Modulo's interview with Richard Ruscyk Founder of AoPS and Beast Academy

Hi, everyone. I'm Manisha, the founder of Modulo. We are an online community for secular homeschoolers with expert support. And I am so excited today to be hosting Richard Rusic, the founder of Beast Academy and the Art of problem solving. And we are especially excited to have Richard because we have been using Beast Academy so much the past three years. Generally, when we use Beast Academy at Modulo, the children work through Beast Academy with an online tutor who coaches them as they go. And a lot of our kids have gone through the entire program in a matter of six months and are looking for the next best thing. But it's just such a rich, extraordinary program, and I think that has a very different approach to mathematics than what you see in school and also any other math program that I've seen. So I'm really excited to have you here today. Welcome.

Well, thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me.

So we, we asked our community if they had any questions for you, and they did not disappoint. But before we launch right into those, I'd love to just know if you could tell me a little bit about the background story, how Beast Academy came to be and if, and kind of what your. What you thought was broken in the traditional math teaching that you were trying to fix by creating Beast Academy.

All right, so when we started from Art of Problem Solving was actually the first thing we built. Art of Problem Solving is a set of textbooks and an online school and website that was designed for really high interest, high potential students in middle and high school. And as we got to closer to the end of that, we started thinking, all right, we'd like to have a lot more students doing this. We'd like to have a lot more students that are interested and engaged in mathematics at this level. So while we figured we had two different ways we could go forward. One is we could really get into marketing and try to go out and find more students. Or two, we could go younger. And then I thought of it as trying to create more students who would be able and interested in working at the level that we're working at in middle school and high school. Well, we're a bunch of math people. That first avenue of marketing, we chose door number two. We decided to go after an elementary school curriculum. And we went and we found Jason Batterson, who is the primary author for all of this curriculum. He was a Math Counts coach. Math Counts is a middle school math competition. I'd met him at the national competition for Math Counts where he was coaching the North Carolina team, including A student who would eventually be on both the US and the Canadian IMO team. So we knew he had the experience in working with the kinds of students that we work with to be able to build out a full curriculum. So he joined us, and then we started trying to figure out what to do. We spent months. Jason would make worksheets, we kick around ideas, and then just in the span of 15 minute conversation, someone said comic books, and then Jason said monsters, and then just Beast Academy just popped out. So it was one five minute conversation after months and months and months of not quite, not quite figuring out what the framework is that we'd work in. Now, the reason we chose Beast Academy and chose comic books, chose monsters, is in the comic books, you get to. You get to introduce a world. So the students are kind of emotionally immersed in the world. They're involved in the conversations. Because, you know, you've got children, you can't lecture a third grader. It just doesn't work. You have to have a conversation. You have to have a back and forth, a give and a take. And the comic books allow us to do that. They allow us to create, to, to simulate conversations, and the kids will emotionally put themselves in those conversations. We get to model the sorts of problem solving behaviors that we'd like the students to develop and to learn. We get to model the resilience that we'd like the students to retain. And that last word right there is really important, retained. I think that's what we're doing that's different than a lot of math curricula because I think most students like solving problems. Most little kids, they. That's all they can do, right? When you're four years old, you can't do much of anything. You see the adults doing all these amazing things. You can't do it because you're four. So you try, right? You try. You want to do the thing, but you can't because you're four and you'll cry, you'll get upset, and you'll quit, but then you'll do something really amazing. You'll come back 10 minutes later because, well, you're four and you haven't learned yet how to quit forever. And we want to retain that. We want to retain that resilience and that toughness that a little kid has where they will keep coming back after the thing, even after they struggle the first time, and to keep that love of learning, because most kids love to learn. And what we do in most American classrooms is we train that love of learning out of the students by teaching them that math isn't a process of exploration, of discovery. It's just memorization and repeating the same thing over and over again. And that's not mathematics. Mathematics is not arithmetic. It's a. It's a discovery. It's a learning how to understand. Understand ideas, understand the world, understand how to combine basic ideas to solve really hard problems. So that, that was our starting point. Might have been a longer answer than, than you wanted to.

That's an exceptional starting point. And I guess one thing that leads into for me is a lot of parents were asking if there is a plan to get Beast Academy into the public schools. Is there anything in the works there?

Funny you should ask. We have just started this year a project that we're calling internally Beast Academy Classroom BA Classroom. And the goal here is to take what we've built as a set of resources, a curriculum that a lot of homeschoolers are using or a lot of students who are in school. They use it as a supplement, either in the schools or they use it as a supplement on their own, but to try to build out a full classroom experience that can be used by a wide range of students and a wide range of teachers. And that's going to be a multi year project because we're having to learn a lot more about a broader audience, both a broader audience of students and a broader audience of teachers and school environments. Because schools operate in very different ways, we don't get to tell them how to operate. We have to figure out how to develop the tools that will empower them to deliver the learning that we'd like them to deliver in the environment that they're maintaining in their classroom. So yes, very exciting.

So what we've observed in modulo is a lot of the families, at least in our community, have chosen to homeschool, are really attracted to the the idea of one on one mastery learning. I just published a blog about this today and for those of you aren't familiar, basically mastery learning is when you're learning sequentially, mastering one concept before you move on to the next at your own pace. And there's a very famous Bloom's two sigma problem that showed that mastery learning with a tutor, one on one, the results you get one on one versus in a classroom setting are just massively bigger. I think 98, 90% higher. And so one of the things that we've been noticing with the online version of Beast Academy is that having adaptive educational software can actually sometimes achieve the same results as you would get with one on one mastery learning. And so I'm really curious to know if you've observed that as well in terms of the results you're seeing in students with the online version. And along with that, just about this process for making Beast Academy adaptive. What goes into that and what are you trying, how are you trying to improve it? Because I feel like you're one of the few apps that's actually doing that well.

Yeah, I think part of, I mean one of the big challenges you're talking about here is in general is for the edtech industry. I think the edtech industry has not realized the promise that it's been claiming for the last 10, 20 years. Online learning is outstanding for a very small set of students. And that's the set of students who are really dialed in, really excited to learn. I guess there's probably another set of students who may not be as excited but are really well supported at home or in a classroom. It's the set of students outside those two circles and those two circles kind of overlap. I think the set of students outside there, I think that we online education providers still have a lot to learn there. So while I do agree with you that the, the potential is there for online tools, whether they be adaptive or not, I don't think the world that we've realized that potential, meaning the whole industry now for Beast Academy specifically, I think what we've created is a very good environment for the student who really loves learning, loves learning the sort of mathematics that we're delivering, the sort of problem solving, the kind of puzzle based curriculum in places where students are having to do this kind of second order, higher level thinking in order to solve the problems that they're, that they're seeing. They may, they may be practicing addition and not even realizing they're practicing addition because they're solving a puzzle, not not doing basic addition or multiplication tables. So I think creating good experiences for students online really helps facilitate what you're talking about, getting that. I mean, one of the big strengths of a one on one interaction as a tutor is providing that kind of emotional support and experiential support for a student. There are really only two big problems in education. One is getting the student to want to learn and the second is helping the student when they're stuck. And I think for Beast Academy what we've built is that first tool is really, really strong. We've created something that makes the kid want to learn, that makes them want to continue. The second piece is supporting the student when they're struggling. We provide A lot of different avenues. So we have videos, we have books, we have. The kids get multiple tries at problems. So it's not just, oh, I made a silly mistake, I get it wrong and now I have to start everything all over again. No, they get it wrong. It's just like, all right, let's try this again. Let's step back, slow down a little bit. Oh, okay, I got it right. And then you get just as much credit as if you got it right the first time. And that's great for a learning experience. So it's part of creating and crafting this experience that will help the student want to continue, help them, want to learn and support them at the right time when they get stuck. Now that second part I think is still wide open field for ed tech writ large. Because I don't think, I don't think anything in ed tech that I've seen can do what a really good parent teacher tutor can do in supporting a child.

What are the challenges of, let's say I have a six year old who's working through level two in Beast Academy and she's consistently getting the same question wrong. What are the challenges towards continually delivering her that question in a different variety until she gets it right and then moving her on? I think some, in building the software, how is that done? Is it hard?

It's really hard. Like I, I do think that there are going to be blocks in any sort of, any sort of online education that are going to, you're going to need a human at some point or a very determined student. So I don't think you can solve that problem entirely with software, at least not yet. But I think one of the, again, one of the things you want to do here is provide different avenues towards the information. Maybe the student responds to video, maybe they respond to text. I think it's just a software design. Another thing you want to have, wherever possible, thorough instructions, thorough solutions. So I think that second is, is really important now you do, you know, the parent, the teacher, the tutor does need to train the student to actually read the solutions and actually read the instructions. You know, there's a little bit of training that, that needs to happen coming from the people around the student to teach them how, how to learn, it's okay to get the problem wrong and then read the solution. It's important that if they still don't understand, they've looked at the video, they've looked at the book, they've looked at the solution, they still don't get it, that they are willing to Ask for help. And this is something some students do very naturally for other students, particularly students who are encountering challenge for the first time. You know, if they've raced through math and they've never had a problem and suddenly they hit something they don't know how to do, they're sometimes kind of shy about admitting that. So it's kind of coaching a child through that. For a parent, sometimes it's just modeling that behavior, being willing to ask questions themselves when they're out in the world. So this child sees the parent being willing to ask questions when they need help.

This touches upon a point that I'm very passionate about, which is, I think a lot of parents are concerned that they're not a math person so that they can't help their child with math. Is Beast Academy for every parent and every child, or do you think that some parents really aren't qualified to help their children with math?

I think. I mean, I think that it's not just Beast Academy. It's any sort of math curriculum is going to have this sort of. Or any other curriculum. Like, there are going to be places where you're teaching somebody a skill if you're a homeschooler or even if you're a teacher. I've been in this situation myself where I'm trying to teach a student through a problem that I don't know how to solve myself. So part of, like, the most important goal, I think, of a teacher is to get the student to a point where they don't need the teacher anymore. Like, that's the goal to some extent. That's kind of the goal of a parent as well. They don't like to frame it that way because you want your kids to always need you. But the goal is to get the children to a point where they can take care of things themselves. So part of the. The teaching, the coaching that a parent is doing isn't about teaching math. It's about teaching the kind of thought processes that go into solving problems that you're. That you're stuck on, that you're seeing for the first time. So it's giving them strategies. Oh, have you ever seen another problem that's like this? Oh, let's go look at that. How does that relate to this one? Or if you look at a problem and you're just like, what have you tried? Can we make up a simpler version of this problem? And just kind of somewhat modeling the experience of how you're trying to figure out the problem for the first time yourself? Because you might Be trying to figure out the first the problem for yourself. So now you're modeling a behavior for the child. So I think parents, parents can. Shouldn't approach teaching a subject as I have to be a master of this subject in order to teach this subject, because a big part of teaching is outside of that. Now at some point you may hit a barrier. I think the barrier might be. Is almost always much farther out than you think it is where, oh, it's really time to hand this child off to an expert. That's when you're taking a student and probably where that student has shown the inclination and the potential to become a real expert themselves. So like, you can go out and teach your, your child how to hit the tennis ball for a while, but once they start to get really good, like, they're going to need someone who really knows how to play to take them up to that really highest level. But I think elementary school math is not anywhere near that point.

Yeah, I so agree with you. And I love this idea of learning along with the child. So if we're stuck, say, hey, let's watch this video together. Maybe we should try looking at the hint or something of that nature. And I feel like that really helps teach the child how to learn. After 20 years of teaching, I feel like more and more my whole teaching philosophy is, I don't know, what do you think? What could we try? And I feel like a lot of parents are really quick to jump in and give the answer instead of really encouraging children to figure it out on their own. And when you actually say you don't know and encourage your child to keep going, you're actually saying, I trust you. Because when you give them the answer, you're kind of saying, I don't trust you. You can't figure this out.

In a way, that's an interesting framing. I don't think I've ever heard it framed as a, as a trust issue before. I like that a lot. Yeah, I think the, the be less helpful is, is something that's hard for a new. A new teacher or for a parent to, to. To really internalize as a teacher that you're going to teach with questions, not with, not with declarative sentences.

Wonderful. I hope every parent took great note of this. I think that parents have a really important role to play in their children's education, especially around modeling learning. All right, lots of questions here about what's next. So maybe you could give us a brief hint at when the science curriculum is coming out. People are really excited.

We so we have a Beast Academy Science. We have the. I actually have a, a draft of a couple of the chapters right over there to, to review. We hope to have the first book out March or April of next year, and then the second that'll be roughly spaced out every six months. The structure there, we're, we're thinking right now will be two books per level, which would roughly cover a year and take through all of elementary school. We're starting a little bit later in elementary school, just like we did with math. We're starting around third grade and we'll start and go up from there and then go kind of backfill later on. But that's, that's the development plan.

Very exciting. And English Language Arts we are building.

We have classes online for our virtual academy. And then we have 12 learning centers around the country where we're building out classes. And. Well, we've been running classes in all of those now for six or seven years.

Is that right?

Yes. We don't have immediate plans for building that out into a curriculum to send out books. That may happen someday.

Wonderful. So my biggest question, I just really love the online Beast Academy. As I've mentioned many times, it's so beautifully designed and our kids have learned so well with it. I'm curious why it stops when it does. If you have any plans to add more levels or if there's a reason that moving to the other program makes more sense once the child gets to the ninth grade level.

Yeah, I mean, part of it is just at some point, a lot of the kids drop off from wanting to operate in an environment that's kind of more comic based. And there's also, you get to a point where that framework, that kind of world is kind of gets kind of limiting when you start getting to concepts where you actually do need blocks of text to convey the concepts. So while it's possible that we could go a little bit higher, I don't think we could go a whole lot higher and really maintain a full, complete curriculum. Like, one of the things I've, I've considered at times is to do kind of offshoots that, that lend themselves nicely to, to a comic book delivery. So imagine a book that's just on kind of talking about cardinalities of infinity. Like, this is stuff that's fun for kids. It's not a kind of a core curriculum topic for say, middle school, high school, or elementary school, but these kind of introductions to advanced areas of mathematics that are more exploratory rather than kind of formal curricular for the middle school and high school, we do transition into textbooks. You know, what people think of as a traditional textbook. But our textbooks are structured a little bit differently. Each section starts with the problems instead of having instruction. Here's how you do all the problems. Now it's your turn. It's, here are the problems. Give it a try. See what you can see. See where you get with it. And then here's how we did it. If you did it a different way, great. That's fantastic. The goal there is to get the students to develop as much of the mathematics they can themselves. Like, we. We scaffold the problems when we're introducing them at first so they're not completely cast adrift. But the goal there is to make it their mathematics instead of ours.

Wonderful. And I've heard that it can be a problem for extremely gifted mathematics students. Sometimes they intuitively know the answers, and so at a certain point, their learning gets blocked because they don't really. They can't really map out how they've been solving the problems. What mechanisms you have built into the curriculum to help that?

I mean, I think one thing that's. We. We will often have parents come to us, say, my child will not show their work, will not explain how they are doing the problems. The first question I have is, are they getting the answer correct? And if the answer is yes, then they don't have. Then there's no problem here. Like, move on. Like, keep going. Keep going. What they're learning. If they're getting the answers correct, they understand the material, they can't communicate yet. That's okay. Some of that's developmental, and some of that is just. It's obvious to me. Why should I explain it to you? The point at which that. That's the student thinking, not me. The point at which students that are exhibiting this behavior will start communicating mathematics is when they need to communicate it to keep track of it themselves. And they'll hit that point, because everybody does. At some point, they'll get to a point with the math problems that they're working on, where in order to keep track of all of the information, they're going to have to write something down. And that's the point at which they'll start learning the importance of communicating mathematics because they have to communicate it to themselves. That may be much later for some students than it is for other students. It's when you see a student starting to get answers incorrect, that is the right time to step in and say, all right, explain to me how you're thinking about this because there's a misconception there, there's, there's something wrong and you need to unpack it. And waiting until that point to really dig into that. Well, now it makes sense to the student why you're asking the question to begin with. The answer is not right. Let's talk about how we're thinking about this. Whereas if you're forcing a kid for whom everything is obvious to communicate why this obvious thing is true, you're turning math class into English class. And you know, I don't want to like English class is a wonderful and great thing, but let's keep these two separate when we're trying to get the student to really appreciate and love mathematics.

Yeah. What do you see as the biggest ways parents get in their kids way when they're learning math?

That's an interesting question. You might know the answer to this.

Better than we talked a little bit about intervening too early. I see a lot of parents, for instance, as a tutor, I'll ask a student a question and the parents will start giving them hints or asking them a lot. The question over and over again. I see a lot of parents just giving the answer a little bit too early and not allowing that natural time to ruminate or to step away and come back with fresh eyes.

Yeah, that is, that is certainly true. I'm thinking of the, the getting in the way is a really interesting framing. Like there are things that parents think are okay that maybe aren't as okay as they, as they think. So for example, racing through a curriculum that is designed for average or below average students. Students getting 100 and everything, they're bored. Why do I care? That's great. That isn't getting in the way. That's not, that's not enabling a student to reach their full potential. So I think that's a, that's a different category error. But actually getting in the way, I think yours is probably the most prominent is helping too soon. And you know, let me do that for you. That that's going to prevent learning, preventing kids from being around other kids. I think it can be a barrier as well. So I, I haven't seen this a whole lot, but there are definitely parents I've seen that their kid is special. They don't want their kids working too much with other kids. And like there comes a point at which the kids are learning as much or more from each other as they are from us as parents or as teachers. So I think being deliberate about kind of the environments you, you put your child in with Other with other students. I think that's a powerful route to learning and to getting the child even more engaged and excited if they're around other kids who are engaged and excited about the same sorts of things. That has a nice positive feedback loop.

Very interesting. So your program, if I'm correct, is somewhat branded towards students who have been identified as gifted or profoundly gifted. At least that's the word on the street. And I've also noticed that your program seems to be really great for certain children with specific learning disabilities that be neurodivergent children. And so I was just kind of wondering, based on what you've seen over the last years, who do you feel Beast Academy is really an ideal fit for and when does it not quite work as well? Who is not a good fit for.

I'd say that the main group I would point out for not a good fit are students who struggle a lot with reading and aren't going to have someone there to support them in the spaces where they're struggling with reading. It is, you know, even from first grade there's, there's a lot of text in the books. There's text, I mean the comic book, there's text there as well. There are videos in the online system to help support those students who are more auditory. But there are still non trivial reading components. So I'd say that's the group. A group, there's, there's another group of students. The group of students who whenever they struggle just will completely shut down. But that student, those groups of students need the support to learn how to overcome that. They're going to have to overcome that at some point. The student who insists on always getting every single thing correct, like that's something where you want to as a parent, as a teacher to help work a student through that and get to be okay with taking on challenges that they're not always going to get correct, coming back to the students that it is good for. I think, I think all. I do believe that all students should be given the opportunity to engage with mathematics at this level. And I don't think there's any one thing that's right for absolutely everybody. We are trying to hit as many students as we can. But like we have been traditionally kind of tracked towards these so called gifted, I'm not real fond of that word, but the so called gifted group in schools, but I think the world is not very good at figuring out who's gifted. I don't think we've really solved, I call it the Gattaca problem. From the movie. There's, there's. We can. There are some identifiers, there are some ways you can identify some kids, but there are a lot of kids that get missed by those identifiers. So that's why I think it's important to give students the opportunity to go down, go down these various paths. Students who like, who like a challenge, who don't want to do the same thing over and over again. So Beast Academy is going to be very good for those students. There are students who maybe you can give them a whole sheet of two plus four, four plus seven. Those. And they'll do those all day long. Students who resist that, Beast Academy is going to be much better for them because we're not going to give them the same problem over and over again. We're going to show them something new, then show them something new because ultimately that's our goal. This is what I mean when I talk about problem solving is solving problems that we've never seen before. And that's, that's the experience where we want to give students all throughout their education.

Wonderful. And I think one of the things that I've observed in these children who have been identified as gifted is in a sense, they're learning math at a much more accelerated rate than other children, which doesn't mean the outcome might be the same. And at a certain point that might, that acceleration might ebb or flow, but it's happening a lot faster. And I do, you know, it sounds hokey to say all children have their natural gifts, but in my teaching experience, I really have observed people have talents in some areas and other areas. And a label like gifted can help a parent determine what resources they need to support their child as well as identify what problems might be happening. You know, for example, child might be spacing out in class all year, and that's because they're not being challenged enough by the material. Could be a host of other reasons as well.

Yeah, that's, that's an interesting point there that like there is a set of students there that are getting season math class or whatever maps to a C in elementary school. And the problem isn't that they don't understand. They're bored and being able to pick out, pick those out. We want avenues to do that.

Yes. And how great we have East Academy as an avenue for that. So one of the characteristics of these children who have been identified as gifted, I think the Davidson Institute is really, I think they do some really good writing and support for children who have been identified as gifted and they have six types of gifted students. So one of the types tends to be a perfectionist. And I think one thing that happens with this type of children is they start getting told very early, wow, you're so smart, you know. And so they start identifying with that. And then one problem is that they start really disliking failure and becoming perfectionists. What? Of course, you know, even within this there's so much variety. But I'm wondering if you have worked with these families who have children who are perfectionist or, you know, really struggling with the idea of failure and how you can kind of help your child to maybe get a little bit more comfortable with failure.

Yeah, it's so critical that you, you. Because the students will internalize that. Once they can't do something, they will never be able to do it. Like that's the, that's the danger you're going to have with a perfectionist type student. When I first started Art of Problem Solving, I got an email from a classmate of mine who described that he had gotten perfect scores on every middle school and high school math test that he took. And then he got to college. He went to Princeton in first year math class. He called it the most bewildering experience of his life and poisoned him on math for years. And this is what we're setting our kids up for. If we're letting them get perfect scores on everything, eventually they're going to hit the wall. Everybody hits this wall. And if we don't train students how to overcome that wall, the later they hit it, the more likely they are to just quit. Now, for me, I hit the wall in math competitions. Totally low stakes. So I don't get a trophy. Big deal. So like, yeah, it was a struggle. It was like for the hardest math competitions, it took me two years to be able to do one problem. It was, and it was pretty demoralizing along that way. But like, if the first really hitting the walls in a college class, that's much more, much more dangerous to the set of possibilities a student might have. And the problem with our education system writ large is there's no feedback loop to fix this. Because the teachers, those middle and high school teachers, they think that this guy was a success, got perfect scores, went off to Princeton. They didn't see the failure in college because he didn't come back and say, what's up? So it's, it's critical that parents solve this problem. Now, how to solve this problem, it's, it's, I think, part of it for, for some people they'll solve it when they fail at something they really, really want. And that's probably the place to focus when you're trying to train a student to overcome difficulty. So, you know, if, if getting a perfect score and all the math tests, if, if it's like, for me, it was a math competition that I wanted to do well on, I'm going to learn how to climb. For the child you're working with, maybe the place where the thing that they really want most is to be able to play a particular piece of music well, that's the place to focus on this sort of training. And then you get to translate it. Once you get the student to see that they can succeed at this in one space, then you get to point at that and say, hey, you did it there. You can do it over there. And that's what happened for me, going, going into college, like, I learned how to do this in math. I learned how to take these basic ideas, solve hard problems, handle problems that I couldn't solve on the first day or the second day or the third day and eventually get through them. I could translate that into physics, economics, philosophy, whatever it else, whatever else it was I was studying or, you know, if I wanted to play sports, I'm like, yeah, I'm terrible at this, but I'll at least get adequate if I keep practicing. I learned that I'd internalize that. So I think that would be the thing I would suggest to parents is figure out what thing it is that your child cares about the most. That's the place where they're going to put in the extra time. That's the place to teach this lesson. Try to get it there and then start translating it. Don't focus on the thing that they really don't want to do in the first place.

Yeah, I really love that thought. I think, you know, and I. I liked how you were talking about connecting two worlds in a way. You know, maybe the child is getting really frustrated with chess and doesn't want to play chess anymore because her older friend keeps beating her. And you can say, yeah, I mean, I know that's really frustrating. And remember when we were at the beach the other day and we were building that sand castle and the waves kept falling and you kept going and it was so exciting. And I think, you know, by the. By applying those skills to your chess game, you could one day beat this chess, you know, if you want to. I really love. You know, children have really incredible minds, and they're capable of making extremely complex connections like that. And I would also say, you know, if parents can model that in their own lives, if they talk about experiences when they were frustrated at work and kept persevering and achieve the results they want anyway, that will definitely rub off on their children as well. Celebrating our failures.

Oh, and I have plenty to celebrate.

Oh yes, so many failure celebrations. Fantastic. All right, so let's see, what else do we have from our families? Do you think that there's an age that's too early to start Beast Academy? I know we've had parents of 2 year olds and 3 year olds who are wanting to get started. Their advantage to waiting.

I think the main thing is if the, if the child doesn't take to it right away is come back to it again later. So in our, in our pre algebra online classes, for example, I used to, I taught, I taught that for many years and we would occasionally have some really young students in that class and they were usually among the, the strongest or the weakest students. They were in one of those two buckets and it was purely a maturity issue. So the ones that were in, in the weakest category, their math was fine. They just didn't have the kind of maturity and executive function to kind of stay with it. They'd come back in two years and they'd be just fine. So if you are going to try Beast Academy, pretty young with a child and I, I would very hesitant, I would hesitate to say there's, you know, don't do it before four. Like I, I don't really believe in that. I think kids develop in very different ways and different rates. If it doesn't work, wait a couple years and come back or wait a year and come back. So that I think is the main thing. I don't, if a student like I've had some parents who have started their kid very young on Beast Academy and they kind of just play and do whatever they want to and they kind of finish really young, but they haven't really done everything or done much of most of it and then they'll go back more through, more deliberately when they're a little bit older and are able to function that way. So I think that's another way to approach Beast Academy is hey, this is a toy we're going to play with when we're three or four. Maybe it's just reading, reading the guides, the Beast Academy guides to them and reading some of the, you know, the kind of comic book stories to them. And just in that past they're just kind of getting familiar with the Universe, some concepts will stick and then it's on a second or even a third more thorough pass that they'll really start to. To bring in the material. This actually was the strategy I used in college. I would get a syllabus at the beginning of the course and in the first three weeks I'd work all the way through the course, wouldn't understand any of the second half of it and then in the middle of the course I would go through it again a little bit more slowly. And then by the end when I'm seeing the hard concepts for the third time, only then did I start to understand them. And I think that sort of might work. That sort of approach might work really well for students who start, who start really early.

Yes, I am also a broad to specific type of learner. I, I like to have the whole overview before I. What's the end of my journey before I. Before I start? I. When I. The first time I went to Italy, we went TO I think nine different cities in 14 days because I just, I needed to get a sense of the whole country before I went individual. Okay, so I'm curious to know more about just your process of creation. How do you decide what to teach, what principles you follow when designing the curriculum, especially the scope and the sequence. And is it different for you and for your co founder in any way?

Yeah, I mean I think we take in a lot of different. First of all, we start from kind of outlining. These are the topic, the areas, topics and areas that we'd like to cover. And then you kind of work backwards from there. Like the, I'd say the broad. When I say the topics and areas we'd like to cover? Kind of what is the end goal? What are the kind of sets of things that we want a student to understand at various points and then work backwards from there. Okay, what are they going to need to get to there? What are they going to need to get to that point? What are they going to need to get to that point and kind of work. Work backwards a little bit and then working in the other direction is kind of whenever we're going to start, say a pre algebra book, what are we going to take? That's not a great example because we kind of started fairly foundationally there. An algebra book. What are we going to take as the students know these things and being pretty deliberate about. Okay, students should know these things before they start this book. So these are our starting points, these are our ending points and what are the things that we need to build to Go in between the two. Now we do we look at things like state standards, not so much because we think that's the way to do it, but just kind of rough coverage and just because we left anything out that we just didn't think of for some reason or you know, to think about why they sequenced things the way they did. Sometimes we pretty strongly disagree with them and we just won't do that. And other times we'll be like, oh yeah, that, that makes sense, but we're going to do it this way instead. Or oh, that winds up pretty well with what we're doing. Yeah, I mean there are, we, we, we talk a lot with each other, you know, like, okay, here's our outline, here's what we're trying to accomplish. Oh, have you forgotten this? Have you, should you add this? Should you add that? I, I suspect a lot of people have a similar process for whenever they're trying to construct anything in this vein. I'd say another place where we're maybe even more deliberate is problem selection. And you've seen this in, in Beast Academy online, I think, is a place where we're not constrained by a book size or a book delivery mechanism, where we get to be even more deliberate than we are in the books. And we're quite deliberate in the books, but deliberate about the scaffolding inside a given lesson. So a given lesson might have six problems. Those six problems are not chosen at random. Those six problems are often constructed or almost always constructed in a way that, okay, we have this hard problem at the end. We want them to get to. All right, here's step one to understanding what that deeper concept is. We're not going to tell them that's what we're doing. But here's a problem. Next problem, next problem, next problem. So that by the time they get to that fifth and sixth problem, they've developed a lot of the kind of thought processes that we want them to develop in order to tackle that hard problem at the end. And this is, this is ultimately what we want to get them, is we can show them the hard problem at end, the, at the end first and they can fill in the gaps. You know, that's the long term goal, not a fair goal to give a seven year old, although every once in a while we might try it and just, just see what happens and then go back and put in the scaffolding. So I think that's a place where you can really see, if you look closely through each of the lessons, you're going to see that scaffolding there because you know to look for it.

Absolutely. I mean it's very clear in the way you kind of start adding elements into different problems as the child makes their way through. We love that aspect of Vista Academy. You mentioned that there were some aspects of the standardized curriculum where you strongly disagree with the sequencing. Could you give me an example?

Yeah. One example of that is it's pretty standard to teach matrices very, very early. Like they'll put it put matrices and vectors in say algebra one classes and you can't talk about linear transformations. Then like you can't talk about the reason vectors and matrices are actually important mathematical objects. They're really just an accounting system. When we're, we're putting them in first, they're treated as an accounting system. In algebra 1 this is how you add matrices. We're not going to talk about what matrices actually are. They're just grids of numbers. And you can add this matrix to this matrix, but you can't add this matrix to that matrix because they're not the same size. Well, what's a matrix? We can't actually answer that question with the tools we have at the point when a matrix is actually usually introduced into a math class. So we don't introduce matrices and vectors until we are in our pre calculus course where we can talk about things like linear transformations where we can tie or we can tie them into things like trigonometry or even, even complex numbers. So that's an example of something where we choose to put something far later in in the curriculum. An example where we go the other direction is discrete math. So discrete math is the area of mathematics that we can things that we can count. 1, 2, 3. It's the mathematics that underlies a lot of computer science. So it's super important now, but it's basically non existent in most of the standard curriculum. It's because the standard curriculum is mostly decades behind where the real world is. And part of the reason for that is you first have to teach a generation of teachers this mathematics before you can put it in the curriculum. And that's hard. I don't know where we're going to start and solve that problem. But in our experience we have discrete math in Beast Academy. Like we start in elementary school with some, with some pretty foundational concepts and then we have a deep treatment of discrete math again in middle school and an even deeper treatment that's basically equivalent to a college discrete math class in high school. Students can understand and really enjoy this mathematics at a very early Age. And that's something that the broader standard curriculum just hasn't caught up with. It's always treated as, oh, that's, that's a college subject. We'll do a little bit in pre calculus, but we're mostly going to do that in college. It needs to be taught much earlier.

So. Cool. You make me want to dive back in and do the whole curriculum myself. So, you know, you kind of have. You do make an effort to hit the main points of Common Core. Is that because you want students to be able to use Beast Academy as a replacement for math taught in school? Is it because parents really need that confidence that it's aligned with state standards? What's the reasoning there?

I mean, aligning with Common or saying that we've hit all the things in Common Core? I would say to some extent it's a marketing thing, you know, for the people who care about that. It's like we built the curriculum and then went back and said, okay, this is where everything lines up.

Right?

So you want to be able. It's the competence thing that you're mentioning. I mean, there are. You look at the Common Core and like, I haven't looked at the Common Core stuff in so long. My main opinion about Common Core in elementary school is that it's given elementary school teachers the COVID to turn math class into English class. And I've already talked about that, but I think part of his M.O. is the, the confidence thing that you're suggesting is to get those people who care about that sort of thing to be like, oh, okay. It's actually covering all the things that the state might, might care. We cover a lot of things that are not in the Common Core. And that I think is the, is the, like, we don't think of ourselves as a Common Core aligned curriculum, meaning that we just lined up the Common Core and just laid our curriculum right up against it. We think of ourselves as, oh, yeah, we do that. We do this other stuff too.

Cool. All right, we have a couple minutes left, so maybe we'll do a little bit of a rapid fire round. I don't. Let's. So first of all, what's your process for testing and refining your curriculum? If you could give me the quick overview.

I mean, the quick overview is just you give it to a bunch of students and see how it goes. Or you might be teaching a class, see how it goes, and then revise, revise, revise. Like you've got to put things in front of students or in front of teachers, in front of parents. And you're going to learn a lot from their reaction.

You're the only math online math curriculum our kids have used that they have not found errors in. And we have tried all the big names. So you're doing something great.

Yeah, I mean, they might have been helped by the students who came before them. I don't know.

There you go.

I'm happy to hear that.

Okay, we have a couple technical questions and some suggestions from parents. Would you ever consider a lifetime membership to the online version as an alternative to the subscription model?

Sure. I'd have to think about what that framework would look like, but I mean, it's something we've kicked around. But there are so many things going on, how to focus on one.

Sure. So you talked a little bit about an ELA curriculum that you have or is in the works. Is it geared to. Towards mathy kids? We have so much math that's geared towards ELA kids. Is. Is the other thing possible?

That's an interesting question. I mean, we probably have a little bit more strand, more strands in there of kind of mathy, sciencey stuff, but it is not strictly aiming at just adjust those students.

All right, this one is kind of food for thought. One of the parents asked that. This is, I guess it's touching upon something we talked about earlier with gifted kids. She says, I'm curious about your decision to have so much of it geared towards accelerated and contest focused youth. I'm not sure if you agree with that. The way that the art of problem solving teaches kids to really understand mathematical thinking rather than just memorize it is so great. But she finds the classes to be not friendly for kids who need additional processing time. And we're wondering if kind of a more inclusive art of problem solving could. Would be something that you would consider down the road.

Yeah. So I think there are a few different things to unpack there. So, I mean, one of them is it depends on which classes they're taking. Our classes in different delivery mechanisms run at very different paces. We definitely have classes that are a lot of students who are very focused on. On math contests, do things very quickly, whatever, instead of being more deliberate and going very, very deep. Then we have other classes. We have classes with different numbers of students in them as well. So we have classes, our classes that are in person, in our learning centers move a little bit more slowly and a little bit more deliberately than say, our classes in our online school that's been around for 20 years. That's all in kind of a. Our online school that's been around for 20 years. We have two online schools now. That's why distinguish between them. It's all text and images. There's no video, there's no audio. It can go very fast. You know that students who, students can read much faster than they can listen. They just commute. They can have multiple conversations going on at once. And for some students that's a great way to learn. So they can go, you know, they can go at the speed that their brain is going at. But for other students, it's a terrible way to learn. They don't read very fast. They want to take more time at each step. They need a different environment. So we have, we have these in person learning centers. We also have a new online school that we started during the pandemic that's on zoom or on a video based. Those classes are smaller and those also go at a different pace than our older online school. So I do think there's, there's definitely room for it to be used in different ways. Like for me as a student, give me the textbook. I'm good like that. That really lets me go at the pace that I want to go at is just give me the book. Sometimes it's faster, sometimes it's slower. So I think that's, I think the textbooks are part of the answer there. But for the classes, we have a self paced class option now that we're starting to spin out over time in our, in our, the apps online that's been around for 20 years and we've seen something very interesting there actually. And this speaks to, I think what the parent is talking about here. Sorry about that. It speaks a bit to what the parent is talking about here. What we saw with the self paced classes is like one month in, we were looking at how the kids are doing and we were kind of disappointed in that. Oh, this isn't working at all. And then we looked back eight months in and they were doing great. It was exactly. What you're talking about is the students were just going at their own pace, which is the whole point of a self paced class. You know, a couple of them would race all the way through everything, but quite a few of them were going at a very deliberate, very deliberate pace. So that our online class, that's very fast, that finishes in four months. These students might take six, might take eight and that's totally fine. And they were still doing it. They were, they were doing just as well as the other students were doing. Maybe it's because it takes them more time to work through a given problem. Or maybe it's because they just don't have much time, so they can only devote an hour a week or an hour and a half a week. So this is a big part of why we deliver our materials in so many different lanes is because students have so many different learning styles and learning interests.

I found that when you're a parent, one minute can feel like an eternity when another child can solve the problem in 10 seconds, and a month can feel like an eternity a year. There's something really wrong here. But actually it's nothing in the scope of time. And kids can learn at their own pace. They will learn so much better and thus, and then faster too.

Yeah.

So I guess I have two more quick questions. Not quick questions, hard questions. You know, I think that parents are interested in your views or mission around diversity and inclusion. Inclusion. Some of the families pointed out that they noticed some of the art of problem solving centers were in wealthier areas or they themselves couldn't afford them. And I was just curious what you guys were doing there or your plans in the future.

Give me just a second to think through all the different things to share with you.

All right, so there are a few different things.

Yeah, there are a few different avenues I'd like to explore on this. So there's. We'll start with the nonprofit work. There was a separate nonprofit organization that I founded back in 2004 that in. I think it was around 2010, we started something called the Bridge to Inter Advanced Mathematics. It's based in New York. We started with summer programs in New York City and then expanded to Los Angeles. And now we're starting a national model of that that's going younger. So the original summer programs were sixth and were first, seventh grade, and then we added on sixth grade. Seventh grade is residential. Sixth grade is non residential. And those programs are for students from underserved communities. Again, first in New York City and then in Los Angeles. Our national model, we're using Beast Academy as the spine to work with schools and students all over the country with the goal of kind of identifying and supporting those students who have high interest and high potential in mathematics but don't have the resources, don't have the opportunity opportunities that the students in our learning centers do. And those students will be supported through Beast Academy, then through some of our AOPS online classes until they're old enough to start participating in camps that will run as part of the the Beam program. So that's the separate nonprofit within the company here. We have two. Two avenues that I'D like to talk about. One is what we've, we started in the past few years and we're really ramping up right now is what we call our Pathways program. And this is where we're looking for partners. Honestly, we're looking for partners to help us identify the students to bring into this program. And again, we're looking for students from underserved communities, students who couldn't afford even the resources we provide because, like, we're very depends on which resources you're talking about. Ours, like some of ours are say, much lower than other online resources. But our learning centers are very similar to other learning centers because there you've got a fixed cost you can't do anything about, you got to pay rent. But with our Pathways program, we're looking for partners to help source numbers of students that we can bring into our online services, bring into our learning centers if they happen to be near one. And so we'd love to hear from, from people who can help us with that. The other thing that I'd like to talk about is our Beast Academy classroom that I talked about before, because that was the impetus for doing that, was just if we want to solve this problem at scale, if we want to have a more broadly inclusive, diverse workforce in STEM related fields, we need to start really young and we need to be their whole education. We need, we need to not just be a supplementary program that we're doing occasionally, but we, we need to provide them Beast Academy every single day and provide them the kind of support that are more affluent students are getting every single day. So taking a very long view at it, the Beast Academy classroom is the, the most powerful vector we have to achieve these goals.

Phenomenal. Well, thank you so much, Richard. It has been an absolute honor talking to you. I love the work that you're doing. I love seeing the impact it's having on our kids in their confidence and their love of math. So thank you so much for everything you bring to the world and we're excited to continue to be using Beast Academy and bringing it to our students and can't wait to see what's next for you.

All right, well, I can't wait either. And thank you so much also for spreading the word and for all the support you're giving to all the families you work with.

Absolutely. Thank you so much again.