Source code is available:
https://github.com/mathigon
https://mathigon.io
Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
31–40 of 97 posts
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the most popular video games amongst kids is about tinkering, exploration and building cool stuff.
No child learned anything useful in Minecraft. It's better than Candy Crush (no overt addicting psychological tricks) but ultimately the same kind of waste of time. No child ever grew up and said "gee, how great it is that I spent 10000 hours in Minecraft instead of doing sports or learning a useful skill". I grew up on video games myself; trust me, it sucks.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess youve removed most forms of gaming from you life?
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO most college level math isn't difficult Don't make the mistake of assuming the entire world is like you. Plenty of people struggle with lower level math. What makes you think the concepts are not difficult for them, and to blame only the teaching?
It's not either or. It's difficult to understand concepts (well) and it is also difficult to EXPLAIN concepts (well). The better the explanation the easier it is to understand for more people. Whereas a bad explanation is something that assumes students understand something most of them don't. It's really not a blame-game but more an impedance mismatch between the teacher and the students. IF you can have your own tu…
A thought: Most people who learn to play piano do so by having a piano-teacher whom they privately meet with once a week or so. Whereas this is not the convention for learning math. Maybe it could apply equally well for math as it does for learning to play piano.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#34It really feels like we're on the cusp of a textbook similar to the Primer in Neal Stephenson's 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer'. As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching. A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. If advertising networks have ef…
I am building Primer. :) https://www.primerlabs.io You can checkout the documentation part for images/gifs to learn how it works. Bit late on schedule, but working hard to release soon. Made a video about the same explaining the interface. https://youtu.be/acTdwGV0s9I P.S. The landing page is a horrible experience on mobile. My bad.
Are you hiring? This looks interesting
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. That'd be extremely useful to have.
I concur. While I appreciate that math education at the elementary and high school level is easier to author and has more data points, where I think this approach would really shine is at the college level. The main problem in math is that the higher level you reach, the fewer experts who exist or are willing to sit down 1:1 and tutor students. I think an automated teaching system for analysis, writing proofs, number…
So true. I recently began taking college math courses online for fun and the ALEKS system was great up to Pre-calc, but once I hit calculus, and only found video lecture-based courses, things became frustrating, half-clear and confusing.
Suddenly textbooks and multiple other sources became necessary to combat what you so cleverly called "math anxiety."
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just videos of someone going through the motions of solving problems. These are interactive explorations of mathematics.
Hmm, you may have an outdated view of KhanAcademy. Sure, there's videos to supplement, but there's also plenty of exercises and interactive content.
I used Khan Academy to complement my math and econ learning. While the concept of KA is good, with quality practical exercises, I found the videos very inefficient to learn most things.
I understand that it's step by step for the general audience, but KA applies this very slow, remedial structure to everything. The throughput was so bad I quit many series because of desperation.
Some MIT OCW recitation videos are examples of how to do this right. The lesson-giver has surgical precision and gets right to the point. Here's this problem/subject, and here's the relevant knowledge nugget. They'll mention what built up to this problem, which is amazing for discovering prerequisites - but never discuss those in depth. (I believe videos are not the most optimal way to learn in general, but in review and understanding they are very good.)
KA, on the other hand, goes into needless detail and redundance. (It's fine if you mention how demand graphs are relevant, but don't explain the basics of demand graphs again! I'm watching a more specific topic!).
That's how you end up with a long series of videos with sparse knowledge where, after six videos of ten minutes each, you have learned squat and the words "oh, let me use this pen color..." resonate in your head.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#37I'm a maths teacher in Australia, and have been using a system over the past couple of years call "Maths Pathways" (it's only designed for the Australian Curriculum at this stage). I think of it as a personalised electronic text book, and after a bunch of diagnostic assessment, it provides the learner a choice of worksheets they are ready to learn next. Solves the problem of the massive disparity of ability levels that you get in a typical high school maths class. It totally doesn't replace the teacher in the classroom, but rather replaces the textbook (it's mostly worksheet-based, and not particularly interactive).
But one key point, both from using Maths Pathways, and as a teacher in general, is that a lot of learners need a human to guide them through some of the problems. This is usually for confidence reasons rather than anything else, and ideally we move to students who can take more control of their own learning and solve their own problems, but in reality, a lot of students (for a lot of reasons) will take a lot longer to get there. I'd be fascinated if a chatbot interaction could pull this off if it were 'human' enough, but I suspect not (though that's probably my own bias).
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A textbook that is able to diagnose common misunderstandings from a set of wrong answers to a problem set and evolve its teaching methods. That'd be extremely useful to have.
I concur. While I appreciate that math education at the elementary and high school level is easier to author and has more data points, where I think this approach would really shine is at the college level. The main problem in math is that the higher level you reach, the fewer experts who exist or are willing to sit down 1:1 and tutor students. I think an automated teaching system for analysis, writing proofs, number…
> writing proofs
In this vein, there is the Incredible Proof Machine‡, an interactive visual proof assistant designed for introducing beginners to mathematical proofs.
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#39This is beautiful. I wanted more content like this, and supporting Kahn Academy made me want to support this also.
They have a Patreon page. If you like what's here already and want it to grow - you should donate too!
https://www.patreon.com/mathigon
Just a couple of dollars from each of us is likely to make a huge difference to such a volunteer effort!
There are more options here : https://mathigon.org/donate
(When I posted this, Patreon had only 5 supporters - can you help too?)
Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, you may have an outdated view of KhanAcademy. Sure, there's videos to supplement, but there's also plenty of exercises and interactive content.
I used Khan Academy to complement my math and econ learning. While the concept of KA is good, with quality practical exercises, I found the videos very inefficient to learn most things. I understand that it's step by step for the general audience, but KA applies this very slow, remedial structure to everything. The throughput was so bad I quit many series because of desperation. Some MIT OCW recitation videos are exa…
I also used kahn academy for similar reason and I think their quality changes depending on the subjects. For me the real value came from their exercises. You get a problem, you don't know the answer, you open all the hints, after a couple of exercises of doing that you see the pattern, and then you have learned that specific thing. When I got stuck was when I watched the videos. It also helps the watch them at 1.5 and 2x respectively, depending on your need.