How to Get Richard on Art of Problem Solving Alcumus

ne of the coolest things currently offered on the Fine art of Problem Solving website is our gratuitous adaptive learning arrangement, Alcumus.

We created information technology over 10 years ago, because nosotros wanted to learn more than about how students learn.

At AoPS, we're always refining our courses and materials—and x years ago, our founders were especially curious about how students more often than not interact with mathematics. What's the best way to get students to do tackling challenging material? What material exercise they struggle with? How much practise students better as they do different topics?

What better way to answer these questions than by using machine learning to larn virtually learning??

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The first version of Alcumus came from some lofty goals. Back and then, we thought it was going to be a learning machine that provided kids with problems, letting them learn exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed information technology. Simply nosotros before long realized our initial method for doing this was not really what works best for learners.

In fact, the most important thing we learned with our early version of Alcumus was about how students interacted with the system overall. What nosotros learned immune us to build the current system, a better Alcumus, where more than 120,000 students take answered 35 million problems and counting.

How did Alcumus become so big? Read on!

First, why phone call it "Alcumus"?

When brainstorming name ideas, Richard Rusczyk and the other AoPS founders wanted a proper name that had some meaning, just also started with the letter A, so it'd naturally testify up at the acme of lists. This mattered back in the aboriginal days of Google's infancy, when being at the top of an alphabetized Yahoo list was the best mode to show how important you were.

Perhaps not-so-obviously, Alcumus was the result. Alcumus, sometimes also spelled 'Alkimos' or 'Alcimus,' was the male parent of Mentor, the character in Homer'southward Odyssey who looks out for Odysseus'southward son and guides him as he grows upwardly. (Yup, Mentor in the Odyssey is where the word "mentor" comes from.) With this fancy pedigree, Alcumus the Learning Tool was built-in.

Why create Alcumus in the first place?

AoPS has always been committed to providing the accented best education for students. We were already good at writing textbooks, teaching online classes, and creating interesting homework problems, and we were hoping that Alcumus would provide insights most how to make fifty-fifty better tools for learning and practise in the future.

We thought Alcumus was amazing, and we were actually excited about what we (and our students) would learn from it. Nosotros had collected a lot of problems, and we started with the system designed to adjust as information technology learned more about the students.

The very offset thing we realized was that this scattershot approach was a truly terrible way to try and teach actual humans.

Those first students who used the first version of Alcumus hated feeling like they were afloat in a sea of math. Nosotros weren't giving them the guidance they needed to solve challenging problems. Even after they were able to answer two or three easier problems in a row, we needed to show them how to move to harder ones.

Instead of standing to answer questions, many of these first students but gave up using Early on Alcumus.

The truth is…it's a rare middle- or high-school student who's willing to play a random organization long plenty that the machine learning surroundings can begin to select less random, more tailored questions for them.

Today's Alcumus is much better than the early version—for reasons y'all might not await.

The reason Early on Alcumus didn't piece of work as well as nosotros'd hoped was an interesting problem as a consequence of the difference in how automobile learning works compared to how humans sympathise things.

Intuitively, yous probably know that math works by building i concept on top of another. If yous don't know what the distributive holding is, for example, you lot're going to struggle with factorization. You lot don't need to effort those issues to know that you lot'll also struggle with the topics that come afterward that, too. Early Alcumus didn't have that structure.

Instead, Early Alcumus treated all math topics equally isolated islands, trying a little of everything until it discovered what students did or didn't know. Information technology takes a long time for a unmarried person to provide enough information for a system like that to piece of work properly!

On top of that, math doesn't exist as topics you larn isolated from each other. Some problems only work after a student has been exposed to multiple concepts, and if all topics are treated every bit islands, there'due south no way for a car to know when to show those problems.

The solution to this was to create a map. Math is a complex, interconnected web of topics, but those topics still have an order to them. Students nevertheless master math topics in Alcumus by solving problems that conform to their ability level by getting more challenging every bit they learn. Only instead of starting with the entirety of the math sea as an option, the Alcumus arrangement explores abilities in logically related topics.

Later students choose a topic, Alcumus gives them different problems based on their individual skills and abilities. Each problem has a clear and detailed solution that can include links to readings in our textbooks, or videos where Richard or an AoPS team fellow member explains the necessary concept. For instance, you can watch videos on why nosotros calculate the expanse of a circle the fashion we practice, or how to detect the least common multiple of a set up of numbers.

Alcumus is an extension of the Art of Trouble Solving philosophy.

We're hither to teach bright students who take the potential to go along to solve some of tomorrow's biggest problems. This means that a central part of our job is making sure they develop the skills and the internal motivation they'll need to tackle those challenging problems.

Yes, math is one of the skills they'll need.

But they as well demand marvel and determination to work on hard issues, plus perseverance to keep trying after they've gotten a problem wrong. That's why Alcumus allows students to submit wrong answers earlier it'll let them give up and view the solution to a problem. Even if they select a topic focus that shows them problems way beyond their current abilities, Alcumus however has them give it a try earlier it shows them the right answer. And if a educatee makes a mistake, Alcumus lets them endeavor again.

You can see how this works by testing out Alcumus yourself; it's free to use for everyone, not just AoPS students!

Remember about your typical day and the work y'all practise—how frequently do other people wait you to answer a particular question exactly once, and to requite an respond that'southward 100% right on the first endeavour?

That's part of why Alcumus lets students answer questions more than once if needed. After all, we're asking students to solve difficult problems—and since we're actually challenging them, we know they won't get everything right on the first attempt.

Learning that mistakes are part of the process is one of the most important lessons that our students learn from Alcumus.

Developing persistence can be an especially vital lesson for vivid learners, who may exist seeing material that makes them struggle for the very first time. Yet many learning systems out in that location weren't built to help students overcome unhealthy degrees of perfectionism. Even worse, some of these learning systems end up reinforcing those tendencies, by rewarding students based solely on their speed or accurateness. Alcumus, on the other hand, has an achievement that students can just earn by answering questions right on the 2nd try.

At Art of Problem Solving, we expect that our students volition experience some frustration while they learn. We want them to master hard things and we know that temporary frustration is an of import office of the learning process. Alcumus is a natural extension of that pedagogical philosophy.

What's today's Alcumus like?

Equally we keep improving Alcumus, we've worked to brand sure that our students like using information technology. It wasn't plenty to eliminate busywork. Because we want students to enjoy solving hard problems, we gamified Alcumus with badges and quests that make it fun (and a bit addictive!) to keep learning math.

One of the things we added that helped students primary their math skills was a map of math topics. This was a major improvement from Early on Alcumus! Intentionally determining where each topic fit into the big-motion picture sequence of subjects was a huge step toward improving the educatee experience.

As more and more than students accept used Alcumus, we've discovered once more and once again that all our students are unique. Some of them accept gaps in their math knowledge that nosotros weren't expecting. Past mapping all thirteen thousand problems (and counting!) on Alcumus to unlike curriculum areas, nosotros've helped students see how the math they're learning in one expanse supports their agreement of another. After all, i of the things that makes education math so cute is how ane topic or set of skills builds on another.

That'southward why in that location's not one single, correct path for students to have through Alcumus. They don't just start in Prealgebra and respond a sure number of questions before progressing through Algebra, Counting & Probability, so on.

Alcumus is full of branches and options, depending on what a pupil does or doesn't know. For example, in that location are many possible ways for students to learn how to solve a question about exponents. Alcumus lets them follow their marvel and movement from one problem to some other, related trouble. If they want to jump to a completely unlike topic, they can do that too!

It also gives them chances to learn new skills by showing them issues that are related to, just not exactly like, the ones they've already seen. Alcumus can also be fix to a particular difficulty level, which means that educatee'southward won't see actually, really hard bug unless they specifically ask for them or have sought out the challenge. They take to enquire for them by setting the level to "Insanely Hard" (which is an actual difficulty setting)–or they excel THAT much as they progress through the organization.

Who should play Alcumus?

Alcumus has problems suitable for students studying Prealgebra, Algebra, Geometry, Discrete Math, Probability, or Number Theory. Its problems are also specifically tailored as do for the post-obit AoPS courses and their corresponding textbooks:

• Prealgebra ane
• Prealgebra 2
• Introduction to Algebra A
• Introduction to Algebra B
• Introduction to Counting & Probability
• Introduction to Number Theory
• Introduction to Geometry
• Intermediate Algebra
• Precalculus

You don't have to exist an AoPS student to utilize Alcumus, though—information technology's entirely free, and even has dashboards that teachers and tutors can use to track their students' progress in the organization.

Alcumus can exist a great supplement to regular math courses, in the aforementioned manner that it pairs and so nicely with our own courses. It too works particularly well as enrichment for students who don't experience challenged by their regular coursework. Using a tool similar Alcumus tin can also help parents exam the waters on providing boosted educational opportunities for their kids.

There almost equally many ways to employ Alcumus as there are Alcumus users, and we're proud that all the work that'southward gone into making it has fabricated it the helpful tool it is today

Do yous use Alcumus? Tell u.s.a.—tweet @AoPSNews, or annotate on our Facebook page!

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Source: https://artofproblemsolving.com/blog/articles/what-is-alcumus-why-we-called-it-that

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