As many parents can probably relate, my children do not love math. They groan and complain about the work and then try to get it done quickly without thinking through the problems. Mistakes are made and frustration is common. Struggly at www.struggly.com is a math program designed to help children think outside the box and to learn that mistakes are a step in the learning process. Some tasks are not overtly math problems, rather problems using patterns, tessellations and logic. Other tasks involve mathematical operations and numbers. A family can have up to five children on one subscription, which costs $120 per year or $12 per month. The program is best suited for children ages seven to twelve. It is not a full math program, rather it is an addition to another math curriculum. It is created to help its users think deeply and become comfortable making mistakes. Each mistake is celebrated with a positive message. A running count of mistakes by all users is located on the website.

I set up my family account for my thirteen, eleven-, nine-, seven- and five-year-old. The five-year-old is really too young for the entire program, but as most younger siblings do, she wanted to be like the older ones. She has repeated the first few tasks, jumping frogs and deciding which number is greater than the other. I required twenty minutes of work in Struggly twice a week but found that I did not have to remind them. Most of my children asked daily to be able to do Struggly. My oldest and least math-loving child has benefitted from the message that struggling to find an answer is okay. He does not seem to be as frustrated when needing help in his regular math curriculum. My eleven-year-old is the most eager to continue to do tasks. He approaches each task as a new puzzle to figure out. My nine-year-old has sometimes ended up walking away from a task to take an emotional break. This has also benefited her in other areas, learning that sometimes we do need to let a problem sit for a while before we can solve it. The seven-year-old says that Struggly is “fun.” She needs the most direction but often watches her siblings and gains tips on how to complete a task before she pulls it up on her own dashboard. 

I really like that Struggly teaches and encourages mistakes as a part of learning. It also makes my children think hard and apply different processes to figure out how to solve a problem. The mere fact that math is approached as a type of game seems to allow a bit more self-forgiveness when a child does not understand how to solve the problem immediately. I have noticed a carry-over into the rest of the school day with this consistent messaging. 
We did find that Struggly did not seem to take age into account, with all of my children being assigned most of the same tasks. That meant I did have to help my seven-year-old with a task involving multiplication, division, and exponents. There is very little to no direction given with each task. This sometimes made for a bit of guessing to decide how to pass the level. In many cases this was okay and part of the process to make the children think. A few times, a very small hint would have been appreciated. 

Overall, the word used most by my children to describe www.struggly.com is “fun” and I would recommend this to any parent, whether homeschooling or public schooling their children. It really does assist with thinking outside of the box, approaching problems in different ways and becoming okay with making mistakes. My children still would not say they love math, but it has become less of a daily moaning session and I would attribute that solely to the work they do on Struggly.

-Product review by Katie Seppanen, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, September 2023