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Comment by teeray | Hacker News Reader

Have you found Math Academy better than just prompting ChatGPT/Claude/etc. to be a math tutor?

I'll tell you my experience as someone who's been using Math Academy for past 6 months.

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.

Yes, much better. ChatGPT/Claude/etc. are useful the times I want extra explanation to help connect the dots, but Math Academy incorporates spaced repetition, interleaving, etc. the way a dedicated tutor would, but in a better structured environment/UI.

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...

I used an early e-learning platform not because I wanted to but because I was one of its developers. I didn't develop the course-content just the technical implementation.

What I didn't like about the content is I often had questions about it but there was no-one to ask the questions from. Whoever wrote that material was no longer around. It's a frustrating feeling when you can't really trust what you're studying is factually correct, or is misleading.

I assume AI will have a huge improvement in this respect.

The second link really impressed me, I'm tentatively sold on (and excited for) their approach. Does anyone know of any other accredited programs similar to Math Academy, but for other subjects?

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.

Not OP, but I have found MathAcademy to be infinitely better. I really liked the assessment portion which levels you and gives you an idea of where you are are at the present. As someone who graduated with an engineering degree a while ago, there were things I realized I didn’t know as well as I thought I did and I probably would not have prompted an LLM to review.

Math is something that should be taught in an opinionated way with an eye toward pedagogy. Self study with GPT is an excellent tool in math, but only for those who have enough perspective to know which directions to set out on. I don’t think anybody who doesn’t know linear algebra should be guiding their studies themselves.

Given my ChatGPT and friends experience has been one of overwhelming frustration due to incorrect information, I would say Math Academy is in an entirely different galaxy. ChatGPT is great if you want to learn that pi is equal to 4.

b-b-b-but the next supercalifragilistic ChatGPT version will be able to tell you that pi is between 3.1 and 3.2. that will be a Quantum improvement, asymptotically close to AGI.

at least, i think i heard alt samman say so.

you plebs and proles better shell out the $50 a month, increasing by $10 per day, to keep dis honest billionaires able to keep on buying deir multi-million dollar yachts and personal jets.

be grateful for the valuable crumbs we toss to you, serfs.

I haven't used it, but there was a big thread about it yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43241499

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