Brilliant
Mindprint Rating
Tags
Mathematics
Standardized Test Prep
^21st Century Skills
Social-Emotional Learning
MS/HS/College
Website
Skills
Flexible Thinking
Working Memory
Abstract Reasoning
Mindprint Expert Review
Pros
- This website provides an enormous variety of challenging problems effectively targeted for each student.
- This site will not discourage students when they answer incorrectly, giving multiple chances and simply lowering the student's level of difficulty.
- There is no timer so motivated students can take as long as they need.
Considerations
- Quality of solutions is dependent on the user community.
- Students who are not strong math students will have little incentive to use this website.
- Although the problems are well-organized, they are not organized by standard school topics for students to practice a specific subject.
Mindprint Expert Review
Brilliant.org is a free, superb website designed to challenge strong math students who enjoy problem solving. Students begin by selecting topics, careers of interest, and birthday to establish a profile and a correct starting point. Next, they take challenge quizzes or do practice problems in their areas of interest. Correct answers win points which can be used to "purchase" solutions for difficult problems. Students receive multiple tries to answer correctly. If their answer is still incorrect, they can see user-provided solutions and will be bumped down in a gentle way to more appropriate problems. This website does an excellent job motivating and challenging without discouraging for students who enjoy math.
Academic Benefits
Improves academic skills
- Provides sufficient and varied types of practice problems to maximize understanding and generalization of the targeted skill/concept
- Manufacturer claims alignment with Common Core/Known Standards
- Presents educational concepts accurately
- Explains answers so students can learn from mistakes
- Better for teaching the skill to new or struggling learners
- Better for practicing or refreshing the skill
- Skills are practiced through authentic, meaningful problems (not just rote practice)
Fun
Engaging for the Mindprint recommended age range
- Appropriate for a broad age range to use and enjoy
- Subject matter and problems are relevant, interesting and authentic to students
- Visually appealing to children in the target age range
- Provides virtual rewards or incentives after meeting specified goals or objectives
- Provides a "break activity" between academic problem sets
- Offers ongoing, progressive challenge
- Overall - Enjoyable. Given the option, students would choose this option
Easy to Use
Understandable for children in the Mindprint recommended age range
- Has a free or trial version
- Provides teaching guidance for adults to support the child and set appropriate goals
- Provides an age-appropriate tutorial/first time users can work independently
- Student should be able to use independently after first use
- Has a multi-player option to foster in-person collaboration or cooperation
- Multiple users can save a profile
- Student graduates to the next level or topic only after meeting a benchmark
- Can play without sound and not distract others
- Students can save work between sessions
- Can effectively understand and monitor student's progress (email report or in product)
- Requires registration before using the first time
- Provides options to play in languages other than English/Good for ELL
- Presents information in multiple formats (voice over, pictures and text, etc.)
- Overall - Easy to use
Cognitive Concerns
May not be advisable for students with the following cognitive needs
- Abstract Reasoning
- Requires multi-step mental math
- Numerical Fluency
- Requires multi-step mental math
- Student will need to copy or write multi-digit math problems
- Working Memory
- Requires multi-step mental math
- Student will need to copy or write multi-digit math problems
- Includes long written questions or text that students must be able to read on their own