Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
New on JustinMath.com - Student Recruited by NASA with Fighter Jet Ride Signing Bonus; How To Figure Out What To Do; Every Kid Should Receive Individualized Instruction
|
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com. Here are 3 new posts: A Former Student Got Recruited By NASA With a Fighter Jet Ride as the Signing Bonus
~500 words • Matteo won 1st place ($250,000) in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, got personally recruited by the head of NASA (with a fighter jet ride as a signing bonus), and published his results, solo-author, in The Astronomical Journal.
And a new podcast: 2025 in Review: Content Production - Math Academy Podcast #7, Part 1
This is a Math Academy “Wrapped” for 2025, focusing on the content side of things. In summary, here’s the good:
– We released a Discrete Mathematics course.
– We added hundreds of “missing middle” topics to our SAT Math Fundamentals course to bridge the chasm between what’s in standard school curricula versus what’s tested on the SAT.
– We soft-launched a SAT Math Prep course that students automatically promote into after finishing the fundamentals course, where they see their estimated SAT score instead of a progress percentage, and they do even more SAT-specific training such as taking frequent mock SAT practice exams and doing rapid-fire problem practice to build up speed and comfort with all the slight variations in the ways that questions could be phrased on the test.
– We added tens of thousands of free response questions throughout our middle school and high school courses.
– We developed all the content including coding projects for our first machine learning course, to be released once the coding interface is ready. (If you’re waiting on that course and absolutely must start your ML journey right this moment, note that there’s a freely available 400+ page textbook that I wrote while teaching this stuff manually in the school program – it’s called “Introduction to Algorithms and Machine Learning.”)
Of course, we’re under no illusion that we need to ramp up our rate of course production and transition from a workshop to a factory. We started pursuing that goal last year, and while there has been much pain from hitting our heads on basically every ledge possible, we’ve learned a lot and have just recently, in the past couple weeks, hit an inflection point where the factory transition is finally coming together. As Alex summarized in a recent post on X: we’re working tirelessly to upgrade our course development pipeline, building new tools and processes to help us manage a higher volume of courses so we can increase output while maintaining the quality you've all come to expect. In particular, we’re using our nearly-finished Differential Equations course as a guinea pig to test-drive some of our new tools and processes. This is the year that Math Academy comes out of the basement and onto the factory floor.
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 - Limiting the length of free response answers
18:08 - Building infrastructure for free response questions was a beast
20:42 - SAT test prep course
22:22 - Machine Learning has been the hardest course to develop so far.
23:12 - People who know machine learning, math, and how to teach them are rare
25:06 - The Eurisko book was the best resource for developing the Machine Learning course
28:51 - Balancing repetition and computational load in Machine Learning problems
29:43 - Designing minimum viable problems for Machine Learning
33:53 - Building the infrastructure for dynamic select questions was a nightmare
36:12 - Dynamic select questions are good for proofs and university-level math
38:03 - The Differential Equations course is almost finished
40:23 - Iterating on course development to make better courses
42:00 - 2026 is the year of scaling up course production
43:03 - How to scale up the team without sacrificing course quality
44:39 - Learning the hard way about hiring too quickly
46:20 - Challenges of managing a fully remote, geographically dispersed team
48:54 - Building tools to measure company output
50:06 - Optimizing content writer performance is like optimizing student learning
52:31 - Incentivizing content creation to improve output
56:36 - Courses planned for the longer term
58:01 - You need to learn concrete computations before abstract proofs
59:32 - Why we separate university-level courses into computational vs proof-based
1:01:07 - The best textbooks for beginners are NOT the most complex
1:02:37 - Teaching proofs and computations at the same time overloads most students
1:04:16 - Intuition through repetition
1:04:49 - Wisdom is the abstract compression of lived experiences
1:07:39 - Mastering details before abstracting
Best, |
Justin Skycak
Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at Math Academy. Posts about learning, upskilling, math education, Math Academy, and more generally, stages 2-3 of Bloom's talent development process in hierarchical skill domains.
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: The Bar For Joining the Technical Workforce is Skyrocketing~150 words • ... and the bar for graduating school/college is cratering Math Trauma Isn’t Really About Math~100 words • Math trauma tends to be less about math and more about being asked to do advanced maneuvers before you've...
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: How To Compress a Grade Level’s Worth of Learning Much, Much Shorter Than a Year~100 words • Seven steps to compressing a grade level's worth of learning far below a year: diagnostic, knowledge graph, mastery before advancing, minimum effective doses of instruction and practice, spaced...
Hey! You're receiving this email because you requested to be notified about new posts at JustinMath.com.(If you've changed your mind, click here to unsubscribe, please avoid marking spam.) Here are 3 new posts: The Math Academy Prequel: Jason Roberts’s Origin Story~750 words • What do Jeff Dean, Travis Kalanick, and a 6'7", 350lb mountain man who collaborated with John Conway have in common? They're part of Jason Roberts's origin story, shared for the first time. When I took DiffEq in...