Math Academy: A Mixed Review
Last year I tried a product called MathAcademy that I really wanted to like. I was recently reminded of a review I tweeted about it, and I wanted to have a canonical version of that review on my blog as well. But please be warned that this is almost-certainly not-interesting unless you're very interested in math education.
MathAcademy: if you read this and are willing to let me use your product to learn in what you consider a slightly sub-optimal way, please let me know, I'd be delighted! I truly think you're onto a great thing and are needlessly limiting people's ability to learn from it.
Anyone else reading this who might have an in at MathAcademy and can help me do the same, ditto!
MathAcademy was one of the weirdest product experiences of my life. In short: I think they have an amazing product, but they're very opinionated about how you use it, and as a result I can't use it at all, which makes it worse for me than a worse product I could actually use.
Basically: the MathAcademy team have figured out some really smart things about how learning works, such as interweaving small units of different topics in order to help you REALLY learn (and remember) new material – they contrast this with traditional homework assignments where you do the exact same problem 100 times, to the point where you're doing it by rote that day, but then can't remember a thing a week later.
I think this is extremely true and insightful, and if I'd had this product in high school when I *had* to study a fixed curriculum I'm sure I would have learned it much faster and better.
But as a result of this philosophy, their product is super prescriptive about which topics you can study and in what order, and unskippably forces you to study the units they say in the order they've decided is best for your long-term learning (assuming a fixed curriculum).
I sort-of understand the part about forcing you to take certain units in a certain order, because of e.g. the aforementioned educational benefits of interweaving material. Sometimes there's a tradeoff between enjoyment and learning (see, e.g., DuoLingo), and I get that on some level I'm "hiring" MathAcademy to force me to keep doing the hard parts as well as the fun ones.
What I don't understand is why MathAcademy is fixated on the "fixed curriculum" part. I hated calc in college, and loved linear algebra, so I was was super excited to re-learn LA and signed up for the relevant course. When I got to the course.... I had a few days of a really fun experience, putting in an hour a day and having a great time, until suddenly my entire "next units" became unskippable trig/calc/etc, as far into the future as the site would let me see.
After several rounds of emails with the (very nice and responsive!) team there, begging them to let me study the LA I signed up for, they confirmed that this was just fundamentally their philosophy and that I had to do it their way.
The most frustrating part for me is that – among many cool things they've done! – they've built these beautiful DAGs of every unit and every dependency within each course. Therefore, more than any other educational provider that I know of, they actually do know exactly which units within a course require which other units as pre-req. So, if they wanted to, MathAcademy could grey out any areas of the Linear Algebra course that require a given unit of calc/trig, and just let me study the rest. Who knows, maybe that would even motivate me to go back and study more trig or calc!
But since I'm literally not allowed to progress at all until I do a seemingly-endless stream of trig/calc pre-reqs – and with literally 0 of the material I'm actually interested in to keep me interested – I'm very sadly giving up.
It all seems bananas. They insisted by email that they were only giving me the pre-reqs that were absolutely necessary for the course I was taking, but again: who says I want to study the whole course as they construed it? I wondered aloud to them if their product was designed for high-schoolers who HAVE to take a fixed curriculum, and if my use-case was outside their scope, but they said that actually most of their customers are adults like me learning for fun or work-interest. In that case, why does it matter whether someone wants to study the whole of "MathAcademy Linear Algebra" or just some subset?
What can I say? I suppose if I were sufficiently motivated I would just go back and learn everything they told me to before studying the thing I want to, but it's hard enough to find time/energy for independent study as an adult and this was just too far for me. Presumably there are people out there who are even more dedicated than I am, but surely just wanting to take linear algebra as an adult puts you in the 99th percentile for this, and enough to be worth supporting?
(As AI has improved significantly since I took this course, I have seriously considered just cheating: going back to MathAcademy and getting an AI to do the units I don't want to do so I can do the units I want to. But I don't have the energy to cheat a system into letting me learn maths, I'm sorry).
I do want to stress: I think a strange thing happens sometimes when someone makes a product, and someone else says "I wish you'd made a different product!", and the producer just thinks "ok, that's nice for you, but I made the thing I wanted to make." I'm not under the illusion that MathAcademy owes me anything, they have every right to make this amazing product and then lock it away from me as they have done. I am sad about all the above, because they want people to learn maths and I want to learn maths from them, and the current situation seems needlessly wasteful to me. But I'm sad about it not mad about it, they do not owe me anything.
I would still recommend MathAcademy to an interested high-schooler who has no choice but to learn all of these topics anyway: with the (strong) caveat that I never got far enough with MathAcademy to learn any new material, rather than re-learn things I once knew, it definitely feels like they've figured out smart things about teaching and learning.
But if you're an adult in similar shoes to mine, I would sadly advise staying away. I've never seen such a clear example of an organization letting the "perfect" (by their own lights, but not by mine!) be the enemy of the good, or of people who've figured out so much about the pedagogy and yet missed such a huge amount about human psychology: instead of learning slightly sub-optimally, I'm now learning nothing at all.