My ds is 12yo and in a public school, and we have up until now not made use of electronic/online math resources. However, I ran into an iPad Trigonometry book published by School Yourself in the Apple iBooks store earlier this month and decided to try it out on him. The book cost $5, and School Yourself is a small start up run by a few MIT grads. The book consists of a mix of text, interactive figures/demos and lectures with verbal explanations combined with animated derivations, etc. There are exercises as well - when you type your answer in the provided box and submit, you are instantly told if your answer is correct. If not, you can try again. Ds had been through Algebra 1 last year at school, and started the Trig book earlier this month. He has worked through almost the entire book already and has gained a good conceptual grasp of the topics covered - he is now on the last chapter. And he is begging for the next book, Calculus, due out in October.
Perhaps good electronic math resources are plentiful - we haven't really looked into them before - but we were impressed with this one. One difference from standard textbooks (he had the one by McDougall Littel last year) is that the number of exercises is limited. For us, this is a welcome change from the endless nightly math homework he gets at school; however, a companion workbook would be desirable at some point to help develop fluency.
Last edited by amylou; 08/30/12 12:18 PM.
