Beast Acad­e­my does­n’t just have a great name, it offers a great math pro­gram as well.  Beast Acad­e­my is a fair­ly new math­e­mat­ics cur­ricu­lum on the mar­ket and was cre­at­ed by the math­e­mati­cians at the Art of Prob­lem Solv­ing.  If you know noth­ing about the Art of Prob­lem Solv­ing, then now is your chance!  The AOPS was start­ed in the 1990s to equip stu­dents to com­pete nation­al­ly in the area of math­e­mat­ics.  From this vision, AOPS devel­oped some of the great­est high school math texts on the mar­ket, and has grown into offer­ing their pro­grams online and in schools.  You can read more about them at www.artofproblemsolving.com

In 2012, AOPS launched their ele­men­tary school math cur­ricu­lum called Beast Acad­e­my.  Beast Acad­e­my is avail­able for stu­dents in the 2^nd through the 5^th grade.  By the time stu­dents have com­plet­ed all four lev­els, they should be well equipped for pre alge­bra.  Start­ing in the fall of 2018, stu­dents can enroll in Beast Acad­e­my online where they work through the mate­r­i­al online and com­plete work­books at home.  The mate­ri­als and prob­lems online are dif­fer­ent than what’s in the book so you can uti­lize both togeth­er.  For those of you who pre­fer to stick with pen­cil and paper, Beast Acad­e­my is pub­lished as a series of non-con­sum­able com­ic books which cor­re­spond to con­sum­able work­books.  Each lev­el con­tains 4 comics and 4 work­books.  As the stu­dent works through the com­ic, he is instruct­ed to com­plete cer­tain pages in the work­book.  Because of the nature of the set­up, deter­min­ing dai­ly assign­ments for this pro­gram can be a challenge. 

While AOPS orig­i­nal­ly start­ed as an advanced math­e­mat­ics pro­gram for com­pe­ti­tion, Beast Acad­e­my is focused on mak­ing a good math­e­mat­ics edu­ca­tion avail­able to all stu­dents.  The sto­ries in the comics are read­able and fun while the exam­ples in the work­books are descrip­tive and very help­ful.  The char­ac­ters in the sto­ries are beasts in school being taught by a math teacher that keeps either get­ting kid­napped or has a split per­son­al­i­ty.  The sto­ry often goes like this:  beast teacher explain­ing a con­cept, beast teacher kid­napped, evil beast requir­ing the stu­dents to pass a test to release their teacher.  The char­ac­ters also reg­u­lar­ly com­pete in math com­pe­ti­tions and the prob­lems are trans­ferred to the stu­dents.  The book con­tains chal­lenge prob­lems through­out and even has small details like math prob­lems for some page numbers.

In the work­book, the stu­dent reads instruc­tions for a par­tic­u­lar type of prob­lem that com­ple­ments the prob­lems from the read­ing.  The work­book almost always includes an exam­ple com­plet­ed for the stu­dent to walk through, but I often found myself hav­ing to walk through the exam­ples with my stu­dents to help them under­stand the assign­ment.  The work­books con­tain a large num­ber of prac­tice prob­lems and focus on ensur­ing mas­tery of the con­cept before advancement. 

Along with the vast amount of prac­tice prob­lems, Beast also includes chal­lenge prob­lems iden­ti­fied by a star or two depend­ing on the dif­fi­cul­ty.  Where­as Beast is designed to be a sol­id pro­gram for all stu­dents, it does­n’t for­sake its ori­gin by being watered down.  The con­cepts are sound­ly taught and the stu­dent not only learns how to per­form the task at hand, but also how to think like a mathematician. 

More often than not, ele­men­tary pro­grams focus on the mas­tery of the facts that they tend to for­sake the math behind the task.  Oth­er math pro­grams can fall off the horse on the oth­er side and focus on the why with­out tru­ly giv­ing the stu­dent a chance to grow into under­stand­ing.  Beast, how­ev­er, presents the task to the stu­dent and then chal­lenges the stu­dent to dis­cov­er for them­selves the mys­tery behind the pro­ce­dure.  Because of the amount of prac­tice and the pre­sen­ta­tion style, this unique method works. 

Because of the explo­rative nature of the text, these books can be chal­leng­ing for both the stu­dent and the instruc­tor.  If you are ner­vous about math, then invest­ing in their online pro­gram or join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty like Scio Acad­e­my where you can ask ques­tions would be a good idea. 

The math­e­mati­cian in me loves these books!  I have often spied my stu­dents read­ing the comics for the sim­ple joy.   I love that the books con­tain a lot of prac­tice prob­lems, rely on a stu­den­t’s nat­ur­al curios­i­ty, and are enter­tain­ing, but Beast Acad­e­my tru­ly won me over by teach­ing my stu­dents how to think like a mathematician!