MathAcademy is exceptional for dedicated students who can commit daily blocks of time to self-study. It was far better than my attempts at learning via textbooks. I largely agree with this author's conclusion that it's worth the money.
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.
How much time did you find yourself spending on the courses? They have this whole "xp" concept (where 1 minute is 1xp and they recomend you spend at least 45 "xp" a day) but I couldnt really find a listing of how big the courses are time-wise. Also did you find it doable to keep up with the daily workload? Ive personally bounced off Anki a few times because I stopped doing the daily reviews.
> How much time did you find yourself spending on the courses?
> …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.
> "adaptive diagnostic assessment..." but this didn't work very well for me.
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.
For me it was not controversial, just imperfect. The perfect diagnostic would learn in one pass what the student has already mastered and not leave them with study material they can already answer at 100%.
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.
I used it and relearned quite a bit a couple of years ago. Whenever I encountered a term I wasn't familiar with, I clicked through to the lessons of each of the prerequisites of the lesson I was currently in. That was a pretty quick way of identifying what I was missing.
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.