I have always tried to encourage her to write everything down in gory detail on paper, with variable levels of success. I think in the past she was too impatient and often tried to leap ahead to the answer (making mistakes). At last she is doing what I have always wanted her to do, going slowly line by line, and she seems very happy about it!

I expect it would be different if she was attacking the more elementary problems, and then she may well have typed it in directly. She has only started using it at the sine rule and cosine rule section, which I guess is towards the more advanced end of things.

– My daughter is very fortunate to have someone (me!) to check her results at times of doubt, but obviously by far the majority of children are on their own when at home. I can really see the value in the software like yours and MS to give reassurance.

I am dying to know if your daughter still first does everything on paper (I am guessing double-checking her work) and *then* enters it into MS.

Here is why I am so curious: my app differs from MS in that I leave (almost*) no trace of student errors. My reasoning is that I want kids to feel completely free to err.

Freedom to err does two things. First, it should reduce math anxiety. I waffle with “should” because I thought your daughter’s experience showed the opposite, but now I recall that MS keeps a record of mistakes. So maybe it confirms my hunch. Second, and somewhat related, some of us like to learn by trial and error. (You should see me coding.) Would I still have trial-and-error in my learner’s toolkit if all my thrashing is recorded? I might not have math anxiety when I started, but I might develop it!

In my corporate work I have seen users take two months to trust the software after a serious screwup caused it to start delivering seriously bad answers. I was the director of development but patiently fielded double-checks from agents until they themselves believed things were fixed.

So I am curious if your daughter decides to give MS a second chance (at direct entry of solutions) or if she is just not going to go there again.

* (I just thought of one — when they pass a mission the medal they get reflects whether they got a perfect score or got one or two wrong (you know, gold/silver/bronze). But no one can see their mistakes.

Six day turnaround? Is that the best you can do?

(Uh-oh. I have some competition.)

Seriously, that is wonderful work. Six days proves you have a great team and a great code base. I already knew you were dedicated to quality math instruction.

I *seriously* have some competition.

If an educator wants to know what it is like developing hard software that worries a lot about the user, I decided yesterday to chronicle just one of the bug reports I got from QA: http://stuckonalgebra.blogspot.com/2014/09/bug-story.html

Still recovering. :)

-kt

http://somup.com/c2QoiN1Qc

As you can see we’ll now break such an answer down into individual lines for the user to maintain best mathematical practice, while at the same time making sure first time users don’t get frustrated.

We have some very talented people, very committed to the cause of improving Math education through best pedagogy and best use of technology. So please do keep the feedback coming (preferably through the feedback button on our app so we don’t hijack this post). We’re listening and we move fast.

Just to let you know how we’ve acted on the feedback in this blog, in the last two weeks Mathspace has added these features:

* Students can communicate directly with teachers from within a problem – check
* We prefix introduction to Equations with n= [ ] so students still coming to grips with the topic are not confused by the input requirements – check
* We allow users to enter equations in a single line and still be able to grade all their input in correct mathematical format – check
* Students entering an irrelevant step such as 1+1=2 are now given the message “This step is not needed” instead of being graded as incorrect.

And as always, teachers can see all a student’s shown work – all intermediate steps that a student writes – and this data is summarized into simple, insightful reports, identifying problem areas so teachers can intervene with students as they see fit.

Please keep the feedback coming, more than anything else this is what helps us improve every day.

Regards
Daniel Tu-Hoa, on behalf of Mathspace

You are right – it does look like a good introduction is key to the whole thing and, like your guy needed on the phone, the more sophisticated, human-like the advice, the better.

Back in the 90’s when I sold a desktop version the 800 number for support was tied to my home number. An older guy had decided to learn Algebra, bought my app, and had called to tell me how useless it was. The manual was no help, it seemed.

I walked him through the app for like thirty minutes and he felt better. Called back the next day to tell me how amazing was the application.

We can make learning curves short, and I am trying to create an app now that does not have one (by warning, prompting, catching mistakes — as does MS) but I will not achieve that until the end of the pilot process at best.

Speaking of prepping students for math software, here is a CC professor introducing distance learning students to MyMathLab. https://www.youtube.com/user/billwitte111 Goes on forever, but I imagine it helps kids over the initial hurdle of a new way of doing things.

I think in three years it will seem strange to do math without software at your back, but for now it is essential these products be introduced properly to unsuspecting students.

>I was/am a hypersensitive learner myself so I feel for
>your daughter. I am curious to see if she makes a
>transition to where she becomes comfortable with failure, >simply because there are no consequences. Well, if MS >works that way.

Thanks. In terms of how MS works – it may depend how MS is set up for the students by the teacher. I have no idea, and as usual now she has the hang of Mathspace I don’t get to see anything now! I’m only called in at times of complete disaster in her mind (even though it’s usually a minor problem in reality).

>Does MS have some public scorecard showing the student >rank?

It sounds like it might do, but it’s not entirely clear. She does talk about the `scores’ of other students, but it seems more like a random selection of the others rather than a leaderboard. I’ll have to try to check if she’ll let me! I don’t think it is clear to her what exactly the scores are, which may not be a bad thing.