CalcStudio

Inspiration

As somebody who is passionate about math, computer science, and education I was always interested in learning and applying new concepts by creating new educational tools. In school, I noticed that many students struggled to visualize deep calculus concepts like limits, derivatives, and integrals. I wanted to fix that. I wanted to create a way students can explore calculus concepts visually, interactively, and intuitively.

What it does

CalcStudio is an interactive calculus visualization tool that visualizes calculus and machine learning concepts like derivatives, integrals, and gradient descent. It allows students to interact with the concept and understand it visually.

How we built it

I built CalcStudio using Python, using PyQt5 for the gui and matplotlib for rendering the graphs. I created the application to be modular so in the future I can create as many new concepts as needed. I packaged the tool into its own application so students can run it whenever they want to.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge that I can into when developing CalcStudio was rendering the changing graphs. This required careful optimization and event handling to avoid lag.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of creating a seamless and dynamic UI to explore these calculus concepts, a scalable framework to keep adding on more concepts, packaging CalcStudio to function with macOS, and teaching calculus in a summer workshop using my application to test its functionality.

What we learned

I learned advanced GUI Engineering, best practices for software architecture, user-centered iteration, and education UX principles.

What's next for CalcStudio

In the future CalcStudio will have an AI-Power problem generator that changes how it teaches depending on how the student learns and answer questions. It will generate problems that are catered to the student to address weaknesses and strengthen problem-solving.

Built With

• numpy
• pyqt5
• python
• sympy
• visual-studio