I have to shout out MathAcademy(the same platform the author is using). It's pretty darn good. I did like 2 hours a day for 90 days and went from Math Foundations I(70% completed) to Math Foundations III(74% completed). The pace of improvement was very fast.
I have not detected anything wrong with mathacademy, it does what it says on the tin. With that said, I stopped using it myself as I felt that my ability to "find the slope intercept form of blankety blank" did not actually translate to any deeper understanding of math than I had before.
I think mathacademy is excellent for developing the skills necessary for solving the problems on mathacademy (which largely are the problems on math exams).
But if your goal is understanding rather than application, then mathacademy is more similar to duolingo than it is to language immersion. You can go quite far in mathacademy (and much of performative mathematics) without really having thought about anything. It is procedure learning rather than understanding.
Isn't this more or less true of the whole undergraduate college calc syllabus? Like, I had the same thought grinding on trig integrals: "these problems seem super artificial", and I gather they basically are, and I guess closed-form solutions to arbitrary random integrals all sort of are? But that's not Math Academy's doing, or any kind of "teach to the test"; I went through these same problems with both my kids as they did STEM degrees at Illinois, and that's the actual material.
Mathacademy is meeting a market demand, which mostly seems to be being good enough to solve problems in several standardized math courses. In that regard, I think it is a thing that I would prescribe to any student (along with tutoring and study groups) in order to do well in that course.
But I am just not convinced it can ever (especially, in isolation, which you never claimed) lead to you being a good mathematician in the sense of having internalized the material. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it is similar to the feeling you get when you are some high level in duolingo and realize you still can't follow daytime soaps. You have the rigid intelligence, but not the fluid (internalized?) one.
Oh, I have no idea if it can help make someone a mathematician. But that's not why engineers study math, right? It's still extremely valuable to be able to do, and to an operational extent understand, advanced math.
har777 · · focus · HN ↗
stephen_cagle · · focus · HN ↗
I think mathacademy is excellent for developing the skills necessary for solving the problems on mathacademy (which largely are the problems on math exams).
But if your goal is understanding rather than application, then mathacademy is more similar to duolingo than it is to language immersion. You can go quite far in mathacademy (and much of performative mathematics) without really having thought about anything. It is procedure learning rather than understanding.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
stephen_cagle · · focus · HN ↗
But I am just not convinced it can ever (especially, in isolation, which you never claimed) lead to you being a good mathematician in the sense of having internalized the material. I can't quite put my finger on it, but I think it is similar to the feeling you get when you are some high level in duolingo and realize you still can't follow daytime soaps. You have the rigid intelligence, but not the fluid (internalized?) one.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗