This school year, the New Hyde Park-Garden City Park Union Free School District introduced Magma Math, a supplemental online platform that encourages students to show their work and enables teachers to understand each student’s thinking and level of comprehension.
Students access Magma Math on their Chromebooks. The program is interactive, allowing students to draw, write, pull out the questions, and utilize graphing and geometry tools. Magma Math also uses AI technology, digitizing the students’ writing into a neater font. It can also read questions aloud for auditory learners. The teacher assigns questions to the class with three levels of difficulty: mild, medium or spicy. Utilizing a heat map, the teacher can monitor the students’ progress as they work on the math equations. The heat map allows the teachers to see if the student got the answer incorrect, and how many times it took them to reach the correct answer. Additionally, Magma Math offers playback of the students’ work so teachers can see where they might need assistance or use it as an example when discussing with the whole class. By using Magma Math, the district is preparing students for the high school level, as Sewanhaka Central High School District also utilizes the math platform.
In Maya Guzman’s fifth grade class at Garden City Park School, the students have been enjoying using Magma Math. On Sept. 29, the students subtracted decimals on the platform.
“Magma Math has been helping my students look at math in a different way,” Ms. Guzman said. “By using the playback feature, the class can see all the methods of how you can reach the correct answer.”
