Comments on: Hotmaths – usability challenged

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:49:08 +0000

People of the internet,
I am a student using hotmaths currently, and let me just say its really terrible. There have been many errors where the answer is done correctly but it is “incorrect”. Putting a space in front of your answer = automatic wrong. Not having a capital letter = automatic wrong. Scorchers are wasteful, walkthroughs don’t really teach you anything and the actual questions dont help you learn at all. The teacher is no judging our mathematical skills by looking at our progress table and seeing how many scorchers we’ve done. Hotmaths is a short cut for idiodic teachers and schools who don’t really want to do their job as a maths teacher. I have no respect for the site whatsoever and I hope any teacher that stumbles upon has the brain to realise it is the shittiest way to “teach”, if you can even qualify it as that – getting paid to shove hotmaths in our faces and tell us to learn by ourselves. screw you hotmaths. You teachers are oblivous to the fact your students hate hotmaths so get a clue. kthanksbai.

By: Murray

Murray — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:39:52 +0000

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.

By: Don Colless

Don Colless — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:55:53 +0000

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

By: Murray

Murray — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 08:37:30 +0000

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.

By: Margaret loomes

Margaret loomes — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 05:06:26 +0000

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.