Articles

AoPS founder Richard Rusczyk has been awarded the 2025 Courage & Civility Award and is directing the $5 million grant to MATHCOUNTS to create a new program for grades 3-5. This expansion will build foundational problem-solving skills in elementary students, extending MATHCOUNTS' proven middle school model to younger learners with support from AoPS's Beast Academy expertise.

Discover why bright kids who find "hard things easy and easy things hard" need more than diagnostic labels—they need supportive systems that help them flourish. Learn how the AWARES framework transforms twice-exceptional and neurodiverse learners' unique profiles from puzzling contradictions into lifelong competitive advantages.

A new independent study of nearly 1,000 elementary students shows that Beast Academy Online significantly improves math achievement for high-ability learners. Students who used the platform just 25 minutes more per week scored substantially higher on year-end assessments.

Test anxiety occurs when normal pre-test nerves become overwhelming and interfere with academic performance, causing kids to "freeze" or blank out despite knowing the material. Dr. Tram Huynh provides parents with practical strategies to help their children manage test anxiety, including normalizing feelings, teaching calming techniques, and knowing when to seek professional help. She emphasizes that test anxiety is common and manageable with the right tools and parental guidance.

The world's most prestigious math competition revealed a powerful truth: elite students reach their potential not through isolation, but through community. AoPS CEO Ben Kornell shares what the International Math Olympiad taught him about why we've always put collaboration over competition.

AoPS has been preparing students for the AI revolution for decades—long before anyone knew artificial intelligence would reshape education and make traditional "box-checking" skills obsolete. While most schools train students to follow predetermined steps and execute formulas—tasks that computers can do far more efficiently—AoPS develops the uniquely human abilities to reason, create, and solve problems that don't have predetermined answers. The question isn't whether AI will change education, but whether your student will be ready to thrive in a world where creative thinking outweighs following instructions.

How does problem-solving relate to language arts? Quite easily: every time you work to communicate or understand an idea, you're working to solve a problem. Read on to learn how the AoPS Language Arts team applies our world-class problem-solving approach to language arts.

MATHCOUNTS serves as a transformative "threshold of mathematical adventure" that teaches students to find joy in problem-solving. The program helps young Mathletes discover that math is a shared exploration, and they, in turn, can inspire others to begin their own mathematical journeys.