Transitioning from Beast Academy to AOPS

We actually did this transition about a year ago, but I thought I’d post about it now that we’re a bit further along. The Kid had finished up Beast Academy 5, and was ready to move on. She really wanted to make it into Epsilon Camp (hopefully I’ll get around to another post about that later), which meant that she had a deadline to finish Algebra 1. Looking at the AOPS Prealgebra book, I found there was so much overlap between BA5 and Prealgebra that we decided to skip directly to the Intro to Algebra book.

Math-wise, this worked well. Most of the first few chapters were review, just as you’d expect if coming from Prealgebra. Format-wise, we had some struggles. Gone were the colorful, cuddly Beasts, only to be replaced by a wall of text. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why things were moving along so slowly when the math itself was not a challenge for my kid. She watched and loved the free AOPS videos. She understood the content. But everything was taking foooreeeveeer.

First, I had to model how to work problems in a notebook instead of a workbook. The Kid has always resisted writing her work down, which has been fine in the past because she was able to do it mentally. Algebra was the first time that writing it down became necessary for her. I sat next to her and would scribe 1-2 problems as examples, showing her to number the problem, write down the work, and box the answer.  She caught on to this reasonably well, though I’d still need to show her what might be helpful to write down with new problem types. 

But, still, it was taking so long. Much longer than could be understood by me given her previous math pace. I decided to see how she liked Alcumus, which is the free adaptive program by AOPS for online problems. She loved this system. She would work the problems on a small whiteboard, get immediate feedback as to whether her answer was correct, and if she knew the material then she could move on after only a handful of problems. She started flying through at the pace I’ve come to expect of her. I found the Alcumus problems to be mostly along the lines of the regular problems in the book, even with the challenge level adjusted up (which you can do in the settings), so I decided to also give her a small selection of the challenge problems, but I’d learned from watching her on Alcumus that this would go better if I copied them out so she was only seeing one problem at a time. There’s something about seeing a whole group of problems with no white space that seems to have been what was derailing her when using the book.

Back to the Epsilon Camp goal, her options to substantiate having completed Algebra were to take an approved online class or to take the camp’s Algebra test. The Kid decided she didn’t want entry to hinge on a single test, so we signed her up for the AOPS Intro to Algebra class. This would mean repeating several chapters, but she was ok with that to get to the eventual goal. 

So, she started the class. The online classes from AOPS are 100% text-based. No video, no audio, just text on the screen from the instructor and students for about 90 minutes. Those turned out to be a barrier for my daughter instead of a help. She found the format so unengaging that she was constantly answering a question, spacing out while waiting for the instructor to push the answers through, and then missing when they moved on because there was nothing except text scrolling on a screen to indicate it was time to tune back in. The workload was also much higher, but most of it did not add substantial depth. In addition to the relevant Alcumus sections, she needed to do about 10 other problems about the same level as Alcumus, plus one problem along the lines of a Challenge Problem, plus one writing problem. This actually meant she was doing far more problems than she was with me, but fewer challenge problems. The writing problem is an amazing aspect of the online class, and was definitely a worthwhile experience. For that, students have to solve one challenging problem, and write up a full explanation of how to solve the problem. The task of writing out the full thought process is one that isn’t usually given in math classes until much higher levels, and really stretches a student’s ability to mathematically. The writing problem is graded for both math content and style by actual people, who give both a grade and written feedback on the solution. 

The Kid did finish the class, because we knew the official grade would be helpful to her. However, I do not foresee her taking online AOPS classes in the future. Going forward, we’ll combine the books and Alcumus in ways that work for her.