Math Facts Pro has both a paid side (with tracking, accountability, and a game, Mars Defense), and a free side, Math Facts Pro Lite, without those things. You can try the full side free for 30 days to see what you would get for $1/seat/12 months. If you decide you don’t want the extra features, you can have students play on the Lite side. They will not use an account, so every time they play, the program will be trying to assess what they know/don’t know/almost know and this takes a while, so longer sessions are more effective than short ones. (Of course, using an account on the paid side allows the data to accumulate, so each session builds on the previous ones, making it many times more effective, and allowing you to monitor them just by logging in.) In order for students to prove that they did the work you assigned, they will need to print their results page and turn it in to you.
To have students practice on the Lite side for free, have them click on one of the appropriate operator button at the top of the page. For multiplication and division, they will then need to select up to the 10’s, or up to the 12’s.
Students will be asked for their name for the report at the end. Names are also used for the highest score of the day field. However, to prevent inappropriate words from being used, we have a whitelist of first names. Not all names are going to be on our whitelist. If this is the case, it will warn them. If the student re-enters the name, they will be assigned a nonsense name, like “Mysterious Shark”. (This will also happen if they click Skip Name”. However, if they enter it twice, what they typed will appear on the report for printing at the end.)
To keep fact practice from getting too boring, we play jokes after 20-30 facts. The jokes were either created by us, or filtered by us to be as clean and inoffensive as possible. We do not make fun of any real people, don’t use bathroom humor, and keep the language clean. Since a sense of humor is related to student age, we ask them for their grade level. Students can vote on the jokes, and they are fed jokes that are most popular with their grade level. The grade level selected here has absolutely nothing to do with which facts they are asked. The program will ask a broad spectrum of facts as it seeks to home in on which ones are known/not known/almost known by this particular student. It is completely individualized instruction. If students don’t want the jokes, they should just select “No Jokes.”
50 facts typically takes about 5 minutes, and 100 facts about 10 minutes. For other quantities, or to try to master the grid, select Unlimited. If students make no mistakes and are never too slow, mastery determination takes about 120 facts when playing 0-10’s, which actually has 121 facts. If all of the hardest facts are perfect the program will assume that all the facts are known. However, some facts will get asked more than once to make sure they weren’t a fluke, thus the number required is not firm.
If students are on unlimited, when they decide to stop, they should click the Results button in the upper left corner.
From the results page, students can print or click an operator button to either re-enter the previous session, or change to a new operator.
