The Beast Academy series of books, published by Art of Problem Solving (AOPS), is an engaging curriculum for teaching elementary mathematics for ages 6 to 13. This review explores the Beast Academy learning books and app, delving into their effectiveness and appeal, and shares our personal experience using the curriculum.

What is Beast Academy?

Beast Academy takes a unique approach - a comic book format. Using this approach they present stories featuring a cast of monster characters who explore, struggle, and triumph over math problems, while weaving in mathematical concepts. This narrative technique makes learning math more relatable to children and nudges children to want to continue reading to follow along with the protagonists' adventures.

Each level in Beast Academy consists of four books, and up to four corresponding practice books. Students can use the practice books to do problems after reading through the guide book.

The Beast Academy app takes the curriculum to a higher level of engagement. It mirrors the content of the books while incorporating interactive elements such as problems and puzzles. Through the app, students can solve problems, receive instant feedback, and earn rewards, making the learning process both fun and motivating.

One of the app's standout features is its adaptability. It can adjust the difficulty of problems based on the student's performance, ensuring that each child is challenged at just the right level. Additionally, the app includes video lessons that reinforce concepts and offer students another way to learn and understand the material.

Another great feature of the application is the comprehensive reporting made available through the application's parent portal. Parents can see how long their child has been using the application and which sections they're working on. They can see which problems they got wrong or right, and it provides links to helpful explanations and write-ups on problems if parents need to work with their child to teach or review difficult concepts.

Application Walkthrough

The are two portals in the application, the Student and Parent Portals.

Home Screen

The application is fairly straightforward and child-friendly.

Class Screen

Each level of Beast Academy is split into chapters. The chapters have sections for students to tackle sets of problems related to a particular topic. Students can jump around and work on different sections if they so desire.

Theater

The theater section contains a YouTube-style library of videos for math topics. If your child wants to just watch some videos, this provides a quick link to do so. The videos shown in this section are also interspersed throughout the class coursework.

Puzzle Lab

The puzzle lab has a large number of puzzles. Some of them are more visual, such as the "laser blocking" puzzle, and can be quite challenging, even for an adult!

A few of these will require Mom and Dad to take a look - they're no joke!

Library

Of course, all of the books are included in the Beast Academy application subscription. I ended up purchasing the books anyway because I'm not a fan of reading on an iPad/computer, but if you want to skip the expense of paper books, you can.

The comic is appropriate for children.

Leaderboards

If your kid likes the idea of competing, they can get experience points for completing lessons.

Beast Builder

As the student earns currency in the game, they can trade it in to buy decorations and parts for their Monster avatar in the game. All items are completely refundable - there are no microtransactions or other nickel and diming of parents.

Parent Portal

Ultimately, parents want to have an idea of what their kid is learning and how they're performing. The application's parent portal is very helpful in this regard.

Within the parent portal you can see which lessons have been completed,  how much time they've cumulatively spent on a chapter, and so on.

You can view how your child performed on each lesson as well as see how much time was spent on it.

For each problem you can see what the student's answers were and view the correct solution/explanation.

In addition, for each chapter there is a helpful Overview document provided that parents can review.

Conclusion

The product is overall great, but there are a few drawbacks.

Students are given a good introduction to a wide variety of math topics, and are introduced to many clever puzzles and methods that we didn't know of.

However, the lack of repetition in the program means that for some learners they may not deeply master a topic. This we feel can be accomplished through supplementing the Beast Academy curriculum with another worksheet/problem book like those published by IXL.

The Pros

• Engaging Content: The combination of story-driven books and an interactive app makes math engaging and fun for children.
• Depth of Material: The curriculum is rigorous and deep, encouraging students to gain understanding of mathematical concepts.
• Adaptive Learning: The app’s ability to adjust difficulty levels keeps students continuously challenged.
• High-Quality Problems: The problem sets are varied, challenging, and encourage critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Developing Number Sense: Many of the chapters emphasize building number sense and introduce subjects like multiple digit operations using multiple approaches.
• Parent Portal: The parent portal provides an excellent way to measure progress - you won't need to think about what to work on next.

The Cons

• Pace: The rigorous nature of the curriculum might be challenging for some students, especially if they are not used to a deeper conceptual approach to math.
• Lack of Repetition: While the concepts are taught in a very clear and methodical way, some children need to solve more problems before they really master solving a particular type of problem. This can be done by supplementing math education with another product.
• Cost:  Purchasing both books and paying annual app subscriptions may be a consideration for some families. The cost is $99/annually for the application, with each book and practice guide running ~$30 as a pair. If you're expecting to go through a lot of material on the application, it's a good value.

Final Words

We started out using Brain Quest books for 1st and 2nd grade, and tried out the The Good and the Beautiful's math curriculum for 3rd grade before settling on Beast Academy. So far, we find this is an effective curriculum and will likely continue using it until completed.

We supplement by using IXL for additional practice problems, as well as providing a rigorous assessment every six months to track progress.

A note about the app subscription - if you bundle the app with the books you can save about $60. It's normally $120 in books if you bought the $99/year app subscription with $120, plus you can get a discount for additional students if you have more than one child using the program.

We hope you find this review helpful!

This site contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn commission from qualifying purchases.