Practicing Math and Science with Brilliant (review)

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew

Math and science skills, while arguably aren’t automatically necessary in the “real world” (especially the advanced courses), are still rather handy to keep sharp, especially for us homeschool parents. That’s why I’ve been using the Brilliant app for the past few weeks (instead of having assigned it to my high schooler). With my Premium Subscription, I can access all of the courses through the website or the app; I opted to use the app because I prefer the convenience of my phone over the computer.

I completed two courses over the weeks of the review period: Logic and Everyday Math. I chose Logic as my first class because I really enjoy doing logic puzzles (you know the kind – where you have a grid and a series of clues and you have to figure out “who is married to whom, their wedding month, and what their pet is” for example). I thought that by taking the Logic course on my Brilliant app that I would learn some skills to help me solve those puzzles more easily as well as have some fun.

The Logic course consists of 18 lessons and over 135 concepts and exercises. The entire course uses the same characters, though it does add more as you move through the lessons. It’s based on a group of robots, and there are a huge variety of things to solve using that group. As the lessons progress, humans and androids are introduced, and eventually you’re using concepts like “what you don’t know can actually be quite helpful” to figure out which character is what type of being. The end lessons are actually quite difficult as some of the clues they give you are untruths and it’s your job to figure out which information you can trust and which you can’t in order to get the answers right. I enjoyed the challenge for the most part, but some of those later lessons were a bit too hard to be fun. That does not mean, however, that they weren’t useful! I may not have gotten the answers correct when it was hard to wrap my mind around the information being given, but I still learned the concepts thanks to the “show explanation” feature.

Everyday Math has 9 courses with over 100 concepts and exercises, and I found this course much easier than Logic. The name of the class is quite appropriate, as these are things I use nearly every day in my normal life (not just in homeschooling!). It covers things like fractions and percentages, exponents and place value. These are things that are super helpful to know and understand even if you’re not a mathematician or an engineer. If you cook meals for your family, you use fractions. When you’re grocery shopping and want to calculate a sale price, you use percentages. So this course was very useful in that it helped me to further cement the concepts of everyday math in my mind. And because these were the types of things that I enjoyed learning back when I was still in school (I didn’t hate math like so many others did), I didn’t find the course difficult at all. And I’m the type of person who enjoys easy things and gets frustrated over difficult things, so this was a great course for me.

Overall, I have really been enjoying spending ten minutes a day working through a class on the Brilliant app. I am currently working on the Probability Fundamentals course, and it’s easier than Logic but harder than Everyday Math, so I’m quite enjoying that one too. I definitely see myself using this app on a daily basis all year long.

Make sure to head over to the Homeschool Review Crew to find out more!

Blessings,

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