn't even in the same category as Math Academy when it comes to depth and Duolingo just may be the worst learning app ever created despite the fact that it's been a great business. I used to run a language school and later worked at a language learning startup and was active in communities of language learners. While I've met many people who have used Duolingo for hours a day for a year or even multiple years, I've never met a single person who's gotten to even a B2 level through Duolingo. If you really want to learn a language, get LingQ and either read stories in it or listen to the audio versions of them at the bus stop. That will get you a lot more input / minute.
Other than that, I have very high hopes for the future of MA. It's by far the best platform I've found for actually learning math.
From what I could read, many studies have shown this is an effective technique. From my personal experience it only works if you understand what you are trying to remember. For example, trying to memorize some complicated formulas that you don't understand is doomed to fail.
1. New tasks are selected only as you complete existing tasks (so if you come back after 2 weeks, you need to complete some existing tasks from 2 weeks ago to get new tasks selected based on your knowledge profile right now).
2. We are often able to implicitly knock out due reviews with new lessons. We're not just doing plain vanilla spaced repetition. We're doing a highly efficient novel version of it that we call Fractional Implicit Repetition (FIRe). I have a writeup on this that gained some traction on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
Regarding spaced repetition, keep in mind the following:
1. New tasks are selected only as you complete existing tasks (so if you come back after 2 weeks, you need to complete some existing tasks from 2 weeks ago to get new tasks selected based on your knowledge profile right now).
2. We are often able to implicitly knock out due reviews with new lessons. We're not just doing plain vanilla spaced repetition. We're doing a highly efficient novel version of it that we call Fractional Implicit Repetition (FIRe). I have a writeup on this that gained some traction on HN recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40954571
Happy to answer any questions you may have.
Also what is the difference between MathAcademy and Brilliant? I have read many skeptical opinions on Brilliant, so it would be interesting to have a comparison.
MathAcademy is great for learning new topics that you haven't studied before, provided they have a course in that subject.
Does anyone have an opinion about MathAcademy vs KhanAcademy ?
Fast forward some time in the future, and they have removed it...
TLDR: I learned from those kinds of resources myself, and while I came a long way, for the amount of effort I put into learning, I could have gone a lot further if my time were used more efficiently. That's the problem that Math Academy solves.
Also: I too really hope they expand into physics.
But lets put it in concrete terms. lets say you want to break into machine learning and deep learning but you lack the requisite math background.
if you start at foundations 1, if you put in around 8-9 hours a week of work into it, you can get to the end of math for machine learning after a year and a half. lets be cynical and say 2. At 50 usd x 24 months, you're looking at a cost of $1200 usd. Even the cheapest community college set of courses you'll be taking to get to that level will cost you more than that AND will require a ongoing time commitment where you show up at the classes. While its nice to have a class, Mathacademy is much more efficient for getting the information into your brain. You have the problem set in front of you and you see imediatly if you get it right or not. the time window for correcting yourself from feedback is tighter than you're ever going to get from a classroom where your graded problem sets come back days later.
AS for return on investment, Just look up how much machine learning engineers make. coding is the easy part. Having the mathematical maturity to understand why certain things are used where they are and kwowing enough to deviate where they don't work is PRICELESS.
I think my main problem (at least last time) is my inability to stay interested - I like having a real-world use case for the things im doing. It probably also didn't help, that my ADHD wasn't diagnosed last year.
Since MathAcadamy seems to address this problem (somewhat) I will try it for a couple weeks and report back. Might be interesting for some of you to get an entirely different perspective than the author's one.
My biggest complaint about the maths I've learned in the UK is that it was always taught mechanically. e.g. matrices were just taught as a set of rules for which numbers to add/multiply etc to get the right result, with no mention of why it all worked or the proofs behind it.
I also documented my experiences when I hit the 100 day streak mark here: gmays.com/math
It's not perfect, though, and my experience differed a little:
> MathAcademy excels at identifying exactly what you need to work on, zeroing in on your weak spots and areas for improvement.
It doesn't excel at this yet. It claims to have an "adaptive diagnostic assessment [that] will identify the correct starting place for the student" but this didn't work very well for me. I ended up sitting through many questions that felt insultingly easy (e.g. number lines) without a way to skip them. You have to answer the questions quickly and correctly to prove you understand them, which is probably a defence against students clicking "I understand this" for everything when they don't, but it felt very tedious.
If you get a lot of questions wrong on a subject it ends the topic early with a (somewhat discouraging), "ending your session early due to poor performance" (why not just, "let's come back to this later"?). But if you get lots of questions right quickly it doesn't seem to have a similar, "lesson ended early due to great performance" or "ok, it's clear you already understand this" — it just continues to drill you, which feels very tedious.
> For less than the cost of a single hour with a private math tutor, MathAcademy provides you with 24/7 access to what is essentially a tireless, expert math tutor.
It's less like a tutor and more like a choose-your-own-adventure textbook with tests, spaced repetition and guided pathfinding. And that's great! But I missed things I'd get from a tutor, like the ability to ask for clarification. MathAcademy uses terms in questions or descriptions that it hasn't defined or explained previously (or perhaps it had defined those terms in earlier lessons it skipped?). I ended up looking things up from outside sources or taking a 30-minute detour into YouTube to fill in the gaps. Which is fine when it's occasional, but annoying when it's every other session. Sure, it's "adaptive" but it's not responsive like a real tutor.
The overall tone is that of the forever unimpressed tutor — quick to penalise and very light on encouragement. Full gamification with gold stars and badges and weapons upgrades would be annoying, but I'd like something more than "you scored x". (For example, immediately show me how my recent result has affected my overall understanding of the subject as a progress bar.)
The UX of the site is tedious when drilling questions daily. The slow round-trip before seeing if your answer was correct becomes grating; if this can't be done client-side I would love to see improved performance server-side.
On the whole, though, yes, it's worth checking out if you're serious about maths improvement.
> …I couldn't really find a listing of how big the courses are time-wise.
I spent about an hour a day and it projected a course end date of about two months away. (When you commit to an XP daily pace, it estimates the completion date for the course you selected.) Most courses seem to need 30-90+ hours of study, but it will vary by subject and student since the placement test may put you ahead of or behind others.
> Also did you find it doable to keep up with the daily workload?
No. I set an XP daily pace I felt comfortable with (I think 40XP?), saw the projected end date was far further than I had hoped, then increased my daily pace commitment but couldn't match that consistently due in part to the compounding gripes I mentioned in my parent comment and — frankly — my own lack of motivation.
To stick with MathAcademy or any learning program it's better to have strong motivation in the form of a concrete goal you are working towards. I didn't have a strong sense of that — only a much woolier, "I think a stronger maths foundation would unlock more for me as a software engineer", which is the kind of goal that makes quitting too easy.
If I were to subscribe to MA again I'd first clearly define a goal, like being able to write an AI or game engine physics library from scratch (and then also a strong reason why those things feel important to me, like getting a job in the field or whatever). But I've since moved on to learn other things (design, drawing, painting) and find the motivation flowing much more naturally there. Partly that's because the positive feedback loop flows better for me with art than with maths (the progress week-to-week is highly visual!) but also because I'm working toward a more strongly defined goal.
I found it a bit controversial too, but it makes sense if you consider the goals of MA / creator's approach. MA aims for "you're going to learn to mastery, passing 100% or you don't know the subject yet". Which works great if that's what you're after, and less well if you want to just get to know the landscape and be more comfortable appling a few things every few months. (One of the reasons I dropped out was when it made me do way too many vector/matrix multiplications that felt like busy work I'm never going to do manually, but it would make sense at uni time) You can trigger the diagnostic again btw if you think something's seriously off.
I didn't think anything was seriously wrong, just wrong enough to be annoying for the first few days because I wasn't learning much and the system is rigid and zero trust — I have no way to tell it I understand except by hard proof.
It's also a balancing act, though. Under-estimating a student's ability on purpose might frustrate them a little but offer a small confidence boost while they're still learning the system and finding a daily rhythm. Over-estimating could make them feel stupid and intimidated and drive them to drop out early.