With part 8 of this series on Math Academy I finished my summary of the book The Math Academy Way. I now switch to providing some feedback based on my own experience as a Math Academy student, starting with those aspects of Math Academy unrelated to actual mathematics education. To keep things semi-organized, I’ll divide my comments up into multiple topics.
Marketing
I have two comments here, one positive and one not so much. First, the positive:
Thus far Math Academy has (by its founders’ admission) spent no money whatsoever on advertising (Internet-based or otherwise), preferring to have its message spread by word of mouth. I think this is an excellent approach, especially for a service that is still in beta. I myself found out about Math Academy from a post on X, and since then I’ve seen multiple mentions of Math Academy on other services, including Reddit in particular (e.g., the /r/learnmath subreddit and—of course—the r/MathAcademy subreddit). Most of these mentions have been positive, from people who’ve used the service and like it. Your customers are your best salespeople, as the saying goes.
Math Academy staff have been active on these various platforms, providing in-depth responses to questions from people interested in signing up for the service. Again, this is an excellent approach, especially if the target audience is technically knowledgeable.
You can’t find Math Academy-related posts on all social media. In particular, I couldn’t find any Math Academy presence in the Fediverse (at least the section of it I have search access to) and the only post about Math Academy I’ve found on Bluesky was someone else’s repost from X. I wish Math Academy would establish a Bluesky or Mastodon account, even if it’s for nothing more than product announcements. There are lots of people like me who have moved their social media activity mostly or totally off of X.
Now for the not so positive: I am not a fan of Math Academy using the term “AI-powered” to describe its service. I think it’s a flawed strategy in at least three ways:
First, it’s a “me too” marketing strategy for a service that claims to not be a “me too” service. It seems to be trying to leverage the hype around large language models and generative AI to advertise a service in which the only “AI” appears to be traditional machine learning. I understand the motivation, but:
There are going to be lots of startups trying to ride the AI bandwagon with promises of personalized tutors that will talk to your child and patiently hold their hand while they learn. By leaning on the “AI-powered” slogan, Math Academy risks having itself be lumped in with a crowded field of companies trying to turn an LLM into A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. And if those companies fail (as many of them no doubt will), there’s a risk of having their failure taint Math Academy as well.
Second, hyping Math Academy as an “AI” application will also likely risk harming its image with that relatively large contingent of people for whom “AI” is synonymous with copyright violations, planet warming, and the immiseration of artists, writers, musicians, and many others in the name of VC-driven hypergrowth. “AI-powered” is a phrase that’s an instant turn-off for a lot of people who might otherwise be prepared to evaluate Math Academy on its merits.
Finally, “AI-powered” is “feature/benefit” marketing: “here is a product feature and here is the benefit it brings.” I strongly feel that Math Academy would be much better off with a “problem/solution” approach to marketing itself—or, if you want to get even more stark, a “pain/pain relief” approach.
(For example, for an adult learner like me the marketing message of Math Academy might be stated as follows: “You’ve forgotten more math than you remember, and you need or want to re-learn it. Math Academy helps you learn mathematics so that you never forget it again, and helps you do it in the least amount of time possible.”)
The main Math Academy website (the one you see if you’re not an active student) mostly gets this right: The headline is “Math Academy is the most efficient and effective way to learn math . . . guaranteed,” and there’s only four places on the page that reference “AI”: “AI-driven algorithms“ in relatively small print, a question “Is it really AI?” also in relatively small print, a larger headline “AI-Powered + Research-Driven Pedagogy” halfway down the page, and finally a small link “How our AI works” at the very bottom of the page.
The question “Is it really AI?” and the link “How our AI works” would cause the casual reader to expect that the answer would be “yes” and that clicking on the link would lead to a discussion of how Math Academy is leveraging LLMs—what most people would likely think of today if they heard the term “AI.” But instead the “How Our AI Works” page talks about Math Academy using an expert system, the knowledge graph, the student model, the diagnostic algorithm, the task-selection algorithm, the spaced repetition algorithm, and so on. “AI“ is mentioned only in the headline and the first sentence.
This reinforces my contention that the references to “AI“ and “AI-powered” are mainly marketing fluff and could be dispensed with mostly or even totally. Call it an “expert system” or an “algorithm-driven system,” refer to “advanced machine learning” or “adaptive analytics” embedded in the system, and so on. Just try to limit the use of the term “AI.”
Pricing
Assuming someone is intrigued by the idea of Math Academy, the most salient point for them is likely to be the price: $49 a month is a pretty substantial sum for most people. Math Academy is clearly pricing the service based on its value to a user, not based on the marginal cost to support an incremental new user (which I presume is fairly low). But, at least to me, the price is worth it: I place a substantial personal value on knowing an area of mathematics that has previously eluded me, and I’m happy to pay for a service that (at least thus far) seems a good choice for helping me do that.
The price also serves as a filter to discourage people whose motivation is not that high and for whom Math Academy would not be an effective learning experience. The remaining people who do pay the $49 a month are not only motivated to actually use Math Academy, they’re also motivated to talk up the service to others—if for no other reason than to justify to themselves why they’re paying so much. (This blog series can be seen as an extreme example of that.)
Finally, the high price and the absence of a free option helps fund development and operation of the Math Academy service, helps Math Academy be profitable as soon as possible, and helps ensure that the company and service will continue to be available for the foreseeable future.
However, there are a few ways I can see the pricing scheme being tweaked. The first—already floated by Math Academy itself—is to make the service more affordable to people in countries where typical incomes are a fraction of what they are in the US and similar countries. Due to the deficiencies of their public school systems, students in many of those countries already pay for private tutoring at a much higher rate than US students, and thus would be good prospects for a service that could credibly promise to accelerate their mathematical education.
There will certainly be people in the US and elsewhere who will try to game any geo-based pricing scheme, for example, by using a VPN to make it look like they’re based in India rather than Indiana. However, it’s not clear that this would be a major problem, and there are potential ways to reduce it. (For example, the cheapest prices might only be for access to versions of the service in other languages, say, Hindi or Chinese.)
There are also likely students within the US and similar countries who would be very good candidates for Math Academy but whose families cannot afford it, namely mathematically promising students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Math Academy could offer discounted subscriptions directly to such students, but another possible approach would be to reach out to local groups working to identify and assist mathematically gifted students, and offer them discounted group subscriptions that could be paid for by donors to such groups. Math Academy is apparently also considering offering family discounts, something that would presumably be of great interest to the home-schooling community.
I’ll elaborate more on this in my next post, but I can also see a potential market among adult learners who are very motivated to learn mathematics up to a particular level (equivalent to Mathematical Foundations II or even just Mathematical Foundations I) and are not interested in (or capable of) progressing further. A per-course flat price might be a better approach for that segment of the market, especially when combined with my next idea:
There’s a particular pricing issue that is likely to affect me and perhaps other adult learners: Let’s say that I succeed in my quest to learn what an eigenvector is (i.e., by completing the Math Academy Linear Algebra course). I’ll likely want to go on and take one or two other courses (Multivariable Calculus and Probability and Statistics being the most likely ones), but I doubt that I’d want to continue cranking through every advanced course that Math Academy has to offer.
So, what would I do then? The obvious answer is to cancel my Math Academy subscription. But what if I’m afraid of forgetting what I’ve learned, and don’t have total confidence in previous spaced repetition reviews having foreclosed that possibility? In that case, I’d be interested in switching to a hypothetical reduced-price Math Academy subscription that just provided ongoing reviews of material from previously completed courses, say for $5-10 per month. Math Academy would then keep me as an ongoing customer, and I could always upgrade my subscription back to full price if I happened to find a new course I was interested in taking.
(The Math Academy “test prep” mode—which I haven’t tried—is somewhat reminiscent of this, in that it prevents moving to another course and instead just does reviews for the current one. But this is intended only as a temporary, not permanent, measure, and you’re still paying full price in the meantime.)
User experience
As of today, the only way to use the Math Academy service is as a website. I started out using the Math Academy on my laptop, a 13-inch MacBook Air, and it was perfectly usable in that context. However, after a couple of weeks I switched to using the website primarily on my iPad Mini. By doing this I could easily take the iPad Mini and a similarly sized 5-inch by 8-inch notepad (to work on problems) and work on Math Academy lessons anywhere in the house that was convenient: home office, living room, or bedroom. I could also easily take them and work on problems elsewhere, like in a library or if I were eating in a restaurant by myself.
The present Math Academy website is usable on an iPad Mini or similarly-sized tablets, but the experience is not perfect in all respects. The main problems I encountered were as follows:
First, the small text entry boxes used for some answers are difficult to use unless you really expand the page. This is especially true for the special features used to enter fractions or square roots; after entering part of an answer using them I often found myself struggling to get the cursor to go back to the remainder of the text field, because my finger is so large relative to the input fields. On a desktop PC or laptop the tab key can be used to move back to the enclosing input subfield, but that’s not possible on a tablet (at least, not without the use of an external keyboard). Perhaps an additional UI element could be added that simulates the effect of typing the tab key?
Second, when taking quizzes, the position of the “Prev” and “Next” buttons was very inconvenient when using my iPad Mini in portrait mode, because they were off the screen when viewing the problem itself at a normal readable size. Once I entered an answer I found myself scrolling the page around to try to find the “Next” button to go to the next problem—an annoying thing to have to do when you’re taking a timed quiz and every second counts. Quizzes do work better with a tablet in landscape mode, but that’s a less natural way to hold a tablet if you’re not watching a video.
My final thoughts on the user interface: I think keeping the Math Academy service as a traditional website is perfectly fine. I don’t feel the need to have an iPad app (or a similar app for other tablets), and I certainly don’t feel the need for a Math Academy smartphone app. (For one thing, any non-trivial use of the service requires you to be writing on a scratch pad to work problems, something you can’t do in the typical situations in which you’d use a smartphone, like standing in line at the grocery store.) Maybe having a phone app would be useful for markets in other countries where a smartphone is the only device used by most users, but I don’t see it as mandatory for the US market.
However, I definitely would like to see the website tweaked to be more usable on tablet devices down to the size of an iPad Mini or comparable Android models. This includes relatively larger default fonts, relatively larger text input fields and a way to handle the tab key issue, and a page organization that can fit all needed UI elements within a portrait-mode tablet screen without having to scroll the page horizontally. Due to the issues I’ve encountered, I’ve decided to switch back to my laptop for now.
I’ll have more feedback to offer in part 10 of this series, in which I’ll discuss the learning-related aspects of Math Academy as I experienced them.