Community reviews for Citizen Math

Mathalicious provides standards-aligned, high quality lessons that explore mathematical topics through a real-world lens. Teachers are able to sign up through their school, or on a pay-what-you-can basis for access to dozens of lessons. Each lesson has three tabs to help teachers plan, teach, and reflect on the lesson. Mathalicious is a portal for highly engaging, fascinating activities that inspire students to find math in their everyday lives like never before.

Mathalicious lessons are simple to execute and are aligned to many common core standards. Students usually become interested in the outcome and some race ahead in order to find out what happens. Administrators always give me positive evaluations when the pop in to a class while I am using a Mathalicious lesson. When I plan my unit, one of the first things I do is look for related activities on Mathalicous's website. Each lesson comes with a very detailed teachers guide. Teachers should work through the activity on their own first in order to anticipate and prepare for points of student confusion. They are also very responsive for support through email and twitter. The downside is that you must have an internet connection to run the slides that correspond to the lesson, although usually the lessons are not dependent on the slides and it can be taught without them.

Mathalicious ties standards to real world problems through high interest, visually appealing, and easy to use lessons. Questions probe students to think critically and analytically, to problem solve outside the box. While the lessons are engaging, sometimes they require significant front-loading of instruction to set students up to complete the tasks. A few of the tasks demand many repeated similar calculations to reach a conclusion -- the repetition can lower student engagement and obscure the mathematical significance of the task.