Shows
The OpenEd PodcastStop Trying to Make Your Kid Love Math | Math AcademyYour kid doesn't need to love math. They need to stop being taught wrong.Jason Roberts coached a 4th-grade math team at a public school. By 7th grade, those kids were doing calculus - 6 years ahead of schedule. His teaching philosophy comes down to one question: how did you teach your kid to tie their shoes?Jason Roberts and Justin Skycak (Math Academy) break down why lectures fail, how spaced repetition prevents forgetting, and what adaptive math learning actually looks like under the hood. Read the full blog post: https://opened.co/blog...
2026-02-2658 min
Math Academy#7, Part 2 – Earning the Right to Scale0:00 - Introduction2:18 - Building infrastructure to handle increasing load3:41 - Bringing on AWS expertise to robustify the backend4:22 - An overloaded database enters a new realm of physics5:50 - Prioritizing execution over perfection in start-ups6:33 - Paying the bill for accumulated infrastructure debt7:53 - Improving job prioritization of the task processor9:52 - Benefits of scaling organically11:42 - Wisdom is the result of failures12:18 - There is no substitute for experience13:17 - Focusing on solving problems, not advertising14:48...
2026-02-191h 14Math Academy#7, Part 1 – 2025 in Review: Content Production0:00 - Introduction3:57 - Added 115 “Missing Middle” topics to SAT Prep6:06 - Integrating the SAT Missing Middle topics into other courses9:42 - Added tens of thousands of free response questions10:34 - Free response questions are useful because they don’t prime you13:33 - When to use free response vs. multiple choice questions14:54 - Too many free response questions taxes learners16:39 - Limiting the length of free response answers18:08 - Building infrastructure for free response questions was a beast20:42 - SAT test prep course...
2026-02-101h 08Math Academy#6, Part 3 – Learning Debt and Skill InsolvencyWhat we covered:The dangers of accumulating learning debt: the gap between what you can do and what you need to be able to do.If you miss building up your foundational skills in school or sports, you can get by for a while. You develop some compensatory strategies, like favoring your forehand over your backhand, or using ChatGPT to write all your school essays.But learning debt is like any other kind of debt: it accrues interest and eventually comes due. Over time, the workarounds become more complex. The cognitive load increases. You start avoiding situations that...
2026-01-2851 min
The Report Card with Nat MalkusMath Academy (with Jason Roberts and Justin Skycak)Can students learn math much faster than they typically do? Can students who feel like they have hit a wall in math instruction make steady progress again? And can math instruction be successfully delivered online through a platform that doesn’t even use video?Math Academy, an online learning platform that is serious about math instruction, is built on the premise that the answer to all of these questions is yes: An adaptive learning platform that carefully determines what students already know and what they don’t know yet can radically improve math instruction for many students—and ca...
2026-01-141h 20Math Academy#6, Part 2 – On The Rails and Out Of ScopeWhat we covered:– The benefits of short problems. Math Academy problems typically take only a minute or two. This way, students can stay on the rails with lots of reps, successfully building up complexity instead of getting crushed by it from the start.– What goes wrong in college math classes: they tend not to scaffold content very well, forcing students to build their own bridges across knowledge & skill gaps. Weekly problem sets often consist of a handful of hour-long problems that instructors hope students will “self-scaffold” up to. In reality, what happens more often is that stu...
2026-01-141h 16Math Academy#6, Part 1 – Why Can’t College Students Do Middle School Math?What we covered:– A recent report from the University of California San Diego revealed that 1 in 12 incoming freshmen were not proficient in middle school math – basically, anything above arithmetic with fractions. Their existing remedial math course was too advanced for these students, so they had to design even lower remedial remedial math courses. Even crazier, over a quarter of these students had a perfect 4.0 GPA in their high school math courses.– It’s not just UCSD. This is everywhere. A similar thing happened at Harvard, too, having to add remedial support to their entry-level calculus courses...
2026-01-031h 04Math Academy#5, Part 2 – Getting Kids To Do Hard ThingsWhat we covered:– Most kids are not intrinsically motivated to do the hard things: practice their soccer drills, do their math homework, eat their broccoli. Getting them to do the hard things often requires gamification and/or incentives.– A little gamification goes a long way. Jason gamified drills for his kids’ soccer team to get the most out of each practice (e.g., “zombie attack”), and it was unreasonably effective. XP and leaderboards on Math Academy are also unreasonably effective.– A good incentive can change kids' behavior overnight. The incentive doesn’t need to be big; it...
2025-12-181h 41Math Academy#5, Part 1 – Building Without BloatWhat we covered:– Any successful endeavor requires a great team: capable people, who like and trust each other, and have complementary skillsets and ways of thinking. Some modes of thinking cannot be performed at the same time within a single brain.– Accountability requires control. You can’t hold someone responsible for outcomes unless you also give them control over the system that produces those outcomes (though you can set reasonable operational boundaries).– Solve today’s problems today. Smart people can invent endless hypotheticals and build giant solutions to fake problems. Not only does this waste...
2025-12-111h 16Math Academy#4, Part 2 – Knowledge Graph Engineering: Mental Models & War StoriesWhat we covered:– Building a knowledge graph is like city planning & road construction. Too many prerequisites leading into a single topic creates a cognitive traffic jam.– Elegantly rewiring a live knowledge graph: the evolution of our tooling and automatic validations. How to avoid staging servers & migrations and NOT have it blow up in your face.– UI work takes time and adds complexity, so we spend it on the customer. Internal tools are almost entirely command-line; clickable buttons are for customers.– Justin's transition from research coding to real-time systems. He started with mathy, n...
2025-12-031h 20Math Academy#4, Part 1 – The Unreasonable Effectiveness of the Knowledge GraphWhat we covered:– Why “problem solving” is often just a vague label people use when they haven’t explicitly enumerated the underlying skills, and how those skills can in fact be exhaustively mapped in a knowledge graph.– How to approach research problems: Alex's PhD journey, top-down familiarity vs bottom-up mastery.– If you have natural talent, use it, but not as a crutch, otherwise you'll stunt your long-term development. Don't turn your blessing into a curse.– The story behind building our SAT prep curriculum: realizing that the standard school curriculum leaves a massive “missi...
2025-11-251h 22Math Academy#3 – Waging War on Mediocrity: Tales From the TrenchesWhat we covered:-- How bureaucracies instinctively reject new ideas like an immune system attacking a foreign organ, and what it takes to keep your project from being "spit out." Concrete example: how Jason & Sandy muscled past institutional resistance to get 8th graders passing AP Calc BC.-- Every system inevitably decays into mediocrity unless someone fights to keep the standards high. The way you keep people, systems, and projects moving is by "horsing" them forward. Concrete example: how Justin kept 8th graders passing AP Calc BC, and what it looks like when a school...
2025-11-182h 29Math Academy#2 – Teach Like Your Life Depends On It0:00 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 1)5:47 - Find Your North Star: Why Justin Quit His Data Science Job to do Math Tutoring Full Time11:23 - Getting "Inside the Trade"19:31 - What Would a Tutor Do, If Their Life Depended On It? (Part 2)27:28 - Efficient Learning Techniques are Obvious if You Think About Athletics33:45 - Enjoyment is a Second-Order Optimization39:50 - We Need to Stay Hardcore, But Become Less Harsh51:14 - Math Academy is Like "Yuri's Gym"59:06...
2025-11-042h 42Math Academy#1 – The Long Game: Building Minds and Machines0:00 - Introduction4:00 - Applying the MA Way to X Growth7:40 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 1)25:50 - Jason's Near-Infinite List of Important Things34:20 - The ML Course Has Been a Massive Undertaking42:10 - Breadth-First Development44:30 - Status of the ML Course and its Kick-Ass Coding Projects (Part 2)50:15 - Why Math Academy Needs To Do a CS Course56:45 - The Never-Ending Stream of Confusion1:00:30 - The Story of Eurisko, the Most Advanced Math/CS Track in...
2025-11-032h 36
Chalk & TalkThe case for practice and the power of Math Corps with Alex Kontorovich (Ep 52)In this episode, Anna Stokke has an engaging conversation Dr. Alex Kontorovich, a math professor at Rutgers University with a strong passion for math outreach. They explore why practice in math is often undervalued compared to disciplines like music or sports. They also discuss Math Corps, which is a summer math program for kids that combines evidence-based learning strategies with high expectations. Alex recently founded a Math Corps chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The episode wraps up with a lively discussion about A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart, sparked by a comment from a listener. Whether you're a t...
2025-07-281h 16Chalk & TalkThe case for practice and the power of Math Corps with Alex Kontorovich (Ep 52)In this episode, Anna Stokke has an engaging conversation Dr. Alex Kontorovich, a math professor at Rutgers University with a strong passion for math outreach. They explore why practice in math is often undervalued compared to disciplines like music or sports. They also discuss Math Corps, which is a summer math program for kids that combines evidence-based learning strategies with high expectations. Alex recently founded a Math Corps chapter in New Brunswick, New Jersey. The episode wraps up with a lively discussion about A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart, sparked by a comment from a listener. Whether you're a t...
2025-07-281h 16
Chalk & TalkMath Academy: Optimizing student learning with Alex Smith and Justin Skycak (Ep 42)Join Anna Stokke in conversation with Dr. Alex Smith, Director of Curriculum, and Justin Skycak, Director of Analytics, from Math Academy. Math Academy is an AI-powered online learning platform designed around science of learning principles. They discuss Bloom's 2 sigma problem and explore how Math Academy aims to address it. They also explain how the platform leverages knowledge graphs to support mastery learning and highlight key instructional strategies such as worked examples, spaced practice, and the testing effect.
They explore how Math Academy manages cognitive load to optimize learning as well as its success with adult learners and ad...
2025-02-281h 14Chalk & TalkMath Academy: Optimizing student learning with Alex Smith and Justin Skycak (Ep 42)Join Anna Stokke in conversation with Dr. Alex Smith, Director of Curriculum, and Justin Skycak, Director of Analytics, from Math Academy. Math Academy is an AI-powered online learning platform designed around science of learning principles. They discuss Bloom's 2 sigma problem and explore how Math Academy aims to address it. They also explain how the platform leverages knowledge graphs to support mastery learning and highlight key instructional strategies such as worked examples, spaced practice, and the testing effect.
They explore how Math Academy manages cognitive load to optimize learning as well as its success with adult learners and ad...
2025-02-281h 14
The Road to Reading PodcastS3E14: Discussing Cognitive Science with Justin SkycakIn this episode, Justin Skycak, Chief Quant, Director of Analytics at MathAcademy.com will walk us through some principles of cognitive science and how they can help us think about planning our instruction and planning practice for our students.Show Notes:Road to Reading WebpageSoR Resource PageSeason 2-episodesSeason 3-episodes
2025-02-141h 37
Scraping Bits#137 - Justin Skycak: Learning Math Is Hard, Proof Writing, Which Order To Learn Math Your Host, DeGatchi:https://x.com/DeGatchi DeGatchi's Website:https://degatchi.com Follow Scraping Bits on Twitter:https://x.com/scrapingbits Guest Speaker:https://x.com/justinskycakKeywords: mathematics, math, game theory, calculus, linear algebra, category theory, signal processing, statistics, probability, solo auditor, public auditing platforms, private audits, scalability, freedom, Scraping Bits podcast, blockchain technology, audit industry, flashbots, reverse engineering, cybersecurity, infosec, mev, mev bot, quant.
2025-02-072h 45
The CS Primer ShowE23: MathAcademy and the efficient pursuit of masteryThere's something about MathAcademy that just works for learning math (for both kids and adults - ask Reddit!), and we're chatting with Justin Skycak - Chief Quant & Director of Analytics at MathAcademy - to try to figure it out.Shownotes:justinmath.com -- Justin's personal websitemathacademy.com3blue1brownCell biology by the numbersExecuteProgramStar Trek 2009The Math Academy Way -- Math Academy's working draft book, authored by Justin, which answers the following questions: What techniques exist to maximize student learning and talent development, particularly in the context of math? Why are these techniques so impactful, and if...
2025-01-2048 minScraping Bits#116 - Justin Skycak: Essential Math For Machine Learning, Math Intuition + Creativity, Proof Vs Computation
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Keywords: math, mathematics, solo auditor, public auditing platforms, private audits, scalability, freedom, Scraping Bits podcast, blockchain technology, audit industry, flashbots, reverse engineering, cybersecurity, infosec, mev, mev bot, quant.
2024-11-132h 42Scraping Bits#107 - Justin Skycak: Proof Writing, Discovering Math, Expert Systems, Learning Math Like A Language
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Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Keywords: math, mathematics, solo auditor, public auditing platforms, private audits, scalability, freedom, Scraping Bits podcast, blockchain technology, audit industry, flashbots, reverse engineering, cybersecurity, infosec, mev, mev bot, quant.
2024-10-011h 37Scraping Bits#102 - Justin Skycak: Learning Mathematics Like An Athlete
Follow Scraping Bits on Twitter: https://x.com/scrapingbits
Your Host, DeGatchi: https://x.com/DeGatchi
Guest Speaker: https://x.com/justinskycak
Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
https://x.com/ComposableFin
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Keywords: math, mathematics, solo auditor, public auditing platforms, private audits, scalability, freedom, Scraping Bits podcast, blockchain technology, audit industry, flashbots, reverse engineering, cybersecurity, infosec, mev, mev bot, quant.
2024-09-1757 min