Online Math Instruction – My review of LearnBop

My nine year old daughter recently decided she hated math. Since I don’t know how to motivate her myself, I was excited to be able to get her an online math tutor in the form of a 12 month subscription to LearnBop for Families from LearnBop!

LearnBop offers personalized math support for grades 3-12. It gives your child an adaptive learning experience to meet her right where she is and includes instructional videos and built in step-by-step help for every problem to teach her how  to solve them, rather than just testing her knowledge. 🙂

Artist, who just turned 9, used to be great  at math and enjoy doing it as well, but last year the program she was using bored and frustrated her so she decided she hated it. I ended up letting her take a break from math for awhile before she became set in her newly formed hatred of the subject.

I was ecstatic that the day after she started LearnBop, when told it was time for her math lesson she replied, “Okay, I like LearnBop.”
(When I grinned, she then tried to take it back, “Um, I mean, well, I like it enough that, um, I don’t mind doing it…too much….yeah.” LOL.)

I can totally see why she likes it! LearnBop has a ton of awesome features. I love the aesthetic of LearnBop’s site. It’s fun and inviting without being overly cutesy or distracting.

When Artist first logged in, she got to set up her own profile and choose a “character.” One of the options was fashion designer  which is perfect since that’s what she wants to be when she grows up (while also being a rock star and living on a farm). LearnBop then customized her experience with a special background and a specific “Math Power.” I love the way they emphasized the fact that she really does need to master math skills  for what she wants to do in life, as opposed to it just being a subject she’s forced to do for school. 🙂

I also love that LearnBop is filled with positive reinforcement. Artist earns achievements pretty much every day, as they’re given for things like watching the instructional videos before starting, and completing at least 10 “Bops” (problems). The achievements even point out what positive character trait was required to earn the achievement such as patience, persistence, and focus. And there are lots of fun inspirational quotes with whimsical pictures! Yay! 🙂

Artist started at the beginning of the Grade 3 “Roadmap” which is broken down into 13 units. I can change her at any point to focus on a particular subject, such as Operations and Algebraic Thinking  or Measurement and Data. I can also move her to another unit in her grade, switch grades, or search for a specific concept to have her work on.

Each unit is broken down into concepts with building blocks that need to be mastered beforehand in order to understand them. For example, she’s working on Understanding Area  and the unit concepts are Multiply to Find Area  and Find Perimeters.   There are 5 building blocks including Add/Subtract within 1,000  and Solve Two-Step Word Problems.

For each concept there are a few teaching videos that I feel are excellently done. A number of online math programs Artist has tried went straight to asking her to solve problems without first explaining to her how to do them, which left her frustrated and me scrambling to try to figure out what she was struggling with and teach her myself — which is exactly what I try to avoid. There’s not enough coffee in the world for me to be an awesome math teacher. I resort to using jelly beans as manipulatives every time, which are great for eating afterward, but not so great at showing counting by 100s. 😉

Once Artist is ready to begin tackling problems, she gets to my very favorite part of LearnBop — Step-by-Step Help!

If she gets a problem wrong on the first try, it breaks the problem down to help her figure out not only what the correct answer is, but also how to find that answer!  I love this so much!!! She also has the option of asking for help to start with if she doesn’t know the answer, which helps her gain the mastery percentage required to complete the unit, as opposed to guessing and getting it wrong. Occasionally the question was either worded in such a way that neither Artist nor myself realized what answer they were going for, or there was an actual error and the correct answer was marked as incorrect. I imagine they’ll be fixing all of those spots soon, though, if they haven’t already, as they had the option to send a report. When I did, they followed up with me quickly asking for more information about it and assuring me that the content team would improve the question. Though it frustrated Artist quite a bit when it marked her as wrong but she wasn’t, I talked to her about informing me so we could send a report, and while definitely not a feature of the program, learning that just because someone else labels you as wrong doesn’t make that true  isn’t a bad life lesson.

Another of my favorite LearnBop features is the parent dashboard. It provides ALL THE INFORMATION about Artist’s progress. There’s a general overview of what unit she’s on, what step in that unit, and what percentage mastery she has on that step. I can also click into any step and see how many problems she’s solved in it, how many she got correct on the first try, and a graph showing her progression. From there, I can click into any individual problem and see her work on it including how long she spent, how many attempts she made, and each step she went through if she used the step-by-step help. 

The parent section for LearnBop is one of the best I’ve come across. There’s not any information I’m not able to easily find, and it’s laid out very intuitively (for me anyway). 🙂

All in all, I’m quite pleased with our 12 month subscription to LearnBop’s Single Student Plan. Once they’ve worked out the couple of kinks we came across, I’m confident it will be even more excellent. True, Artist would rather not  be doing math in the summer when her friends are out of school, but that’s what happens when we take a two month long spring break. 😉 Since I’m forcing us to do summer school this year, I like knowing that the time she’s spending on LearnBop  is helping her making significant progress. 

Be sure to hop on over to the Schoolhouse Review Crew link up to check out what other reviewers have to say about LearnBop.

*P.S. This post contains an affiliate link, which means that I will get a commission if you decide to purchase anything through it.