Feedback from doing early mathematics with a 5 year old
I wasn't sure where to post this, or if anyone who works on the site or its direction reads this forum (or it just feeds a feature sausage factory), but I'll post it anyway. I'm spending some time with my child trying to understand where she's up to in school and suppliment it with some time on Khan Academy. The idea is to continue this each term, and ensure that she doesn't miss any key concepts that will become a blocker to learning and then give up on maths (like I did in high school).
So here's my experience after a couple of sessions:
First up, I'm in the UK, so the word "math" isn't used in singular. I think that this might put people off. We either call it "maths" or "mathematics", so ideally a locale for en-gb would override this and call it "maths" for British users.
Secondly, the text size is a little too small for my child. A five year old is used to seeing much larger text and mine finds smaller text intimidating, so I had to do a lot of the reading. This was a bit painful when it came to the JavaScript exercises - it would be nice to bump up the font size a bit so she can crack on independently.
Also, for such a young audience it might be worth having the option for the exercise's problem text to be narrated, if that's possible (I'm sure it is but it's just a lot of work).
I also found the standard web text input boxes to be small and difficult to hit, and the standard flashing text caret was quite unfamiliar to her. She soon got her head around that though. Thinking of familiarity and dexterity, she also triple-clicked on the next buttons a few times and lost her final score at the end of a module. The exercises themselves seemed to be immune to those sort of errors though, which is nice to see.
Finally, in the counting module, she could do the "missing number in the number grid" thing but struggled on the transitions between tens, like knowing that it was 60 that came after 59. I think an exercise dedicated to the transition between tens would help here.
Finally, I'd like to be involved in evaluating Khan Academy like this as time goes on, sharing / journalling my actual practical experience and feedback. Is this really the correct forum for it, or is there somewhere else for parents and teachers to talk about our experiences?
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