[HN Gopher] Immersive Math
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Immersive Math
Author : oumua_don17
Score : 318 points
Date : 2024-05-11 17:16 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (immersivemath.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (immersivemath.com)
| whereismyacc wrote:
| ah sick people from my uni
|
| it's pretty messy tbh but it's a good idea
| greymalik wrote:
| What's messy about it?
| bbor wrote:
| It's possible I'm alone in this, but the textbook / vaguely
| "academic" style of site always comes across as messy to me.
| That said, I think we're spoiled by vaporware that invests
| huge money into style and flashy visuals -- as anyone who's
| been in school during the Blackboard/Piazza era knows,
| education software does not have to be pretty to be popular.
| whereismyacc wrote:
| maybe the layout just messed up on the resolution I looked at
| it with, there were boxes all over the place, the spinny
| thing on the main page scaled out of its bounding box. also I
| think it would be helpful to have some consistent design cues
| for which elements are interactive or what you can do with
| them.
|
| if nothing else I feel each interactive canvas should have
| some kind of description of what you can do with it so you
| don't have to trial & error
| pimanrules wrote:
| I found if I resize my browser window the spinny thing on
| the landing page starts spinning _really_ fast. I like it
| :)
| whereismyacc wrote:
| oh interesting it actually works that way whether you
| zoom in or out
| akam4n4n wrote:
| looks like the future of education. especially with VR
| lambdaba wrote:
| I remember Jaron Lanier describing this vision of learning
| through VR, where a student in class would "become the
| triangle" in learning trig, etc.
| bbor wrote:
| Looks incredible! All this needs is a little bit of
| conversational AI magic in the background to filter and modulate
| the content according to plain-English student questions and its
| go time.
|
| Note that this was finished in 2019, so now would be the perfect
| time for someone to polish this up and expand it to the rest of
| math! Assuming this is threeJS, you could get an open-source file
| format going for simulations, and even host crowdsourced
| applications of it to existing popular math textbooks by
| Figure/page #. I mean, linear algebra is cool, but the market for
| good free geometry education is limitless
|
| Does anyone know if the big names in math education offer
| simulations yet, or is it all animations/images/videos still?
|
| EDIT: definitely ThreeJS -- love the vector chapter. What this
| needs is true spatial computing support - not pages with nested
| simulations, but site-wide (SPA-wide) _simulated objects_. What
| if every student in geometry class could have their own
| simulation on their Chromebook as they read /follow along? I
| can't wait.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| It really pains me to see someone suggesting adding AI to a
| book like this. Current AIs are infamously bad at math. The
| last thing we need is ChatGPT misplacing a minus sign and
| confusing readers or setting back their understanding by weeks.
| dhosek wrote:
| I remember a friend reviewing some math before starting grad
| school was stymied by a typo in her textbook for an
| inordinate amount of time. It's really vital that
| instructional materials avoid errors as much as humanly
| possible. AI right now ain't it.
| lanstin wrote:
| True tho detecting untrue maths is a key skill. Unlike
| software there is no compiler tests whatever step to filter
| out your own minds flagrant errors.
| lupire wrote:
| Please read the comment carefully before parroting a canned
| retort. It doesn't say what you think it says.
| scubbo wrote:
| (Not the person you replied to, but) I just re-read it, and
| the "canned retort" still looks completely accurate and
| relevant. Can you elaborate on why you think that AI's
| (known, admitted, and inherent) propensity for
| hallucination _wouldn't_ be disastrous in the context of
| pedagogy?
|
| If the original comment had _just_ proposed to direct
| students to locations _within_ the original content
| ("filter"), it would have been less-impactful - being
| directed to the wrong part of a (non-hallucinated) textbook
| would still be confusing, but in the "this doesn't look
| right...?" sense, rather than the "this looks plausible
| (but is actually incorrect)" sense. But given that the
| comment referred to "Conversational AI", and to
| "modulat[ing]" the content (i.e. _giving_ answers, not just
| providing pointers to the original content), hallucination
| is still a problem.
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| GP's comment has been edited since my post. The original
| said something like "regenerate diagrams according to
| student questions". It's obviously a bad idea if you're
| trying to learn vectors and the entire diagram is flipped
| over the X axis, for example.
|
| Nonetheless, today's AIs still regularly contradict
| themselves from one sentence to the next. Even if they're
| only generating text and "modulating" (which I take to mean
| rephrasing/summarizing), mistakes can and will happen. I
| stand by my comment even as it applies to the edited GP.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| You clearly have no idea how effective an interactive
| conversation with a text can be. An AI doesn't have to be
| "good at math" to be useful. People (and programs) who are
| "good at math" are a dime a dozen. To be useful to a student,
| a language model just has to be good at answering questions
| about math.
|
| That part works, right now. _Try it._ Go to ChatGPT4 and
| pretend you 're a student who is having trouble grasping,
| say, what a determinant is. See how the conversation unfolds,
| then come back and tell us all how "infamously bad" the
| experience was. Better still, ask it about something you've
| had trouble understanding yourself.
| boomskats wrote:
| Just taking something like the threejs GLTFExporter and
| combining it with modelviewer.dev on the fly could enable a
| 'view in AR' button compatible with both SceneViewer and Quick
| Look (i.e. most mobile devices available today).
| ubj wrote:
| This looks like a fantastic resource. After a quick scan, I
| couldn't find any information on how this book was programmed /
| created. Does anyone know if a particular framework was used, or
| if this was all coded by hand?
| ayhanfuat wrote:
| Looks like the authors rolled out their own
| https://immersivemath.com/ila/javascript/samillustration3d.j...
| smburdick wrote:
| My undergrad math professor created one of the first fully online
| linear algebra texts: http://linear.ups.edu/html/fcla.html It's
| integrated with Sage, a Python library for studying (among other
| things) number theory. Another prof at the same university also
| wrote his own linear book, using a lot more illustrations, but as
| a traditional textbook.
|
| I see this book as a solid evolution in both directions. Nicely
| done!
| WillAdams wrote:
| Very cool!
|
| Does anyone have a list of other similar texts?
|
| There's:
|
| - Geometry: Joyce's Java version of Euclid's _Elements_:
| https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm...
|
| - Physics: https://www.motionmountain.net/
|
| - Chemistry: The Elements by Theodore Gray
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-elements-by-theodore-gray/...
|
| A nifty thing my kids enjoyed was the website version of the
| book, _Bembo's Zoo_ (which sadly is no longer on-line:
| https://soundeffects.fandom.com/wiki/Bembo%27s_Zoo_(Websites... )
| vitalnodo wrote:
| https://schoolyourself.org/ with different ideas about
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cQIbZa7P80 Computer-Assisted
| Instruction
|
| http://dmentrard.free.fr/GEOGEBRA/Maths/export4.25/golf.html
| some people manage to create some applets in geogebra
|
| https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/teaching-formal...
| a way to teach theorem proving
|
| maybe I'll remember something else and add it here
| teleforce wrote:
| Previous posts on HN:
|
| 1) 2015 (78 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10183725
|
| 2) 2019 (140 comments):
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19264048
| tunnuz wrote:
| I studied physics-based rendering from a book by one of the two
| authors (T. A-M), and it was written excellently. I'll have a
| look at this for sure, as I need a refresher every now and again.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Love the bootstrap 3. Clean, it works, and embraces the principle
| of least surprise.
| brnaftr361 wrote:
| Thank God people are moving towards this modality. I have a
| fervent hatred for textbooks and publishers. The former are
| antiquated, static, badly formatted, and often ride with
| distracting garbage in the margin, or worse inline. It makes
| actually reading them far more difficult than needs be, with
| unremarkable asides that may span pages and that are easy to get
| pulled into. While I understand that they have a purpose, they
| aren't for everyone so having a platform with the dynamism of a
| webpage is something that I hope will inevitably lend itself to
| future development along this course. Not to mention being able
| to have interactive questions that give quick feedback rather
| than requiring turning through pages to find out if you're on the
| right track... And this interactive stuff is just an excellent
| means to drive meaning from terse and difficult to explain
| systems.
|
| Cheers to the folks that put this together, a thousand thanks for
| the travails you've been through to blaze these trails!
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(page generated 2024-05-11 23:00 UTC)