Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Beast Academy from AoPS

Has anyone used (or heard of, at this point) Beast Academy books from Art of Problem Solving? These books are for younger kids (AoPS refers to the audience as up and coming "math beasts"). The books are so new, they haven't published the whole series yet.

I've been using book 3C with DD8. The first part is an introduction to pre-algebra. It goes over the idea of variables, transforming sentences into equations ("Twenty four minus a number is fifteen"; "Thirty-six is a 16 less than a number.") Subsequent sections go into long division and conversions.

The books are in full-color comic book format, and the characters are all monsters. They're surprisingly readable. There are also exercise books. Some of the exercises are quite original (e.g. a perfect square maze in book 3B where you have to trace a path from beginning to end by stepping on perfect squares; PEMDAS-type problems without the exponents).

Overall, I'm pretty impressed so far at what they cover, the depth they go into, and how they explain things. Has anyone else used them?

Thanks for the review. I've got all the books in the "shopping cart" ready to order if the school doesn't give DS6 his next math acceleration.

There are a few reviews that are very complete and consistent with what you wrote on the welltrainedmind forums.

We checked these out as previewers, before they were released. My kiddo was in 3rd, but in an accelerated program (so doing 4th grade stuff). He took the pretest and already knew pretty much all of it, so I'd say that you might want to do pretests if those are available to see what level your kiddo is at. Because he knew most of the material, he wasn't so interested in testing out the problems, which looked to me to be pretty challenging. He liked the comic book format, though, and read through the unit in one sitting.

Val, any chance you can estimate the reading level of the comic books?

Hmm. Well, I'd say that my grade-skipped DD8 who's only a month into 8 can understand it pretty easily. We read the comics together and take turns speaking for different characters and it's fun for her.

SIDE NOTE

From what I've seen with AoPS (Beast Academy with DD8 and Algebra II with my eldest), it's hard to define the level the books are ostensibly set at. This is because they go into more depth than the very good textbooks I've used with my kids and WAY more depth than the typical ones that have been discussed here. In the tough questions (and there are a lot of them), all you need is algebra 1 to solve the equations. But setting them up is the hard part.

Also take the pre-algebra stuff in Beast Academy. The book spends pages discussing what variables are, how to write equations, and then how to solve basic equations for x. By "solve for x," I mean that the book has a solid explanation about why something changes sign when you move it across the equals sign.

In contrast, the "algebra" worksheets my kids bring home from school don't do that. They just want the kids to fill in for x, as in "3+x=10 x=_____." I'm not convinced that the kids are learning much by doing these worksheets. I suppose that the idea is to teach them that a letter can stand for any number. But to me, this approach is simplistic and no different from what they were doing in first grade when they were memorizing math facts and filling in "3+____=10." They don't teach the logic that's there the way that Beast Academy does. And the same types of exercises seem to persist until pre-algebra, which means that things kind of stagnate.

Val
Where would you put them on using a murderous maths scale - those aren't really textbooks, and the level of math seems to vary between late elem/early ms type. DS loves them. And DS 6 is the type who loves learning the theoretical but still working on the facts that school is sending home. And he has just soaked up the mm theory, so when he is doing those worksheets you mention and finds them so simple because he already understands about x and equations, etc. So i haven't been sure where to have him go next, would you recommend this, or would you consider it a more formal textbook replacement?

Thanks,
DeHe

Hi DeHe,

Sorry for the long response time. I haven't used Murderous Math, so it's hard to say.

The BA 3C book (3rd out of 4 books intended for 3rd graders) starts with basic pre-algebra (What's a variable? Write equations from word sentences. Move numbers across the = sign.). Then it does long division. Some of the problems the typical ones you'd find in a fourth-grade textbook. Others are definitely NOT. Examples:

• When 234 little monsters are divided equally into 9 classrooms, how many little monsters are in each classroom?
• When 41 is divided by 7, the quotient is a with remainder b. What number can be divided by 9 to get quotient b with remainder a?

The 3B book has multiplication, perfect squares, he distributive property and pages and pages of easy-to-difficult problems using all of them.

3D will be released in January and will have fractions, area, and estimation.

The books seem to have two goals: the first is to teach the basics of various operations and ideas in early mathematics. The second is to teach very young students to start thinking in the language of mathematics. Does Murderous Maths do this?

Thanks Val! And no worries about response time, is hard to keep up with it all sometmes.

MM seems to be about capturing their interest with math by showing all the cool things you can do with it. It is not a textbook but has problems to do. So it might have a similar problem but presented in a weirder way. It seems to have covered a lot of stuff in terms of theory and little in terms of math facts, which is why DS loves it. I hadn't been sure where to go next. We just got him the usbourne dictionary of chemistry ColinsMum recommended and they have a math dictionary which DS wants and I poo pooed thinking it was too hard, which of course got his back up, I do so know my math facts! So I was looking for presentation of the same stuff but in a fun non textbook way So sounds like it might be a good way to go.

DeHe