Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Math 911--TOS Review


Professor Martin Weissman has been teaching Math for 50 years. He created the Math 911 software because he is passionate about the subject and wants to help students overcome their fear of Mathematics (and to master it).  Throughout his years of teaching, he felt that students needed fewer explanatory textbooks and more illustrative examples to help them understand how to do higher math problems.  Because of this need, he decided to develop the Math911 tutorial software.

 Math911 is set up in the form of a tutorial and generates problems for students to solve in the following courses: Introductory Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, Statistics, Trigonometry, and Pre-Calculus.  We're barely at the introduction to algebra level with my oldest child but we gave this software a shot (and to keep in mind for the future). After registering the software we were able to get access to the program. There are no frills, it is a very simple program but very straight forward to use. We chose the Intro to Algebra level to begin, below are the topics we started with for Pre-Algebra review:
  • Introduction to integers
  • Addition and subtraction of integers
  • Multiplication and division of integers
  • Exponents and order of operations
  • Factoring number and prime factorization
  • Addition and subtraction of rational numbers
  • Multiplication and division of rational numbers.


There are 8 levels to complete under each category as well as 2 midterms and 2 finals spaced throughout the tutorial. No questions are ever marked wrong however there are a certain number of problems that need to be “correct” to prove mastery and move to the next level.  If the student does not understand how to do the problem, he may click on a button for step-by-step instructions to see the problem being solved.  He may follow these step-by-step instructions for as many problems as necessary to understand the process.  Professor Weissman wanted to give students practice, practice, practice in all types and variations of problems.

It was easy (and quick) to download this software off the site and because we were working in Pre-Algebra, there were also free PDF downloads with some explanations of how to do the problems.


To see what my fellow Crew Mates had to say about Math 911 visit the Homeschool Crew Blog to read more.

**Disclosure: My review and opinion written in this post is entirely my own. This product was provided to me for free in exchange for my review as a member of the 2012 The Old Schoolhouse Magazine Homeschool Crew.

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