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Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

mathigon.org

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Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#71

Post by walterstucco »

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…

> As in, something that learns your interests and customizes to your tastes while still teaching

As cool as it sounds, this is exactly what learning is not.

Learning is getting out of the comfort zone, usually going against what you like and discover new things, especially that you thought you liked those things before, but you actually were just liking what was popular back then.

I was deeply into car repairing and scale models when I was a kid and a young teenager.

But one of my uncles was a sci-fi fan and kept giving me books as gifts, he introduced me to computers (he had a Sinclair Spectrum 48k) and gave me my first PC (a 286, I owned the C=64 before, but I wasn't really programming it).

If it wasn't for him, I would have never become a programmer.

I was the first one to ignore what I really liked.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#72

Post by walterstucco »

spiralganglion wrote: post #25
otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grew up playing video games, and now I'm a graphics programmer. I learned to program because I wanted to make games. Trust me, it slaps.

That's just motivation

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#74

Post by robfitz »

jacobolus wrote: post #50
itissid wrote: post #27

This looks awesome. But: 1. Grain of salt: contemporary research shows how learning has other facets that are also important like grit[1] (i.e. repetitive application of hard work that has the right direction). 2. Contemporary research suggests that when learning a new concept is made "easier" using such methods its more efficient. On the contrary this is only the first step. Learning is better when its harder, but h…

Yes, this format makes it hard to ask very difficult questions, and the little chat bot rewarding the students with animated gifs of cartoon characters is a gimmick. This is okay for teaching basic vocabulary and concepts, but seems to go no further than a pretty superficial exploration. Not much ingenuity or thinking is required from the students. Everything is pre-digested. If a high school student were trying to l…

I think you're focused on making good learners great (which I assume is the journey you experienced in school), but there's also a fairly large opportunity in helping every student get up to a certain baseline of "pretty good". A student who can't grasp how to plot a point isn't going to benefit from Geometric Transformations.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#75

Post by sdenton4 »

solipsism wrote: post #12
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…

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'. Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps. For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you w…

Absolutely.

Writing textbooks is extremely time consuming... Seeing 'Mathematics - May 2019' in the list of tracks for Primer strikes me as un-serious. Likewise the single animation for Hyperbolic geometry in the 'non-euclidean geometry' page on mathigon.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#76

Post by jonsen »

neatcoder wrote: post #67
octahedron42 wrote: post #17

I love the chapter on fibonacci numbers. So colourful! https://mathigon.org/course/sequences/fibonacci

When we go from 2 pairs of rabbits to 3 pairs of rabbits, we see a brother and sister rabbit mating to produce a pair of offsprings. This does not sound realistic and could also be disturbing to kids. But for some reason, I have seen this example cited in many places. Why is this example so popular despite the implication of siblings mating while going from 2 to 3? Surely, we can come up with better illustrations if…

Would you rather they showed mating between parents and offspring? I think it’s quite normal for animal flocks to start off from a single pair.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#77

Post by ai_ia »

surajs wrote: post #66
ai_ia wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey! this looks like something within my wheelhouse. Let me know if you need help with content/design/development. I'd love to be a part of this story.

Thank you Suraj.

Will definitely connect with you once I release the beta.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#78

Post by dalore »

chongli wrote: post #53
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…

I see it more from the point of view of it giving extra attention to stuff you didn't learn the first go.

For example some language learning apps already do this, they will show you phrases you have learnt before and if you get them wrong it will show them more often, if you get it right, it will show it less as it knows you know.

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#79

Post by davidgl »

solipsism wrote: post #12
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…

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'. Feels to me like we're about as close to that as we are close to regrowing limbs. We've made baby steps. For one thing, the illustrated primer created content from scratch -- content especially suited to the reader. Mathigon and things like it can only present you w…

Amazing research on regrowing limbs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjD1aLm4Thg

Re: Mathigon – an interactive, personalized mathematics textbook

#80

Post by justinclift »

ai_ia wrote: post #24
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…

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.

Guess it's not going to be OSS?
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