I used to go on Khan Academy pretty often earlier this year, but now I usually learn by means of a textbook + writing down exercises in a notebook. Earned 2 Sun Badges and about 350k energy points so far, if you’re interested in hearing about some measure of progress.
It’s absolutely awesome for high school students, but it doesn’t look like it can help much past the freshman or sophomore year in college. (Then again, what the heck do I know?) If LessWrongers are, on average, as good at math as I estimate them to be, then only the youngest of us can derive much benefit from it.
I don’t think khanacademy is just for high school kids, or elementary or middle school. Everyone will forget, and almost everyone with a high school education or better will have gaps in their knowledge. Everyone seems to think that college is the end of their education, but that’s false. As with everything you learn or master, you need to practice them, and khanacademy offers periodic reviews according to the principle of spaced repetition.
So, it’s great for adults too, even if they’re only in review mode for the vast majority of their life. When they start to learn something more advanced, they don’t have to go back to elementary math or deal with the problem of knowledge gaps.
Only the youngest can derive much benefit from it? Absolutely not true.
Is what you said true even if you go into a field, or choose a major, that relies heavily on advanced math? That was what I was trying to get at. If people do much more complicated math on a daily basis, presumably they have already mastered all math topics at a high school level, unless the skills they use are much narrower than that (which, of course, might very well be true).
That’s a question that cannot be answered without looking at math major’s area of focus or their specific career of choice, of which I am ignorant about.
That being said, I don’t think a math major or a person who is in a strong math related field necessary focus on everything that requires high school mathematics. They may not touch statistics, or linear algebra as often as other area because they don’t need it in their day to day job. They may need khanacademy to reviews those area that they didn’t touch.
In a highly technical field like programming, most programmers may not need to deal anything more complicated than algebra, so they’re going to forget the more advanced aspects.
I used to go on Khan Academy pretty often earlier this year, but now I usually learn by means of a textbook + writing down exercises in a notebook. Earned 2 Sun Badges and about 350k energy points so far, if you’re interested in hearing about some measure of progress.
It’s absolutely awesome for high school students, but it doesn’t look like it can help much past the freshman or sophomore year in college. (Then again, what the heck do I know?) If LessWrongers are, on average, as good at math as I estimate them to be, then only the youngest of us can derive much benefit from it.
I don’t think khanacademy is just for high school kids, or elementary or middle school. Everyone will forget, and almost everyone with a high school education or better will have gaps in their knowledge. Everyone seems to think that college is the end of their education, but that’s false. As with everything you learn or master, you need to practice them, and khanacademy offers periodic reviews according to the principle of spaced repetition.
So, it’s great for adults too, even if they’re only in review mode for the vast majority of their life. When they start to learn something more advanced, they don’t have to go back to elementary math or deal with the problem of knowledge gaps.
Only the youngest can derive much benefit from it? Absolutely not true.
Is what you said true even if you go into a field, or choose a major, that relies heavily on advanced math? That was what I was trying to get at. If people do much more complicated math on a daily basis, presumably they have already mastered all math topics at a high school level, unless the skills they use are much narrower than that (which, of course, might very well be true).
That’s a question that cannot be answered without looking at math major’s area of focus or their specific career of choice, of which I am ignorant about.
That being said, I don’t think a math major or a person who is in a strong math related field necessary focus on everything that requires high school mathematics. They may not touch statistics, or linear algebra as often as other area because they don’t need it in their day to day job. They may need khanacademy to reviews those area that they didn’t touch.
In a highly technical field like programming, most programmers may not need to deal anything more complicated than algebra, so they’re going to forget the more advanced aspects.