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Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

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Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#101

Post by abdullahkhalids »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #14

Is this a video version of stack exchange, where you pay to get your questions answered on video? Anyway I've given and received actual tutoring and imho it just can't be done on video. E.g. in a real session, the tutor might give you a problem to solve (pen and paper) while they sit next to you. You start working on it and when you hesitate somewhere, or if your approach to the solution starts going wrong, the tutor…

Yes, the teaching process is often a two-way and long conversation.

Stack Exchange works in the case where the questioner already has enough mastery over the material to ask a well-posed question. But many students don't even have the mastery and they never get around to asking questions on SE, and if they do, that question is quickly closed. So you never see those students online at all. Maybe on more niche forums where there is more back and forth.

As a former physics prof, the students most in need of help are precisely the ones who can't ask questions. In that case, someone has to sit with them and with a back-and-forth figure out what they don't now. Then teach them that.

So I agree with you. This is a product mainly for above average students trying to understand a bit more. No problem with that. You can choose your customer. But I want to highlight that any sort of teaching methodology (edtech or meattech) will serve some students at the expense of others.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#103

Post by xattt »

anthomtb wrote: post #95
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #52

> Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. "It's free one on one tutoring from the guy who writes the test…

> very few people would come. And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help." My guess is that when they "needed help" was 2 hours before the exam, upon realizing that 10 hours of cramming was not going to make up for 12 weeks of slacking off (source: I was one of these types). IOW, their deficiency not yours.

My profs in my social science-like undergrad also held office hours.

However, I had no idea “how” to ask for help or about what. In my perspective, most of the stuff could be learned or memorized if you sat your butt down.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#104

Post by ghaff »

xattt wrote: post #103
anthomtb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very few people would come. And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help." My guess is that when they "needed help" was 2 hours before the exam, upon realizing that 10 hours of cramming was not going to make up for 12 weeks of slacking off (source: I was one of these types). IOW, their deficiency not yours.

My profs in my social science-like undergrad also held office hours. However, I had no idea “how” to ask for help or about what. In my perspective, most of the stuff could be learned or memorized if you sat your butt down.

Or they totally lack foundational skills.

I tutored a group in an MBA program who were really struggling especially in more quantitative core courses. Which was not at all uncommon but this was extreme.

And it was pretty much a case of: Teach me all the basic high school math I never learned.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#105

Post by prudentpomelo »

jsqu99 wrote: post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

I am in a similar boat. Starting a masters in cs in the fall. What resources are you using to study? I have neem doing some refreshing on Khan Academy but looking for other options.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#106

Post by tripdout »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #52

> Help resources become inefficient - because so much material is restricted, and so much time is spent on delivering live lectures, there’d often be 40 students competing for help from 2 TAs in a 2-hour Office Hours I had the exact opposite problem when I was both a TA and later a professor. I would beg and plead for my students to come to office hours. "It's free one on one tutoring from the guy who writes the test…

I'm in 3rd year CS and I almost never go to office hours for my CS courses, because a lot of the time I don't have something specific to ask.

I go to lecture, don't understand the material, and then review my notes & the slides at home, working through the examples until I understand them.

If I get stuck on something, I typically just keep trying until I understand it, instead of stopping, remembering what I don't understand and asking it in office hours 2-3 days later, and then potentially getting stuck on something else later on in the proof/example.

Typically what I lack is is a more general understanding of the entire proof/example/algorithm instead of small individual details, and I really need to sit down with it and go through it instead of another quick re-explanation by a TA where I have to say "yeah, makes sense" before I've had enough time to think about it.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#107

Post by famouswaffles »

ebuck wrote: post #99
WhitneyLand wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have the opposite experience, it’s been a fantastic resource. Were you using 3.5 or 4.0? Do you have an example of of the type of question that performs poorly?

"Under what conditions does the sun appear blue?" (correct answer, on Mars) If you want to tilt the conversation towards a string of wrong answers, start off with "What color is the sun?" "Are you sure?" "I saw the sun and it was blue." "Under what conditions does the sun appear blue?" "Does the sun appear blue on Mars?" This had ChatGPT basically telling me that the sun was yellow 100%. Of course it's wrong, on Mars…

>Also the 3.5 / 4.0 arguments are trash, made by the marketing department.

All these words to tell us you didn't use 4.

>The underlying math for language modeling it uses is presenatational. This means that it is purpose trained to present correct looking answers. Alas, correct looking answers aren't the same Venn Diagram circle as Correct Answers (even if they often appear to be close).

Completely wrong. LLMs are trained to make right predictions not "correct looking" predictions. If it's not right then there's a penalty and the model learns from that. The end goal is to make predictions that don't err from the distribution of the training data. There is quite literally no room for "correct looking" in the limit of training.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#108

Post by bitwize »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #45
jsqu99 wrote: post #23

I am 53 and cramming while relearning linear algebra, statistics, and calculus, after a 30 year break from college, in preparation for my first semester at GA Tech's online MS CS program in the fall. I love this! But...before I check it out, I'm going to be surprised if it competes with the already-incredible free help i've gotten from chatgpt-3.5. Recently I asked it the following (where it made a mistake that confu…

As someone who has used linear algebra, statistics and calculus as part of my day-to-day work for years, I would be very cautious of relying on ChatGPT as your "tutor". Occasionally I've tried to substitute ChatGPT for the shelf of reference books in my office and nearly always had poor results. The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing . Even as an expert it takes a fair…

> The trouble is that the outputs of these models, by their very nature, look convincing.

Yes, this is pretty much what LLMs are designed to produce, and no more. This is why I say they are not HAL, just a better MegaHAL.

There was an Asimov short story called "Liar!" about a robot whose ability to read minds, combined with its First Law directive, always told people what they wanted to hear so as to avoid causing emotional harm to humans. (When confronted with the idea that by telling people falsehoods it was bringing harm to them, it simply stopped functioning.) LLMs can't read your mind, but they do choose their words based on a statistical model they have of what you might expect given what's been said before. Facts and logic be damned if they don't fit that model.

Re: Show HN: I made a cheap alternative to college-level math & physics tutoring

#110

Post by VyseofArcadia »

ghaff wrote: post #104
xattt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My profs in my social science-like undergrad also held office hours. However, I had no idea “how” to ask for help or about what. In my perspective, most of the stuff could be learned or memorized if you sat your butt down.

Or they totally lack foundational skills. I tutored a group in an MBA program who were really struggling especially in more quantitative core courses. Which was not at all uncommon but this was extreme. And it was pretty much a case of: Teach me all the basic high school math I never learned.

For me, day one used to be handing out the syllabus and getting right into whatever the first topic of the course was. I taught a lot of calculus 1, so usually I'd open with a motivating example for the concept of a limit.

After a couple of years, I decided to instead spend day one on the most common egregious gaps in knowledge, so day one was how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions, and then a little practice solving simple rational equations of a single variable.

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