At Tuva (tuvalabs.com), we are creating an environment to learn foundational statistics and data analysis concepts and skills that go well beyond just video instruction. To get a feel for experience, check out a 30 sec demo here: https://vimeo.com/137256993
That looks nice, but people want problems to solve - gradual problems, that have a nice gradient of increasing difficulty, and are sufficient in number, until they can bring up the student to a feeling of mastery over the field.
I was looking for such a set of problems to gradually learn functional programming by exercises but all I could find was a video course that also had a set of 10-20 mini-problems to solve as it progressed. That was by far too shallow for this learning task. And to think that FP is the love child of Hacker News, with tons of posts in the last few years, yet, there is no comprehensive resource of exercises.
Have yet to go through Evan's post, but as you point out, the equations might be the most accessible way to truly comprehend relationships between 4 or more variables.
However, libraries like Tangle are powerful tools to visualize and understand relationships between 2-3 variables.
Maybe visualize, but understand? Doubtful. I don't think the computational overhead justifies a complex subsystem instead of just something like "x = cos(theta)" without some fancy rotating control.
My take on the best way to write/use such a document would be first present the math, then a reactive example. The user should read the math formulate a hypothesis/visualization/understanding of the system then use the reactive document to verify or falsify the concept.
This does not remove mathematical understanding from the document, but adds an opportunity for quick verification of an understanding. And according to my vague understanding of learning and neural connection getting quick feedback is key to forming strong connections.
Precisely. In physics, testing extreme cases and boundary conditions is one of the first ways to get a better understanding of a system. Tangle can be a great tool to empower learners to do this visually.
We are wholly inspired by Bret's work, and are currently playing around with the tangle library to help students visualize the concept of area, perimeter, and volume. Here is a preview: http://tuvalabs.com/resources/area/
We also plan to open source this code in due time. Ignore the mess please.
A suggestion for the visual area widget: Count the boxes for the user. So in the first box you'd write 1, the second 2, etc. Then it's easy to verify that the numbers are indeed a counting (they increase by 1) and that the calculated are indeed checks out.
I'd write the numbers in gray so they don't dominate the image.
Thanks for the feedback. There is a lot of work that still needs to be done to improve the UI for these tools, but our goal is to build a library of such visual tools for tens of relevant topics.
I share your passion for revolutionizing math education, but I don't quite understand the attachment to "Common Core." Federal prescriptive nonsense is a huge obstacle for real innovation in education and outside of the need to make a sale I don't see why you'd limit yourselves.
personally, I feel uncomfortable reading stuff like "If the width is 2 units and the height is 2 units, the area is 4 square units since 2 times 2 is 4".
2 plus 2 is 4 as well, yeah ?
As also, 2 ^ 2 = 4
The area is 4 regardless of what 2 times 2 is, or 2 plus 2 is, or 2 raised to 2.
I get your intent, but the phrasing is questionable pedagogy at best.
They'd be quite small touch targets assuming you wanted to view the shape and calculation as you change them. Have you considered making the shapes resizable by dragging?
i have been using a variety of extensions (bitly, etc.) for awhile now and have never had an issue like this before. I can log into fb, but nothing shows up on the initial page.
Not knowing anything about what they do, the hack-ish way you could do it is to use Google CSE (custom search engines) to add a list of negative domains. Where to get the list of top 1 million domains? Probably from Quantcast here: http://www.quantcast.com/top-sites-1
