The interface is beautiful!
Just curious... Did you implement each app natively? I.e. Swift and Kotlin? Or were you able to use a cross platform framework like Flutter?
Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#12I watched the video. I think I've been wanting something like this recently but there's not really a name for this sort of thing that I know of. Relatedly, I've been working on a step-by-step solver/calculator but I just use sympy (via pyodide) + mathlive. But I'm starting to see the limitations of running Python in the browser and am starting to look at js libraries now.
The underlying math engine is written in typescript and is open source: https://github.com/dicroce/wyrm_math Probably it's most important feature for applications like this is that the id's of elements in the equations are stable (meaning, if an X has an id of 123 and a transformation moves it to the other side of the equals sign, it still has id 123... this allows you animate between states if you wish).
I tried the demo. One thing I've noticed is it's sometimes hard to know what operation clicking or dragging something will do (or has done sometimes). I'm not sure what would help other than showing like a pie menu before carrying out the operation.
On the library. It's sounds really cool. I'm going to look at it pretty soon.
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#13Bought the app, this is great. Can I make a feature request? I’d love for it to include a sequence of “levels” or existing equations to try and solve in order of increasing difficulty, and maybe a way to generate a random interesting one. Would love to use this to teach others with a mechanism for regular practice.
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#14[dead]
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#15DragonBox Algebra has a similar concept but gamified. It has a cool progression: you get a new "power" each chapter, like factoring or negating. And it starts out with monster cards then gradually transitions to "x" and numerals. My kids have loved it, but it's hard to tell how much they learn when you can only make legal moves. When my older one learned the basic rules of algebraic manipulation and went back to it, it worked great at giving him a visual model to follow.
That said, the game doesn't let you do arbitrary equations, so you cap out when you beat the game. Excited to try this app out!
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#16Based. I tend to think of algebra as movement of terms, as opposed to only thinking in terms of operations. This could be really good for building intuition.
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#17I thought the difference of two squares example was odd. Maybe I just didn’t get how to factorise into brackets rather than out of them.
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#18It doesn't seem like roots can be performed in the web version. Specifically, both x^3=8 and (x^2)x=8 seem unsolvable.
It keeps trying to either subtract x^3, or divide by x. I can't get it to create a sqrt no matter what I drag or where.
Edit: it seems to create a sqrt only if I drag one of the x-s over to the other side first in order to make one side only x^2, but then I get a sqrt(8/x) which I can't do anything at all with.
In x^-1=2, I can get to 1=2x but I can't get it to simplify any further. (Edit: I was able to end up with a fraction of -1/-2 which I guess is correct...)
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#19It doesn't seem like roots can be performed in the web version. Specifically, both x^3=8 and (x^2)x=8 seem unsolvable. It keeps trying to either subtract x^3, or divide by x. I can't get it to create a sqrt no matter what I drag or where. Edit: it seems to create a sqrt only if I drag one of the x-s over to the other side first in order to make one side only x^2, but then I get a sqrt(8/x) which I can't do anything a…
This is actually a great find. I update the engine and the change is live on the web version. I will probably wait a couple of days on updating the mobile apps to see if any more fixes need to be made (there is a whole app approval process they have to go through and I want to minimize that).
Re: Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
The underlying math engine is written in typescript and is open source: https://github.com/dicroce/wyrm_math Probably it's most important feature for applications like this is that the id's of elements in the equations are stable (meaning, if an X has an id of 123 and a transformation moves it to the other side of the equals sign, it still has id 123... this allows you animate between states if you wish).
I tried the demo. One thing I've noticed is it's sometimes hard to know what operation clicking or dragging something will do (or has done sometimes). I'm not sure what would help other than showing like a pie menu before carrying out the operation. On the library. It's sounds really cool. I'm going to look at it pretty soon.
Yeah I added the popup that appears when you hover as a means of trying to counteract this. I'll be looking for more ways to communicate this.