Hotmaths – usability challenged
HOTmaths is “interactive mathematics online”, an offering from Australia. Their blurb claims:
Designed as a complete mathematics learning system to support teachers and students in the classroom and with the homework process, HOTmaths is also a very effective and inexpensive home tutoring system.
I have gone back several times to check out this site, since my first experience was really bad and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.
On my first attempt, it took 22 seconds to load the homepage (I don’t mean fully load – I mean before I could see anything at all). That’s pretty bad when you are using a broadband connection.
Many of the pages are all Flash – with no ordinary HTML text, making search through the lessons very difficult. Why does it matter? The majority of Web users find what they need via search and then quickly scan for information. If I can’t search and I can’t scan, I usually go elsewhere.
The “hot” flame on the homepage (presumably representing the heat of the moment) is very irritating and not user friendly. The menus for Students, Parents and Teachers only appear if you “flame over” them. Usability studies show that this is not the way.
It told me endlessly (via annoying popups) that I must have Adobe PDF Reader. But I use Foxit to read PDF – there was no option to tell it to stop annoying me with the message.
I checked out one of the demos (on 3D “nets” for making boxes and the like), which took 59.63 seconds to load. The total file size of that page was 272 kB. How do students on dialup get on?
The demo said:
Click “Show Me” to see solids unfolding to form nets.
I clicked and nothing happened.
In the middle of “Looking at Nets”, one page took 1.57 minutes to load and was 497 kB.
The Scorcher is apparently popular. The blurb says:
Use Scorcher to develop your competence and confidence with fundamental mathematics.
Browser Problems
The alignment of part of the page has problems in Firefox:
In IE, the alignment is better, but that “System requirements” link is almost impossible to read:
More Recent Experience
To be fair (as I said above), I thought I should have another few goes. Page load times have improved, but that homepage is still there (flamingly annoying…).
Are any of you using HOTmaths? What are your opinions?
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31 Mar 2008 at 1:06 pm Link to this comment
I have been using HOTmaths with my students for the past couple of years and find it a fantastic resource. I use “widgets” in the classrom to demonstrate concepts and take the students to the computer lab on a regular basis for individual work as well.
My colleagues and I set some homework from the site and find that most of our students have no problems at all with using HOTmaths from home.
When a problem has arisen in the past, the “Contact us” section of the site enables both students and teachers to receive feedback from the site’s writers very promptly.
I teach Mathematics to boys aged 12 to 18 at a school in Sydney, Australia. This year we are using HOTmaths with our Years 7, 8 and 9 students. When more lessons are written, we hope to extend our use to our Year 10 students as well.
31 Mar 2008 at 4:37 pm Link to this comment
Thank you Margaret for giving your experiences with HOTMaths. I’m glad to hear that you find it useful.
The experience I had using the freely available demos in HOTMaths was not so good. Maybe the sections that you pay for work better.
1 Apr 2008 at 10:55 am Link to this comment
Hi Zac, I’d love to give you a HOTmaths Unlimted account to play with and some to use with students, or ask you to try Scorcher, our mental arithmetic skills competition provided as a free service to anyone wanting a challenge. You might also like to read a smaple of comments by a maths teacher at http://www.hotmaths.com.au/mediaFiles/HOTmaths_is_Hot_Stuff.pdf Please get in touch so that we can show you some of the wealth of ‘working mathematically’ resources being developed based on input by students, parents and teachers. It’s a pity your initial impressions weren’t so positive. That’s not the sort of feedback we get at all. I’ve been getting comments like ‘HOTmaths has changed the whole way I think about teacher mathematics’ and just last week… ‘my students love hot maths and the scorcher is a source of great competition between my unenthusiastic Year 12 VCAL numeracy students.’
Best wishes
Don
2 Apr 2008 at 9:39 pm Link to this comment
Hi Don
Thanks for your comment.
I went back to the HOTMaths site just now and the load times were significantly improved from my first and subsequent trials.
For interest, I went back to the Solid/Nets example lesson and tried the “Show me” again.
(Above, I wrote:
The demo said:
Click “Show Me” to see solids unfolding to form nets.
I clicked and nothing happened.)
The same thing just now – nothing happened!
But I get it now (having had a look at the HTML code). That “Show me” button is supposed to load the widget in the right half of the screen – but the widget is already there in the right half, so for the user, there is a point of confusion where it seems the link doesn’t work. Hence my question about the usability…
Anyway, I want to give this a fair trial (this is, after all, why I came back to HOTMaths a few times when I first wrote this post in May last year. I was allowing for network congestion).
So yes, please send me trial details (I’ll email you separately) and I’ll give it a spin.