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Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

mathigon.org

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Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#51

Post by jacobolus »

gallegojaime wrote: post #36
ehsankia wrote: post #9

Earlier 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Hmm, you may have an outdated view of KhanAcademy.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…

You should think of Khan Academy as an average high school lecture course, aimed at an audience of typical students, and with an approach and exercises closely aligned to the standard (frankly, quite uninspiring) USA school curriculum. It isn’t the best possible quality, but it does have 2 big advantages: (1) it is self-paced and available to anyone anytime, and (2) it is consistently okay, setting a quality floor. Human teachers are more variable in quality.

As a society, we could definitely aspire to producing much better materials, but even though I myself would never use it, I’m glad that Khan Academy exists.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#52

Post by gallegojaime »

jacobolus wrote: post #51
gallegojaime wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should think of Khan Academy as an average high school lecture course, aimed at an audience of typical students, and with an approach and exercises closely aligned to the standard (frankly, quite uninspiring) USA school curriculum. It isn’t the best possible quality, but it does have 2 big advantages: (1) it is self-paced and available to anyone anytime, and (2) it is consistently okay, setting a quality floor. H…

Those are all fair points.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#53

Post by chongli »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #6

It 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…

something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes

I have grave misgivings about that sort of thing. This approach is what leads to the Google and Facebook "filter bubbles" [1]. What I need is something that exposes me to different viewpoints, opposing viewpoints, presented in convincing ways to challenge me and help me to grow as a person. What I want is to learn about new ideas that would never have occurred to me before.

Traditional schools, much maligned, try to expose kids to books and other media they never would've bothered with otherwise. Yeah, kids for the most part reject this stuff and slog through until graduation, but some don't! Some kids find a new passion for Mozart or Shakespeare or calculus for that matter. Maybe we can predict interest in those subjects before exposing people to them, but I'm not confident about it. There are outliers everywhere and it's not fair to leave them out in the cold.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#54

Post by jacobolus »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #33
galaxyLogic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that hiring a private piano teacher for every child in the country would also be a difficult proposition, politically / economically. Especially if we expected every person to reach the level of competence at music that we expect with numeracy/mathematics.

If we wanted to switch from the current classroom model to a private tutorial model, with the amount we currently spend per student on teachers, we could hire 1:1 tutors for only a few hours per week for each student, which would (a) not really be enough time to cover everything students are expected to learn in school, and (b) would then also leave huge amounts of time where the school wasn’t providing childcare service, which is one of its primary purposes.

However, just as upper middle class families can currently afford weekly private piano lessons or 1:1 sport coaching, you are right that they could likewise afford private math tutorials, and get better results than classroom instruction.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#55

Post by scarejunba »

otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #16

"Edutainment" sucks donkey balls. One of the things I'm forever resentful for is the way my life was ruined by not learning things in a structured and rigorous way in childhood. Re-learning (and learning to learn) in adulthood is a pain and is never quite as good as doing it right the first time around. Thankfully, my own kids are spared of this horror.

I think the primary gain here is the examples. When learning the eps-delta or eps-N def of limits as a child in high school (15 or so yrs old) it took quite a few examples before I grokked it, despite the concept being quite simple.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#57

Post by lovemenot »

gubikmic wrote: post #31

Source code is available: https://github.com/mathigon https://mathigon.io

there's no license file at the link above. I believe this software is mainly intended for the use of educators to develop new content locally.

It seems there's a separate account for their MIT licensed software: https://github.com/mathigon/mathigon.github.io

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#58

Post by perfmode »

ai_ia wrote: post #48
toomuchtodo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might consider exploring obtaining a grant or funding from the Gates Foundation. Education improvement is one of their foundation's core targets.

Not sure if they give out grants to for-profit organisations. Will check it out. Thanks.

You’d be surprised!

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#59

Post by qwerty456127 »

otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #16

"Edutainment" sucks donkey balls. One of the things I'm forever resentful for is the way my life was ruined by not learning things in a structured and rigorous way in childhood. Re-learning (and learning to learn) in adulthood is a pain and is never quite as good as doing it right the first time around. Thankfully, my own kids are spared of this horror.

So you mean you've learnt the things the "edutainment" way when you were a child and are resentful for that? I just didn't learn the things in any way in childhood. There was no edutainment, the way teachers taught most of the things were next to impossible to actually understand (I had near-zero understanding of anything in math by the end of high school, only capable to use some formulae substituting) and all the practice was debilitatingly boring.

If Mathigon, BetterExplained, Ivan Savov's no-bullshit books and things like that existed when I was a child that would be a totally different story. I'm so glad my children are going to study with these and better things given.

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