Hacker NewsFree PWA for Arithmetic Fluency. Not Standard. Not Perfect. Vanity Project. Battle scarred author. Wife dislikes landing page. Kahneman (Tversky) affected development. Additional info: Daughters are great at math.
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I am emboldened to post to ShowHN because of a recent (to me) study about "Arithmetic Fluency" (AF) by McNeil, Jordon, et. al. link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15291006241287726
RightMindMath.com (RMM) is a personal project built from an Adobe Air app I originally created solely for my daughters. It is a FOSS project, and I cannot (and have no intention to) monetize/scale it.
Since it uses the "Pages" feature of Github, cost to keep it going is mainly my domain reg/dns costs which are about $15/year.
If you click thru to RightMindMath.com and click on the back story, there is a little information about how RMM came to be. Not stated is how extreme the resistance to "fluency" or "memorization" from those in my school district really was. For a parent, it was --frankly-- scary. This was early stages of the Common Core (CC) rollout. CC is absolutely against any type of AF, memorization and/or old-style algorithmic approaches. CC was heavily promoted in our WA school district.
Now, however, it appears that building Arithmetic Fluency (AF) in young children may be good as per link above. It actually helps with "theory/understanding" which the the bedrock of CC. Hence this ShowHN post.
Some school districts in Western WA may be starting to recognize this, but it is gradual, and I think there is still extreme resistance. CC so heavily promotes theory and understanding there is little or no room for "fluency" notably re: school politics.
Interesting History: Way back in the day when it cost little to be an Apple App Store developer, and Apple allowed Acrobat Air compiles to be distributed RMM was pretty successful. With *absolutely zero* ad spend or promotion, RMM (different app name at the time) was downloaded about 1500 times. This was an 99.9 variance measured against other free/non-ad apps. So perhaps RMM is OK given this. You can judge for yourself cause it is a PWA and FREE.
More in my comment below.
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