The Future of Multistep Tasks on Math Academy
The primary key to motivation, goal-setting, understanding how to apply all the mad skills you’ve learned... it seems like it's all coming down to multisteps.
Cross-posted from here.
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Summary:
“When/how am I going to get to use these cool skills that I’m learning in some legitimately awesome real-life context?”
This has been a common theme in questions I’ve gotten and discussions I’ve seen this week so I wanted to talk a little bit about our ideas on that and what we’ve already started working on in that direction. Summary below:
We’ve got this particular task type called a multistep task. It’s where we take some really cool context, kind of like a mini-project, and we break it up into very scaffolded pieces, roughly 8-12 questions. Each question leverages some technical skills that this student has learned before attempting the multistep. And the goal of multisteps is to just pull all of this knowledge together into a more complex and authentic problem-solving context.
Originally, the way we started out having multisteps in the system is we first created them to just emulate questions in the free response section of the AP Calculus exam. Those questions go beyond the scope of just a standard minute-long “compute this integral, compute the slope of the tangent line to this function,” and present a more complicated problem scenario. They pull together a lot of what you’ve learned from calculus in order to work your way through it.
As usual, when we created these problems, we wanted to make it very scaffolded and try our best not to frustrate students. A complicated real-world context is cool when you can actually do it, when you actually know what to do each step of the way and you’re like “wow, this is awesome, I can’t believe I did this.” But one thing that turns it from cool to uncool is when you just can’t figure out how to go about it and you’re just struggling and it’s no fun.
So we scaffolded out a ton of these multistep tasks to walk you through the process of solving problems like what you’d see on the free response section of the AP Calculus exam. that was our initial conception of the multistep task. They’re meant to prep students for the AP Calculus exam.
But recently our understanding of what these multisteps can be has started to expand.
We recently started working on coding projects, and it turns out they fit perfectly into the multistep framework where we’ve got a kind of a cool problem context that we’re breaking down into steps. The idea is that we’re just teaching you how to take what you’ve learned and apply it into some particular context that’s really cool.
@exojason brought it up a week ago that “hey, these really cool problem scenarios, they shouldn’t just be for the ML course. We should have these everywhere. We need to pepper our entire curriculum with them. This is not just an advanced level calculus or machine learning thing. We need them in algebra. In prealgebra. In grade school math.”
And we need to really lean into the cool factor. When people learn math they often do so because it’s going to get them closer to doing cool things. What cool things? It depends on the person. It might be launching rockets, modeling bioinformatic data, building a chatbot AI, mapping out how to colonize a planet… these can all be problem scenarios for multisteps.
So we want to start creating tons of these multisteps and leaning into them as a big front-and-center thing in the system.
Right now we don’t have that many multisteps, the ones we do have are mainly concentrated in AP Calculus BC and lower-grade courses, and they’re often not about the most exciting problem contexts. But if we make the problem contexts cool enough and have enough of them that students are receiving multistep tasks frequently, they can be a beacon for learners who are trying to summon up motivation to learn due to questioning why they are learning this or that.
And as Jason pointed out to me last week, people also get super excited about combining math with coding – not just in ML, but in general. Coding opens up the door to do lots of even cooler things with math and coding can be done in lower grades if students have mastered the fundamentals. (After the ML course, we’re also going to be putting together an Introduction to Programming course where students – even younger students learning lower-level math – could learn those coding fundamentals.)
And if we have tons of these multisteps, it can totally take the focus off of “ugh, when am I finally going to be done with the course” and put the focus on “wow, I can’t wait to get to that one multistep on Mars colonization tomorrow.” When you have frequent milestones like that, it’s less of a struggle to maintain long-term motivation because you’re feeling short-term payoffs so frequently. You just rush towards the next short-term payoff and we make sure that by doing that, you are effectively playing the long game correctly as well.
The primary key to motivation, goal-setting, understanding how to apply all the mad skills you’ve learned… it seems like it’s all coming down to multisteps.
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