Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 209 posts

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

#161

Post by eltonlin »

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…

Sounds great - I'm a huge fan of Georgia Tech's online masters. As for AI, I think if it solves all your problems, great. And it's real-time, and free.

But! The reason I still work on explanations.app is that, I often struggle not with "facts" but with the "fundamental way of thinking". How do the great mathematicians think about matrices, do they just see them as numbers on grids, as vectors, as transformations, how do you you think in the first place, how do you approach the problem, that kind of stuff is what I struggle with the most. And that's very hard to articulate too as a specific query, which is why Youtubers like 3B1B are so amazing - there are so many hidden choices they had to make to frame their explanations in certain ways and in certain narratives.

Anyway you can always let me know if you want to try out explanations.app : ) best of luck

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

#162

Post by eltonlin »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #12

Couple of UX focussed comments: The site was impossible to use on FF mobile without using desktop-view. https://www.explanations.app/dat153qkJtTcHf9Fbm1B/overview , for example has the content frame as a slither on the right. Signing in with Google and getting a different name is disconcerting. It's not clear what a "server" is? I searched "electromagnetic" and "electro-magnetism" but got no results ... "Electricity…

Thank you for the thoughtful comments, I appreciate it.

FF mobile: you're correct, this is not mobile responsive yet - I will work on a future version to fix this.

>Different names with Google Login Is it that it shows "feynman-mvp" which is different from explanations.app, or is it that your name is shown to be different?

>What's a "server" I was trying to re-use the same concept from Discord "servers", a community of people. Which word would you use instead?

>Robust search Sorry that you got nor esults - yes the search is pretty terrible. Untitled/empty blackboards are not great too - moderation and vetting will probably be needed

>How does one readily see only college-level content In this current version, all the math & physics "servers" are college level (so manually vetted), and everything else is categorized in the "everything else category". Is there a better way to do this?

Thanks again!

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

#163

Post by eltonlin »

godelski wrote: post #118
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 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. ... And then I'd get feedback at the end of the semester that I "was never available to help." My first year of grad school I had this problem and it made me immediately become disillusioned because the reality was so starkly different from what students wrote. I worked in my o…

Hey sorry to hear your experience. First to clarify - it varies - the classes (usually required CS classes), usually had overcrowded Office Hours, but there were many classes in math & physics where OH was very available (and I did very well in as a direct consequence, though I was a CS major).

If students complain about availability, but never show up despite everything you did, then that's their problem. What people say and do is, unfortunately, not the same.

And I'm sorry to hear about the strange incentives for not being able to report to the department about cheating.

Initially when I started the app, I was very anti-teacher. But as I learnt more and talked to more teachers, I realized, man teachers also have their fair share of indignations from the system.

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

#164

Post by eltonlin »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #130
VyseofArcadia wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing I wasn't teaching physics ;) I actually deliberately varied my teaching style during office hours to account for just this. I got great feedback from the few students who actually came. But by the end, I just felt all the extra effort I was putting in to be a good teacher wasn't worth the psychic damage I took from bad students. All this to say, being a good teacher, or trying to be a good teacher, in a un…

Personally in my experience office hours were not that helpful, I was working fulltime at a factory while I was attending university, I simply did not have time to hang around professors offices (My Manager allowed me time off to attend lectures but there was no allowance outside of that), if I needed to study for exams I'd have to take annual leave for example. Email was single best method I had if I needed to ask p…

Thanks for sharing. 100% - one of the downsides of focusing on attendance and in-person interactions is - simply the time cost, inflexibility and inconvenience for students who already have saturated schedules.

(I was first-exposed to this talking to students from community colleges, many working part-time jobs.)

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

#165

Post by eltonlin »

VyseofArcadia wrote: post #66
pants2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to say anything about you, but when I was learning physics, either I thought the professor was really good in which case I would usually understand the material just from lecture, or the professor was not good, in which case going to office hours wouldn't help and I would seek other resources, like YouTube videos from other teachers. A resource like OP's that could provide a different perspective and learning sty…

Good thing I wasn't teaching physics ;) I actually deliberately varied my teaching style during office hours to account for just this. I got great feedback from the few students who actually came. But by the end, I just felt all the extra effort I was putting in to be a good teacher wasn't worth the psychic damage I took from bad students. All this to say, being a good teacher, or trying to be a good teacher, in a un…

This rings true "trying to be a good teacher in a university setting is extremely unrewarding". Thanks for sharing, and the students who make you feel bad despite you doing more than your fair share, can gtfo.

BTW, I didn't mention it, but I still remember vividly a lot of the TAs/profs. who gave a shit about helping me. So while I had a rough time, I remember some of of the good experiences.

And at the end of the day, we all want a place where we're rewarded for doing the right things, instead of punished.

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

#166

Post by eltonlin »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #116
tripdout wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

I recall that any problems that I had understanding _how_ to solve something, arose from not knowing _why_ it was being done in the first place. And as a result I had no entry point into the solution process. Once inside the process of finding a solution things tended to fall into place. But looking at a problem set and not being able to guess what the first step is, thats a sign that I have not developed a means to…

>The ability to communicate WHY we are doing what we are doing I really resonate with what you said. The Why and the contextual motivation is what I'm always so starved for in classes that I don't understand.

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

#168

Post by eltonlin »

caddemon wrote: post #29

The Piazza post isn't publicly viewable, but I'm surprised you had this experience at MIT. The majority of classes I took had a ton of materials online and there were few instances where I felt I needed to go to class purely because of an attendance policy or a reluctance to share materials. Office hours are designed to be 1 on 1 for educational reasons, but other students collaborating at office hours (or outside of…

Ah I didn't realize the Piazza post isn't publicly viewable, thanks for telling me. I recreated it as a screenshot now https://imgur.com/gallery/GtuF78M

This is a course 6 issue mainly. Course 8 and 18 I've had generally good experiences with (but I'm a course 6 major).

As for OCW, I think it "looks" complete, but it's actually not very useful because so much material is missing e.g. no pset, no solutions, only lectures but no notes, only lecture notes but no recitations, etc. etc. which is why I know Aayush and Ashay are working on https://mitsoul.org/

Anyway, thanks for your comment!

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

#169

Post by eltonlin »

n9com wrote: post #39

Well done on launching. 1. The price should better highlighted on the website, it's not very visible. 2. How do you even sign up to the plan? Add a pricing/purchase page. 3. $10/week is dirt cheap 4. If you're serious about this, please invest in better UX/UI

Thanks for the concrete feedback - OK I will make the price more visible. As for pricing/purchase, it might not necessarily make sense to students - from what I understand, they want to look for the right subject, then the teacher, before deciding to subscribe and pay.

Where should I learn about better UI/UX?

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

#170

Post by eltonlin »

vikR0001 wrote: post #91

This is very cool. Note: the chalk-on-chalkboard sound comes to my speakers as harsh static.

Ah I'm sorry for that. That was a bug from an earlier version that saturated the javascript event loop and caused the microphone to not work properly. This should be fixed as of last month's version.

Sorry again!

Post reply on HN