Best IB Maths Resources for AA and AI (HL and SL) in 2026

Quick answer

• Root Tutor: the all-in-one AI tutor built for the IB by an IB student. One tutor per unit remembers your weak spots, double-checks its maths, draws the graph and gets you ready with practice papers in your exam's style, marked against a mark scheme.
• IB past papers, Questionbank and the formula booklet: the official material every plan should end with, but none of it teaches you.
• Revision Village: IB Maths questions sorted by topic and difficulty, with video solutions, but it does not know your own gaps.
• Save My Exams: notes and topic questions for AA and AI, a library rather than a tutor.
• Khan Academy and Desmos: free help for foundations and for seeing graphs, not built around IB papers.

IB Maths punishes gaps you did not know you had. You can follow every lesson on sequences in Year 1 and still freeze on a Paper 1 question in Year 2, because the skill was never tested without help. The best IB Maths resources do three jobs: they teach the topic, they make you practise it the way the IB asks, and they show you exactly where the marks went.

The best IB Maths resource for AA and AI students, at HL or SL, is one that teaches you and then tests you, and for most students that is Root Tutor. One tutor per unit remembers your weak spots, double-checks its maths, draws graphs and runs practice papers in your exam's style marked against a mark scheme.

We compared six resources on four things: whether it teaches (not just shows answers), whether it matches your course (AA or AI) and level (HL or SL), whether it marks your work against an IB-style mark scheme, and what it costs. Everything about the other resources comes from their public pages, checked on 11 October 2026. Prices change, so check before you pay.

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1. Root Tutor: best for being taught and tested in one place

Root Tutor is the all-in-one AI tutor for IB, GCSE and A-Level. It plans your study sessions, teaches the way you think, and gets you ready for every test. It was built for the IB by an IB student, so it is organised around how IB Maths is actually taught: one block of the course at a time.

It teaches the maths you cannot yet do. Everything lives in units. Make a unit for calculus or vectors, drop in your syllabus or a photo of your notes, and Root pulls out the topics. Tutor works step by step and will not just hand over the answer. There is one tutor per unit, and it remembers your past sessions, your weak spots and your files, so if integration by parts tripped you up last week, it knows.

Its maths is double-checked. A wrong sum is re-done before you see it. That matters in maths more than anywhere, because a tutor that makes an algebra slip teaches you the slip.

It draws the graph. When a picture helps, Tutor draws the diagram or graph, which is most of the battle in functions, transformations and calculus. Stuck on a homework question? Snap a photo and it works through it with you.

It runs IB-style practice papers. Test prep builds practice papers in your exam's style from your topics, your teacher's material and your exam board, and the questions get harder as you go. Every answer is checked by a second solve before you see the paper. There is a timer and a calculator, and you can add photos of your working. Your answers are marked like an examiner would, against a mark scheme, and then you get strengths, what needs work and what to study next, sent to the tutor and into your plan.

It checks what you still remember. Revision mode runs a check-up one question at a time and sorts each topic into Remembered, Shaky or Not yet. One tap sends the gaps to Tutor. Switch on spaced review for a unit and topics come back on set days, with the ones you struggle with coming back sooner.

Cost: Root is free to use, no card needed, and new accounts get a 7-day free trial of everything.

2. IB past papers, Questionbank and the formula booklet: best for the real thing

Real IB papers are the closest you will get to exam day, and every revision plan should finish with them. IB Questionbank is the IB's own tool: it lets teachers build custom exams from official IB examination questions, with markschemes and subject reports, filtered by exam date, paper, level and question type. It is sold as a licence through Titlewave (the Follett IB Store), so ask your teacher whether your school has it.

The formula booklet matters more than students think. According to Revision Village's guide to the booklet, AA SL and AA HL share one booklet (as do the AI courses), and the official AA booklet is allowed in IB exams, while condensed versions are not.

What it lacks: papers and markschemes show you the right answer, not why your method broke. Use them to test yourself, and use a tutor to fix what they reveal. Our guide on how to use past papers covers the review process step by step.

3. Revision Village: best for topic-sorted practice

Revision Village is built around IB Maths. Its questionbank is sorted by topic and arranged by difficulty, with markschemes and video solutions, alongside mock exams, prediction exams and worked solutions to past paper questions. It covers AA and AI at SL and HL.

Cost: The free plan gives access to a subset of topics, with no card. RV Gold costs $249 for a single course or $499 for all your courses, each billed once.

What it lacks: it shows you a worked solution, but it does not remember which topics you keep missing or teach you through a method you do not understand.

4. Save My Exams: best for notes and topic questions

Save My Exams has IB Maths AA and AI courses at both levels, with revision notes, exam questions organised by topic, target tests, past papers, mock exams and flashcards, which it says are written by teachers and examiners. It is free to join.

What it lacks: it is a revision library, not a tutor that teaches you through a topic you are stuck on.

5. Khan Academy: best for rebuilding foundations

Khan Academy is a free nonprofit course library, not built around IB papers. Its precalculus and calculus courses help if IB Maths is moving faster than your earlier algebra can keep up.

What it lacks: it follows its own course structure, not IB command terms, papers or markschemes.

6. Desmos: best for seeing a function

The Desmos graphing calculator is free and online. Graphing a function and dragging a slider is the fastest way to see what a transformation does. In the exam you will use your own graphic display calculator (GDC), so practise every calculator skill on the model you will sit with, and check with your teacher which models your school allows.

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What resources do IB maths teachers recommend for exam prep?

IB Maths exam prep works best when it is built on the IB's own material: past papers with their markschemes, IB Questionbank, the subject reports and the formula booklet. The reason is the mark scheme: you need to see how marks are actually given, not just whether you got the number right.

On top of that base, add two things. First, topic-sorted practice for the areas a past paper exposes, which is where Revision Village or Save My Exams earn their place. Second, a tutor for the topics you cannot do yet, because a markscheme shows the right method without explaining why yours failed.

Mix your topics when you practise. In a 2015 study of 126 Grade 7 students (Rohrer, Dedrick and Stershic, Journal of Educational Psychology, doi:10.1037/edu0000001), students scored higher on the problem types they had practised mixed together than on the ones they had practised one type at a time. Each student then sat a surprise test, either one day or 30 days later, and mixed practice won at both delays (effect sizes 0.42 and 0.79). Real exam papers are mixed, so your practice should be too. Our guide to interleaving explains how to set that up.

Best resources for AA HL, AA SL and AI

AA HL. Paper 1 has no calculator, and Paper 3 is HL only, so build algebra and calculus fluency by hand with Tutor, then drill topic questions and full papers. AA HL is where an unnoticed gap costs the most.

AA SL. The core AA content without the extra HL topics, and the same no-calculator Paper 1 (IB subject brief). A tutor plus regular timed papers is usually enough; you rarely need more than one question bank.

AI SL and HL. Technology is allowed on every AI paper, and the IB subject brief says students should expect to develop strong technology skills, so GDC fluency carries real marks. Practise interpreting results in context, not only getting the number.

Still choosing a course? IB Maths AA vs AI compares them, including what universities ask for. For the full plan to the top grade, read how to get a 7 in IB Maths.

How to use these resources together

A strong week of IB Maths revision looks like this:

1. Learn: work through one weak topic with a tutor until you can do a question without help.
2. Drill: do 10 to 15 topic questions on it, mixed in with older topics.
3. Test: sit one timed paper, or half a paper, under exam conditions.
4. Mark honestly: check every answer against the markscheme, including the method marks.
5. Feed back: send what you lost marks on into next week's plan.

A worked example. Say a timed AA paper goes badly on one calculus question. Do not just read the markscheme answer and move on. Write down which line of the markscheme you first missed: the set-up, a step of algebra or the final accuracy. If it was the set-up, the problem is understanding, so take that topic to a tutor. If it was the algebra, the problem is fluency, so do ten topic questions on it from a question bank, mixed with older topics. Then sit that question type again cold a week later. One question reviewed this way teaches you more than a whole paper you only score.

Done by hand, that loop is a lot of admin. You have to remember which of forty-odd topics you are shaky on, find questions for each one, mark your own working against a markscheme, and decide on Sunday night what to revise next. Root does that work in one place: one tutor per unit remembers your weak spots, Test prep builds and marks papers in your exam's style, and the gaps go straight back to Tutor and into your plan. If you want to see every mode first, here is what Root does, mode by mode, or you can try it on a maths topic you are stuck on, free with no card.

For the wider IB toolkit beyond maths, see our best IB study resources.