Citizen Maths: A Free Online Course That Teaches Adults the Math They Missed in High School

Many peo­ple still have a major fear of math­e­mat­ics, hav­ing suf­fered through school and not real­ly hav­ing been in the right frame of mind to grasp con­cepts that we’ve been told will come in handy in our future work­ing lives. When Britons get to the age of 16, many can choose to leave school, escap­ing the ter­ror of math (or, as they say, maths).

But we shouldn’t live in fear, so along comes Cit­i­zen Maths, a UK-based free online course that pur­ports to help adults catch up with Lev­el 2 math (aka what a 16-year-old should know) with­out get­ting hit with a ruler or a spit wad. The course is fund­ed by the UFI Char­i­ta­ble Trust, which focus­es on pro­vid­ing free edu­ca­tion for adults.

The Cit­i­zen Maths course cur­rent­ly con­sists of three units—Proportion, Uncer­tain­ty, and Rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Addi­tion­al sec­tions on Pat­tern and Mea­sure­ments will soon fol­low. All units come with videos and tests that take about an hour of the viewer’s time. As the nar­ra­tor says, you can “learn in safe­ty, with­out fear of being told off or exposed.” The full course takes, on aver­age, about 20 hours.

And the tuto­ri­als bring in the real world, not just the abstract. Ratios and odds are expe­ri­enced through roulette, horse rac­ing, and play­ing dice. Under­stand­ing insur­ance comes into the tuto­r­i­al on mak­ing deci­sions. Mod­el­ing is explained by try­ing to under­stand weath­er pat­terns. And pro­por­tion is explained through bak­ing recipes and mak­ing cock­tails.

You will need a Google Account to get start­ed, though, for those with­out one, there is a sim­ple guide to get you start­ed. The tuto­ri­als fea­ture YouTube instruc­tion along with an embed­ded app called Scratch.

As of this post, three of the five sec­tions are avail­able, with the com­plete course due up by next year. You can find more advanced Math cours­es in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Math Cours­es.

via Boing­Bo­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es

Free Math Text­books

The Unex­pect­ed Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Star­ry Night”

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.