Which AI Is Best for Math? A Parent’s Trial of 4 Popular Tools for Middle School Homework
The clock above our kitchen stove ticked to 8:15 PM last Tuesday, and Leo’s pre-algebra workbook sat open to slope-intercept word problems, a half-eaten bowl of mac and cheese congealing next to it. I’d already finished my own work emails, loaded the dishwasher, and forgotten what slope-intercept even was for the third time that month. When Leo mumbled that he’d rather use a calculator app than ask me again, I didn’t argue. I’d been meaning to test out all the math AI tools parents keep talking about anyway, so I pulled out my laptop and told him we’d try one a night for a week to see which actually worked, instead of just guessing based on what other parents posted in our school Facebook group.
First up was free ChatGPT, the one everyone has an account for already. We copied the problem text and uploaded a photo of the printed graph, and it spit out a step-by-step answer in 10 seconds. But half a page in, it messed up a negative sign when calculating the y-intercept, and when Leo stopped it to ask why we had to rearrange the equation instead of just plugging in the points, it repeated the same step it already showed us, word for word. I get why kids just copy the answer from it—there’s no push to actually connect the dots if you’re confused. It’s fine if you already get the concept and just need to check your final answer, but it’s useless if you’re stuck on why something works, which is exactly when we need help most nights.
Night two, Leo pulled up Photomath, the app he’d heard all his friends rave about at school. You just point your camera at the problem, and it pulls it up instantly. That part was magic—no typing out weird exponents or graph labels, no cropping messed up photos, it got every handwritten problem Leo threw at it on the first try. The free version shows clear, labeled step-by-step work, and if you pay $10 a month for the premium version, it has animated explanations that walk you through each move. What I liked right away is that it didn’t skip over basic steps the way ChatGPT did, because it’s built specifically for K-12 math, not general question answering. The downside? Word problems tripped it up consistently. One problem about a bike shop’s flat fee plus hourly rate? It pulled the numbers wrong and mixed up which value was the slope and which was the y-intercept. It also locks all the extra explanation features behind the paywall, which adds up if you’re only using it a few nights a week for homework.
Night three we tried Microsoft Math Solver, a free tool I’d barely heard of before I started looking into options. It works the same way as Photomath—point your camera, it reads the problem automatically—and it’s totally free, no paywall for explanations. It did just as well on numerical problems as Photomath, and it actually got the tricky bike rental word problem right on the first try. It also links to similar practice problems from Khan Academy if you want to work through a few more once you figure out the first one, which was a really helpful touch. The downside is the interface is clunky. It has a lot of extra ads for other Microsoft products, and sometimes it pulls up unrelated search results at the bottom that distract Leo when he’s already tired after a long day of school. It also only offers text steps, no animated walkthroughs, so if your kid is a visual learner, it’s not as intuitive.
Night four we tried Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI tutor, which costs $12 a month, but I signed up for the free trial to test it out. What stood out immediately is that it doesn’t just give you the answer. When Leo entered the problem, it asked him a question back: “First, can you tell me what the slope of the line represents in this problem?” If he got it wrong, it gave him a small hint, not the full solution. It’s built like a real tutor, not an answer machine. When Leo got stuck on why the slope was negative for a problem about a candle burning down over time, it walked him through it with a simple example instead of just telling him the rule: “If the candle gets shorter every hour, what happens to the total height as time increases?” That’s exactly what I would have tried to say if I’d remembered what I was talking about. The downside is it’s slow. You have to work through the problem back and forth with the AI, so if you’re cramming to finish homework before bed and just need to check your work, it’s frustrating to go through the whole process. The price is also a big commitment for most families, equivalent to one low-cost tutoring session a month.
After a month of using these off and on, I’ve learned there’s no single “best” AI for math—it all depends on what you need it for. Right now, our routine works like this: when Leo finishes his homework and wants to check his answers, we use free Microsoft Math Solver. If he’s stuck on a problem and can’t figure out where he went wrong, we pull up Photomath for the steps. I have one non-negotiable rule: after he reads the explanation, he has to walk me through the step that confused him out loud before he writes it down in his workbook. That way, he’s not just copying, he’s actually processing what he learned.
Leo pulled his last pre-algebra quiz home last week with a B, up from a C+ he got the month before. We still have rough nights where nothing makes sense and we all end up frustrated, and I still haven’t decided if the budget will stretch for a Khanmigo subscription next semester. For now, though, the free tools work more often than not, and they take a lot of the pressure off me when I can’t remember what slope-intercept even is. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s working for us right now.
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