834 XP = 834 minutes = 14 hours of work in a single day. You’re probably wondering, what kind of person does that much math in a day? Time for a little story.
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I ran a query on Math Academy’s database today to see what the record is for the most work done on a single day. Every learning task is worth a number of XP, with 1 XP calibrated to be equivalent to 1 minute of fully-focused work for an average serious but imperfect student.
The record? 834 XP on January 11, 2024. Roughly 834 minutes of work in a single day. About 14 hours of work. Damn!
Top 20 is highlighted below. Note that this query is just looking at the date field on the UTC timestamp, so it actually slightly underestimates the distribution of the most XP done in a single 24-hour period.
You’re probably wondering, what kind of person does that much math in a day?
Time for a little story.
Let me preface this by saying there have been numerous occasions on which Jason and I have looked at each other like “is that a bug in our code??” only to find that nope, it’s legit, some people are just that serious/dedicated to learning math.
One of those occasions was back in spring 2022 when Jason saw a 6th grader receiving AP Calculus BC tasks – his reaction was “WTF is happening with the model, why is this kid getting calculus tasks, he placed into Prealgebra last fall, this doesn’t make any sense,” but I looked into it only to find that it was legit – this kid completed all of what is typically high school math (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Precalculus) within a single school year.
This happened with a couple other students in our school program as well. We initially thought it was unbelievable having 8th graders pass the AP Calculus BC exam, but once we got the automated task selection working allowing students to move at their own pace, some of the kids just took off flying faster than we could have ever imagined. (*)
Anyway, that 834 XP record? That’s from one of those kids. But this was 2 years later (January 11, 2024), so the kid was an 8th grader.
They’re starting 9th grade next month, and for reference, this is the math they’ve been working on lately (their most recent Math Academy tasks): generating sets, invertible matrix theorem, dimension / rank / nullity / span, basis for null space, Abelian groups, statistics with of continuous random variables, modular congruence, inverses in Zn, reciprocal hyperbolic functions, cosets of additive groups, nested quantifiers, properties of determinants, groups, geometry in 3d vector spaces, line integrals, arc length parameterization, second-order ODEs with exponential forcing, and plenty of introductory proof topics sprinkled in.
Again… this is an 8th grader. Hasn’t even officially started high school yet.
It’s kind of crazy how much math these kids have covered.
Footnotes
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- (*) While I’m going down memory lane, there’s another thing that comes to mind: at that time, we didn’t have as much university-level content as we do now, so Alex had to make sure he and his team were releasing new university topics fast enough to “pave the road ahead” of the high schoolers in our school program (who were studying university-level math after having completed BC Calc in 8th grade). I built this command-line tool that would find the student who was closest to running out of available topics and count how many topics they had left, and initially it told us that this student had something like 50 topics remaining, which seemed like a safe buffer as long as we kept releasing new stuff reasonably fast… But despite that, after what seemed like just a month or so, a couple kids had completed so many topics ahead of schedule that they were less than 10 topics away from running out of work to do! So we had these high school kids putting pressure on a team of PhD mathematicians like, “watch out, these kids are about to flatline! They need more math! Whip up some Abstract Algebra, stat!” Man, it feels good to have more topics nowadays. *
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