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How do people (parents?) use AOPS? In terms of logistics is it like after-school math tutoring? All in-person at their campuses or is there online?

akhilcacharya 8y ago
No idea about other folks, but the folks I knew that did it had an after school thing. I feel bad for never taking part, but then again it's possible I was never cut out for it.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  Are you sure you weren't talking about your school's math club? Art of Problem Solving is mostly an online thing.
sincerely 8y ago
I took some AoPS classes in middle school, they were entirely online - 2 (? maybe 1 or 3?) hour online lesson once a week with weekly problem sets as well (10 questions, the last few very hard). This was almost a decade ago so things may have changed
- saagarjha 8y ago
  They were doing essentially the same thing five years ago when I was taking them. Some of my later classes moved away from the weekly problem set to assigning problems on Alcumus.
gbear605 8y ago
It’s mostly online, but there are also learning centers at which you can take classes. I believe the a lot of users are home school students. Many are students for whom their school’s math curriculum is too easy. AoPS is used heavily by students competing in things like the math olympiad. In addition to math, AoPS teaches two computer science courses in Python, which are roughly equal to first semester of college computer science. The teaching is both an online lecture and reading from a textbook, as well as office hours and supplmentary videos. There is also homework, which is graded and gets long responses, of the type that usually takes the grader 10+ minutes to write. Source: used to grade Python homework for AoPS; I should not be considered speaking for AoPS and I may be incorrect about some of this as I never was a student.
pps43 8y ago
I bought their books and got my kids to go through them, in order, solving problems along the way. This proved to be very effective, both in my subjective opinion and based on the results of the standardized tests. Those books are head and shoulders above any school textbook I've seen in the US.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  > Those books are head and shoulders above any school textbook I've seen in the US. Most textbooks seem to like to have stupid things like "math connections to the real world" and large pictures of unrelated topics in a desperate attempt to appear relevant, all the while serving up repetitive problems that are a copy of an example so that teachers and students can just look back at them without really understanding what they're doing. Personally, I think it's really hard to use books like this in the classroom as it's structured currently because it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class.
  - pps43 8y ago
    > it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class. It's really sad, for two reasons. First, most problems in most AoPS books are solvable (or at least should be) for most of the class, especially if you exclude problems marked with asterisks. They're not that different from old Soviet or Polish math textbooks, and pretty much everyone was supposed to be able to solve that. Second, having only problems that everyone in the class can solve means that nobody in the class advances much. You can't learn to run 5k by walking 5k.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > if you exclude problems marked with asterisks Those are the problems I'm talking about ;)

akhilcacharya 8y ago

No idea about other folks, but the folks I knew that did it had an after school thing. I feel bad for never taking part, but then again it's possible I was never cut out for it.

saagarjha 8y ago
Are you sure you weren't talking about your school's math club? Art of Problem Solving is mostly an online thing.

sincerely 8y ago

I took some AoPS classes in middle school, they were entirely online - 2 (? maybe 1 or 3?) hour online lesson once a week with weekly problem sets as well (10 questions, the last few very hard). This was almost a decade ago so things may have changed

saagarjha 8y ago
They were doing essentially the same thing five years ago when I was taking them. Some of my later classes moved away from the weekly problem set to assigning problems on Alcumus.

gbear605 8y ago

It’s mostly online, but there are also learning centers at which you can take classes. I believe the a lot of users are home school students. Many are students for whom their school’s math curriculum is too easy. AoPS is used heavily by students competing in things like the math olympiad. In addition to math, AoPS teaches two computer science courses in Python, which are roughly equal to first semester of college computer science. The teaching is both an online lecture and reading from a textbook, as well as office hours and supplmentary videos. There is also homework, which is graded and gets long responses, of the type that usually takes the grader 10+ minutes to write. Source: used to grade Python homework for AoPS; I should not be considered speaking for AoPS and I may be incorrect about some of this as I never was a student.

pps43 8y ago

I bought their books and got my kids to go through them, in order, solving problems along the way. This proved to be very effective, both in my subjective opinion and based on the results of the standardized tests. Those books are head and shoulders above any school textbook I've seen in the US.

saagarjha 8y ago
> Those books are head and shoulders above any school textbook I've seen in the US. Most textbooks seem to like to have stupid things like "math connections to the real world" and large pictures of unrelated topics in a desperate attempt to appear relevant, all the while serving up repetitive problems that are a copy of an example so that teachers and students can just look back at them without really understanding what they're doing. Personally, I think it's really hard to use books like this in the classroom as it's structured currently because it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class.
- pps43 8y ago
  > it's considered a bad thing to have problems that are essentially unsolvable for most of the class. It's really sad, for two reasons. First, most problems in most AoPS books are solvable (or at least should be) for most of the class, especially if you exclude problems marked with asterisks. They're not that different from old Soviet or Polish math textbooks, and pretty much everyone was supposed to be able to solve that. Second, having only problems that everyone in the class can solve means that nobody in the class advances much. You can't learn to run 5k by walking 5k.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > if you exclude problems marked with asterisks Those are the problems I'm talking about ;)