Mathspace is an online program used in schools around the world. It's a deeply flawed platform for many reasons: its inability to properly teach concepts, its high prices, its deep systemic flaws, toxic mistake reactions and more. Schools worldwide should ditch Mathspace: because we, the students, deserve better.

Mathspace just simply does not teach you things. On Mathspace, you either understand a topic or not coming in--and that sadly won't change. While Mathspace does offer hints and tips, these are almost unanimously useless rewordings of already-tricky questions. Video tutorials are provided rarely, yet these are all vague and confusing, leaving you more confused than you were pre-viewing.

Also, it just bluntly promotes a bad way of working. Whenever a student makes a minor error, a large red mark will appear--this supposedly 'interactive' maths platform cannot even explain roughly what you've done incorrectly.

While this may seem innocent, it hurts students. It effectively shames students for their mistakes while teaching us to fear failure, rather than learning from them. Marks on a task even drop further with each incorrect answer, further proving this.This negative mindset should not be promoted in anyone, let alone in an educational platform!

Finally, it's just a pretty costly platform! Costing US$20 per student (AU$25.83), this may sound insignificant, but in my cohort of 193 students, this comes to slightly under fifteen dollars short of AU$5,000 (US$3.69K). Is such a terrible, disliked and deeply flawed platform truly worth $5,000 annually? Fair to say it's not.

There are many other bad things about Mathspace:

• It requires everything to be written in fancy typography, and is only coded to understand one way of doing answers.
• Mathspace gathers a fair bit of information about learners: full names, email addresses, school names, year groups and other personally-identifying info
• The platform stresses out students and can lead to anxiety amongst some
• It is not by any means a working replacement for face-to-face learning and a good teacher
• One of its major selling points is its native "textbook": which is convoluted and unhelpful, as well as difficult to use

To Mathspace's credit, their site has a nice interface. But fancy graphics aren't a good replacement for a total lack of, to be blunt, everything else.

Many other platforms work far better than Mathspace: so why do we continue to use this dysfunctional, flawed platform? Education Perfect is an example of how a decent learning site can be made, so why don't we use that? Mathletics also works reasonably well.

For the sake of learning, it's time for educators everywhere to ditch Mathspace and move to superior alternatives. Otherwise, this current dilemma will just continue to grow, with children continuing to struggle and a flawed product to keep taking thousands of school dollars. Whether you're on it full-time during lockdown or just using it as a companion to in-class learning, please:

Together, we will ditch Mathspace. And we need your help.

Sign the petition to help our movement demand change in the school, throughout the country and even across the world.

If you've made it this far, please share this petition with a friend to help further our cause and get the petition to more people. And to put in your perspective, add a comment below.

Thanks,

A concerned student