Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources Experiences with Mobymax.com?

Does anyone have experience with Mobymax math as a curriculum replacement? DD's teacher has agreed that we should try to set her up with an online math curriculum because it's just way too hard for the teacher to keep up with her, and she learns pretty well independently. A friend mentioned this site and said her kids liked it, but she was using it for enrichment only.

FWIW, DD is 8-almost-9 and needs 5th-to-6th grade math curriculum.

Yes, but their lowest-level class is Prealgebra, and I'm not convinced she's quite ready for it yet. She hasn't done much at all with decimals and hasn't worked through multiplying and dividing fractions. And some stuff like volume. She'll probably be ready for a Prealgebra I summer session.

That's what I had suggested to DD's teacher before someone mentioned MobyMax to me. When I grilled the online rep I wasn't entirely happy with some of her answers to my questions, but it does have a pretty good reputation + a cost that the school won't balk at (and it should be their expense since she'll use it at school).

One of the advantages of MobyMax seems to be that it's more adaptive, and will let DD start where she is ready to start, whereas EPGY (according to the rep I grilled last month) will make her start at the beginning of a curriculum year and work through the entire thing. So in EPGY, she'll probably have to re-do half a year of 5th grade math to get to where she "should" be.

FYI, the AoPS Pre-Algebra book covers a lot of territory, but provides a pretty full explanation of everything you need to get through it. Major prior knowledge may not be essential if your DD is feeling ready to deal with the material.

We did it with only grade 4 math, and while DS didn't know most of the topics coming in, we never needed to look elsewhere to fill in gaps: the book is quite comprehensive. If your DD is doing the work on her own schedule using text/ videos/ Alcumus (not an online course), she could take as long as she needs and so wouldn't have to worry about falling behind on sections that are new topics.

I looked at MobyMax last spring for DD6, and wasn't very impressed, at least not for what we saw in the younger level classes. It gave the answer if you asked for help or if you got a question wrong, rather than giving another question of the same kind to try again. DD was not impressed and refused to continue with it after she finished the placement test and did 2 lessons.

AoPS gets the basics covered very well with their pre-Alg book. My DD had Arithmetic with vulgar fractions down already but the AoPS class really reinforced that knowledge and cemented it into a very solid base.

An intuitive 'number sense' and soiid Arithmetic are essential prerequisites to Algebra and the AoPS class really does a good job there.

There are also Beast Academy and Alcumus there too which are free, I think. Why not just get the text and solutions books and see how your child does with them. They have a very engaging style and after a couple of weeks of hand holding my DD learned how to learn from a real Maths textbook and work through the book independently.

Best of luck!

Well, we tried MobyMax with a free account and it definitely should NOT replace curriculum. I tried it with both DD (3rd grade, 5th-grade-ish math) and DS (5) so we have been doing it at two levels. At neither level did it do a good job teaching concepts. It "introduces" new things with a very brief and sometimes simplistic explanation that didn't really impart understanding of the concept--just the procedure to solve the problem.

And with my younger child, it was easy for him to stumble accidentally into the right answer just by try-and-fail methodology because as soon as you happen upon the right answer, it moves on, instead of waiting for the child to tell you he's done working.

I'd say it's equivalent to IXL--ok for practicing procedure, some fun features, but it's not going to teach the concepts kids really need to know.

AoPS doesn't offer a curriculum between grade 4 (Beast Academy books up to 4C, with 4D coming "later this year") and Pre-Algebra.