Math Academy

What we covered:  – It's been a few months since our last podcast, and in that time, we've seen a huge increase in the number of schools wanting to use Math Academy for this upcoming school year. – Now, if you've been following our podcast, you already know that one of the recurring themes at Math Academy is that before you automate something, you gotta first do it manually so you real...

What we covered: – In elementary school, there's often an intense focus on conceptual understanding, but not enough time spent building real fluency with core skills. And this has left many kids without automaticity on basic things like multiplication facts. Math is extremely hierarchical, and when students don't have the basic facts at their fingertips, they quickly run into bottlenecks a...

What we covered: – A lot of schools have recently begun using Math Academy in their classrooms. And one of the biggest benefits of using Math Academy is that it automates all the mechanical parts of teaching, like writing questions, keeping track of what students know and what they don't know, monitoring student progress, assigning extra practice when needed, grading, all that grindy stuff. –...

What we covered: – As Math Academy has grown over the past year, we're getting a better sense of general do's and don'ts when scaling a startup. We've learned hard lessons about overloading the database, the task processor, and our team, requiring numerous infrastructure and process updates. – Schools have been using the system and we've built plenty of additional features to,...

0:00 - Introduction 3:57 - Added 115 “Missing Middle” topics to SAT Prep 6:06 - Integrating the SAT Missing Middle topics into other courses 9:42 - Added tens of thousands of free response questions 10:34 - Free response questions are useful because they don’t prime you 13:33 - When to use free response vs. multiple choice questions 14:54 - Too many free response questions taxes learners 16:39 - L...

What we covered: The dangers of accumulating learning debt: the gap between what you can do and what you need to be able to do. If you miss building up your foundational skills in school or sports, you can get by for a while. You develop some compensatory strategies, like favoring your forehand over your backhand, or using ChatGPT to write all your school essays. But learning debt is like any othe...

What we covered: – The benefits of short problems. Math Academy problems typically take only a minute or two. This way, students can stay on the rails with lots of reps, successfully building up complexity instead of getting crushed by it from the start. – What goes wrong in college math classes: they tend not to scaffold content very well, forcing students to build their own bridges across knowle...

What we covered: – A recent report from the University of California San Diego revealed that 1 in 12 incoming freshmen were not proficient in middle school math – basically, anything above arithmetic with fractions. Their existing remedial math course was too advanced for these students, so they had to design even lower remedial remedial math courses. Even crazier, over a quarter of these students...

What we covered: – Most kids are not intrinsically motivated to do the hard things: practice their soccer drills, do their math homework, eat their broccoli. Getting them to do the hard things often requires gamification and/or incentives. – A little gamification goes a long way. Jason gamified drills for his kids’ soccer team to get the most out of each practice (e.g., “zombie attack”), and it wa...

What we covered: – Any successful endeavor requires a great team: capable people, who like and trust each other, and have complementary skillsets and ways of thinking. Some modes of thinking cannot be performed at the same time within a single brain. – Accountability requires control. You can’t hold someone responsible for outcomes unless you also give them control over the system that produces th...

What we covered: – Building a knowledge graph is like city planning & road construction. Too many prerequisites leading into a single topic creates a cognitive traffic jam. – Elegantly rewiring a live knowledge graph: the evolution of our tooling and automatic validations. How to avoid staging servers & migrations and NOT have it blow up in your face. – UI work takes time and adds complexi...

What we covered: – Why “problem solving” is often just a vague label people use when they haven’t explicitly enumerated the underlying skills, and how those skills can in fact be exhaustively mapped in a knowledge graph. – How to approach research problems: Alex's PhD journey, top-down familiarity vs bottom-up mastery. – If you have natural talent, use it, but not as a crutch, otherwise you&#3...

What we covered: -- How bureaucracies instinctively reject new ideas like an immune system attacking a foreign organ, and what it takes to keep your project from being "spit out." Concrete example: how Jason & Sandy muscled past institutional resistance to get 8th graders passing AP Calc BC. -- Every system inevitably decays into mediocrity unless someone fights to keep the standards...

0:00 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 1) 5:47 - Find Your North Star: Why Justin Quit His Data Science Job to do Math Tutoring Full Time 11:23 - Getting "Inside the Trade" 19:31 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 2) 27:28 - Efficient Learning Techniques are Obvious if You Think About Athletics 33:45 - Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optim...

0:00 - Introduction 4:00 - Applying the MA Way to X Growth 7:40 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 1) 25:50 - Jason's Near-Infinite List of Important Things 34:20 - The ML Course Has Been a Massive Undertaking 42:10 - Breadth-First Development 44:30 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 2) 50:15 - Why Math Academy Needs To Do a CS Course...