Love running into Math Academy students in the wild -- thanks for the kind words and I'm so happy that the system is working out for you! After all the work we've put into building this thing, it's the best feeling ever to hear about positive impact it's having on people's lives.
Sounds like you're well on your way to seriously leveling up your math skills, but if you have any questions about how the system works, how to get the most value out of it, the math learning process in general, etc., feel free to reach out anytime.
You can view lessons in "reference mode" -- to get there, just click on the old task and then on the name of the topic.
You can also get there from the Table of Contents -- to get there, go to your dashboard (where your learning tasks are), click on the name of your course in the top-left, and you'll be brought to a screen that says "Course Sequence" with a list of courses on the left and units on the right. If you expand the units, you'll see topics, and you can click on a topic to view its lesson in reference mode.
Note that XP & knowledge credit is only awarded for completing learning tasks on your dashboard, not for anything you do within a lesson in reference mode.
Not sure, but looking at the interface myself just now, it seems like it's always possible to see the latex of a math field by either
1) right-click > show math as > tex commands (which you can copy/paste), or
2) hover over the field and see the tex commands show up as hover text (but can't copy/paste)
Very well. One of the things that needs to be explained, or the information made available is why rote computation and timed tests are important. Both of those are weaknesses of mine and it did not help my motivation not understanding why it was needed. I came to the answer on a post of yours somewhere in Reddit and now I actually want to get better at it. The idea I got from you and my experience is:
Timed tests make sure I know and use the optimal approach to solve the exercise. I found this while solving systems of equations, where naively I could carry fractions around making calculation cumbersome and error prone, while an initial analysis trying to find a multiplier that does away with fractions is the right approach. I kept failing until in the review lessons I paid proper attention. Analysis and optimisation is being taught. I had a similar experience about choosing a generic ln or an appropriate base logarithm.
Rote calculation was a tough one to swallow until you said that only through much computation one starts seeing patterns that will be useful later in more abstract manipulation. I agree with it but doing the first chapter of spivak’s calculus that focuses on proving very basic entities with math’s arithmetic axioms helped a lot. It is incredibly simple maths but hammers down the axioms that are then the basis of all manipulations.
Also I like the lack of human interaction upon failure. A machine does not get disappointed when I fail, nor annoyed that today I am having a bad day intellectually. It just fails me and gives me the opportunity to do something else and do repeats until it is successful. It also does not let me continue with faulty understanding because the program needs to be on schedule. It gives me an expectation of completion based on current progress history. If am not happy I can just apply myself better. The price being steep also makes it painful when I see no experience gained in the whole calendar week, further adding a motivation.
On a more personal experience I dread tests and especially timed tests. I am kind of “fortunate” that my nightmares often are about failing exams or not having time to finish them. When doing math academy I always was afraid of the “quiz” tab coming up, especially because I have kids and house chores that sometimes need to attend. Anyway in mathacademy quizzes are so frequent they normalize the act of test taking and I feel more like they are a challenge for me to “show off” then something to dread. This is in contrast to my experience in college where there was one make or break exam for the whole semester: fail and you will need to repeat the whole semester.
To finish I so much wish my kids will be able to benefit from this approach. I have been trying to convince others of the worth of relearning maths as an adult. It gives an analytical mind and teaches intelectual humility. I find myself successful in life yet I still struggle in some tests and tasks.
I normally say if you are in need of some reality checks regarding your intellectual ability just do maths. There is always a problem of extreme simplicity that one cannot solve, and makes you feel dumb.
Yeah, I fully agree that in general, we need to integrate explanations of "why is this task optimal for my learning" into the product. It's definitely on the roadmap, but it's a challenging because there's too much info to simply tell a student everything up-front. We have to do it just-in-time. But I'm glad that you were able to find a Reddit post of mine that answered your question. It'll be some time before we have all this info properly integrated into the product itself, but for now, if you're interested in reading more about why the system works the way it does, I'd recommend checking out my working draft of The Math Academy Way (https://www.justinmath.com/books/#the-math-academy-way).
I'm glad that you're having a good experience with the quizzes! That's exactly what we aim for: frequent, low-stakes, broad-coverage quizzes that challenge you to show off what you've learned (instead of stressing you out and overwhelming you). Used properly like this, quizzes are an extremely powerful learning tool. You get the benefits of retrieval practice, the spacing effect, and interleaving, all merged into one. And we pinpoint exactly what skills you need more practice on (which we have you review immediately afterwards), and by carefully calibrating the time constraint, we make sure you're developing your skills fully to the point of automaticity.
Sounds like you're well on your way to seriously leveling up your math skills, but if you have any questions about how the system works, how to get the most value out of it, the math learning process in general, etc., feel free to reach out anytime.