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Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

expii.com

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Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#3

Post by vinchuco »

poshenloh wrote: post #2

We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how everything fit together. :)

Interesting!

It sort of reminds me of Paperscape [1] but more on the style of wikipedia since it invites you to edit it.

Organizing knowledge is way harder than it seems.

Instead of for topics, I would personally like to see this implemented for courses and their prerequisites (and perhaps the topics in each course) in order to keep track of your own learning or plan out what you would like to learn in the future.

[1] http://paperscape.org/

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#4

Post by j2kun »

Once you actually get to an article, having to click "continue" after every paragraph is mildly annoying.

Edit: I am also not a huge fan of the choice to organize the topics by the "high school class" they were introduced in. There is absolutely no reason to break algebra up into "Algebra 1" and "Algebra 2"

In particular, this means you're putting "basics of matrices" arbitrarily with "Algebra 1" when knowing how to add and multiply matrices has literally nothing to do with the other topics in that group.

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#6

Post by expii »

j2kun wrote: post #4

Once you actually get to an article, having to click "continue" after every paragraph is mildly annoying. Edit: I am also not a huge fan of the choice to organize the topics by the "high school class" they were introduced in. There is absolutely no reason to break algebra up into "Algebra 1" and "Algebra 2" In particular, this means you're putting "basics of matrices" arbitrarily with "Algebra 1" when knowing how to…

Thanks for your feedback! All feedback is really useful to us, as it helps us to continue to polish the product. The articles themselves are crowd-sourced, and they certainly show signs of being a community that is still growing. It's possible to create richer articles like this one: https://www.expii.com/t/gravity-weight-642

The main point of our post tonight was to share the current product of the Topic Map. As the rest of the site continues to grow, we hope that you will soon learn about it as a useful resource.

Regarding the split of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2: we fully agree that math should be more connected. We actually experimented with that here, in the "Theory" section of "Math". You can find that by clicking into "Algebra Revisited", which you can also find by first going here:

https://www.expii.com/t/2829

and then clicking on "Topic Map" to see a fully connected version of Algebra. This is much more theoretical though, and does not align so easily with standards used in mainstream schools. We chose to make the main sections of our maps align with standards so that they could be more immediately useful for the mainstream audience. However, we ourselves are a bunch of enthusiasts who love to think about how to push the envelope. :)

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#7

Post by expii »

vinchuco wrote: post #3
poshenloh wrote: post #2

We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how everything fit together. :)

Interesting! It sort of reminds me of Paperscape [1] but more on the style of wikipedia since it invites you to edit it. Organizing knowledge is way harder than it seems. Instead of for topics, I would personally like to see this implemented for courses and their prerequisites (and perhaps the topics in each course) in order to keep track of your own learning or plan out what you would like to learn in the future. [1…

Thanks for your comments! :) We have plans to build on top of this to create a way for you to learn an entire "course" of topics. That's our next stage of development.

For now, we're happy to share the Topic Map as it is of independent interest. :) We hope that it might be helpful for people who are either already at a topic area within a course, or just like exploring maps.

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#8

Post by poshenloh »

voltagex_ wrote: post #5
poshenloh wrote: post #2

We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how everything fit together. :)

Any idea why BlueCoat would categorise your site as "Suspicious"?

This is a really good question! We don't think we're doing anything suspicious, and there aren't even any payment gateways anywhere on the site. To be honest, we weren't familiar with BlueCoat. Do you know what tends to make them rate a site as Suspicious?

We're just trying to create a valuable free resource, through crowd-sourcing. :)

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#9

Post by nitrogen »

Nice. This is about 70% of the way there toward the fully visible conceptual graph I've wanted to make or find for years. I'd like to be able to see items from multiple zoom levels, for example. I want to be able to look at a bubble that says something like "addition of positive integers", and follow a sequence of arrows to every academic concept and career that makes use of addition.

Another thing I want software to do is highlight everything I think I know (maybe take some quizzes to prove it), ask me what I'd like to know, then show the graph and list of topics I need to learn in between. Based on another comment[0] it sounds like it would eventually be possible to use this data to do exactly that. So again, nice.

Re: Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

#10

Post by nitrogen »

voltagex_ wrote: post #5
poshenloh wrote: post #2

We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how everything fit together. :)

Any idea why BlueCoat would categorise your site as "Suspicious"?

Some firewalls, virus scanners, etc. treat "unpopular" as synonymous with "suspicious". It's very annoying as a small software vendor.
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