a belated review of math academy: cleared 90% of foundations ii course & unsubscribed!!
if you're not familiar, math academy is a paid (expensive) subscription platform that teaches math from fourth grade to advanced college coursework like multivariable calculus or math for machine learning. (more info on the courses here.) i found it on r/learnmath, and after trying out a couple of other free resources i ended up sticking with math academy. here's my post about the first foundations course.
tl;dr: i had a very positive opinion of math academy until moving to textbooks, after unsubscribing. i now have an ambivalent opinion of math academy. no longer plan to resubscribe for later courses, but i would recommend it circumstantially.
it's a great option for the bridge between khan academy and textbooks:
it's more incentivizing (immediate results!),
easy to study in short bursts (average lesson is like 10-ish mins),
feels wonderfully productive (they use an SRS so i feel like i'm really retaining everything), &
you can see the progress made every day (with a % to course completion!)
there are massive downsides (especially comp to textbooks):
it's not worth the cost. following their guidance - "We recommend targeting about 30XP per day, 4 days per week" - would've amounted to $750 for this course. it's emphatically not worth that cost, or even a quarter of that, with how many free resources are available online.
(1 XP per minute, 7k XP total for me, $50/month = $750 total.)
it felt more thorough than any other resource initially, as i was learning so much & so quickly, but i did not leave the site with demonstrable success in algebra, precalculus, or probability & combinatorics.
some results after finishing 90% of foundations ii:
glanced through Precalculus with Calculus Previews by Dennis G. Zill and Jacqueline M. Dewar (recommended by Susan Rigetti's guide) & i was almost wholly unfamiliar with two chapters: most of conic sections (ellipse, hyperbola, rotation of axes), and polar coordinates (incl parametric equations). most of the textbook was familiar, with many sections needing lots of additional review/practice.
took the diagnostic test in Calculus: Early Transcendentals by James Stewart (rec'd by SR's guide) & got a 45%. the test covered some algebra, analytic geometry, functions, and trig.
i was familiar with a lot of the early chapters in Stewart's Calculus from math academy, though i've been demonstrably weak on algebra & trig.
i'm posting this a month into my calculus ii class, for context. so far, the journey has been
(a) khan academy until 8th grade [link to tag]
(b) about a month or two of trying lecture videos + workbooks
(c) math academy's foundations i and most of ii
(d) Stewart's Calculus chapters one through four
(e) a 98% on my first calculus ii exam
i don't necessarily regret math academy, but if i could go back i would supplement with an advanced algebra textbook to grow my stamina for textbook study. i don't plan to resubscribe at any point for their other classes, though i would be open to other subscription services. (i've been tempted by calcworkshop! and chad's prep for chemistry.)
