Office Hours

Have questions about how to get started with Free Math?
Want to talk with the team about a feature suggestion?
Interested in finding ways to contribute to Free Math?

Schedule a time to meet with our team using the link below.

Schedule a Meeting

Contact the Team

If you would like to discuss how you could use Free Math in your classroom, send a message to this address. Bug reports, questions and press inquiries can be directed here as well.

[email protected]

FAQ

Does Free Math solve math problems?

No, Free Math allows students to record their work, but does not solve problems automatically.

Where are the problems for Free Math?

Free Math is designed to work with any existing exercises from a book, worksheet or digital problem bank. Students copy problems into Free Math just as they would with a paper notebook.

Isn't the point of digital homework to avoid doing the grading yourself?

Computers are great for automating away repetitive tasks. Fully automated grading tools do not provide the same detailed feedback as teacher, and most have no ability to determine if an answer is partially correct. Free Math is taking a different approach, recognizing that grading is a creative task with repetitive elements. The software allows bulk actions for similar work, but gives you the flexibility to provide partial credit and detailed feedback in a way algorithmic grading cannot today. Feedback provided from a teacher is a great learning tool, but grading everything produced by your students just isn't feasible. Free Math helps sort through student work to show what needs feedback most urgently.

Other sites/services give "instant feedback", isn't that better?

The Free Math team believes that a less radical restructuring of assignments is the right approach to transitioning math into the digital world. Students have been able to get the exact type of "instant feedback" offered by most of these sites for decades, by checking their answers in the back of the textbook. Our competitors that walk students through problems step-by-step are restrictive, discourage diverse solution paths, and do not allow for student/instructor discourse.

We are working to break down the barriers that are preventing communicating about math and giving teachers and students a flexible tool to express themselves, we aren't interested in trying to create a teaching robot.

Where is the answer key for grading?

There is no need to provide Free Math with an answer key. The grading page finds similar student answers on each problem, you only need to grade each final answer once and confirm that work was provided by each student to justify reaching their answer. To allow you to get value from seeing your students work even on days that you are limited on time, Free Math gives completion points to submitted solutions for any questions you are unable to review thoroughly. It also shows an overview of the assignment, based on the number of unique answers submitted for each question, so you can see which problems are likely the most useful to give feedback on.

If students submit files for their assignments, how does the system prevent cheating?

In addition to comparing individual answers, Free Math also compares students' overall documents for similarity. If two or more documents share a lot of work, they will be flagged for you to review side by side.

Why doesn't Free Math show auto-saved recovered documents on my Chromebook, like it does on my other devices?

During development, we did confirm that Free Math could auto-save into a temporary location on all browsers, including the Chrome browser on Chromebooks. Unfortunately, the technology used for this feature appears to be disabled by some district-managed Chromebooks. If you are using Chromebooks, your students should have Google accounts that will allow them to use our new feature to save directly to Google Drive and Classroom.

Supported Platforms

Modern browsers on Chromebooks, Windows PCs, Macs and Android devices.
Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari are all supported on these platforms.
Internet Explorer on Windows and Safari on iOS (iPads and iPhones) are both currently unsupported.