We’ll be blunt - we LOVE MathAcademy. They are an inspiration for us. Our first users called us “MathAcademy for Physics”

However, MathAcademy has one key flaw: they only cover math.

So really, if you want to learn physics, use PhysicsGraph. If you want to learn math, use MathAcademy. If you want to learn both, use both.

But in the interest of giving you (and the SEO engines) as much info as possible, here’s a detailed comparison.

Lesson Design

We keep the lesson structure from MathAcademy - short, concise explanations followed by practice questions. Our explanations are a little longer, and we have more visualizations, but that’s due to the nature of physics instruction. It’s what the curriculum “wants”.

We also both have ‘multistep’ questions, which walk the user through more complex problems step by step. We have more of these than MathAcademy has, but I hear they’ve been going back and adding more to existing courses. They also have something cool where you can select from multiple dropdowns within a paragraph, which is great for proofs; we have recently built this functionality, as well as several other new question types, and will be integrating it into the curriculum soon.

A shared issue with both of our approaches is a lack of “motivating context”. We jump straight to the instruction without making it clear why students should want to learn what we’re teaching, and what it will help them do (they can look it up in the knowledge graph, but that’s not the same). We are currently adding motivating context sections to the curriculum.

Spaced Repetition and Reviews

We both share a commitment to intelligent “spaced repetition”.

Spaced repetition is a scientific way of retaining knowledge efficiently. It relies on performing reviews at intervals - and the more you’ve successfully reviewed a topic, the longer you can go between reviews.

What makes both MathAcademy and PhysicsGraph’s systems better than something like Anki is that we recognize that using a skill necessarily uses other skills, so reviewing skill A can implicitly review skills B and C. This means we can be much more efficient with reviews than a ‘normal’ spaced repetition algorithm.

Now for the comparison part. Quite frankly, MathAcademy’s review algorithm is better than ours. They’ve been doing this for years. They have a quant. However, we can confidently say that PhysicsGraph has the second best spaced repetition system on the market - and it will only get better.

Open response

MathAcademy has open-input questions throughout their courses. This can include putting in numbers and equations. This is something we intend to add in the next couple months, as it’s a better way of testing for understanding than multiple choice.

Where we’ve moved ahead of MathAcademy is in the completely open response Free Response Questions (FRQs). These are the question type that AP exams use, and so it’s really useful for students to get direct practice. We not only have these questions, but we have AI grading that accurately assesses a student's understanding within minutes.

We’ve already built infrastructure that can use AI to assess short explanations as well as drawings such as free body diagrams and graphs. We're working on integrating short essay and graph-drawing questions into the lessons themselves, so that students can practice these activities earlier.

Gamification and UX

We took our initial UX and gamification inspiration from MathAcademy, but we’ve gone farther. Honestly a lot of this probably that Chris and Jeffrey have spent 10x more time playing videogames than the founders of MathAcademy have.

We’re also shipping UX changes at a significantly faster rate.

Our goal is to create a smooth, motivating experience that keeps you learning every day - but also stays out of the way when you're doing the physics.

Conclusion

Two amazing platforms.

If you want math, use MathAcademy.

If you want physics, use PhysicsGraph.

If you want math and physics, use both.