Inspiration: It's difficult to find practice problems with step-by-step solutions, and that often means spending more time searching for study material than actually studying the material. The solution to this is our teaching app.
What it does: The app generates calculus problems with user parameters that also gives step by step solutions. These solutions are not just textbook sentences. The app acts as a personal tutor; it gives solutions to problems through animations that clearly show how to solve the problems through each step. Practice problems, with varying difficulties, enable the user to understand the methods of solving problems with a quick, swiping user interface. The idea is to teach strictly methodology that builds a quick memorable logic for calculus.
How we built it: We used java and android-studio to create problems, answers, and animations.
Challenges we ran into: Ryan is a first-time user of java; his only coding knowledge coming into this is from his engineering courses on Matlab. Java is obviously very different, so learning and executing on the spot was a challenge. A major difficulty was creating the animations, especially because we decided on creating and learning how to create animations right when the hackathon started; the animations were assigned to Ryan while the rest of the heavily math-involved programming and guidance was Goz's doing.
Accomplishments that we're proud of: The basic idea of this app isn't very new to us, but this is certainly the farthest we've gotten to creating a usable product.
What we learned: Aside from learning a whole lot about programming in general, we found that this app is capable of much faster development than we previously expected. For a while, we were expecting to use photoshop .gifs for our animations, but we were able to make a more generalized and useful form of animation, just using android-studio. We also learned Ryan can use java.
What's next for Cram Time: We plan to make Cram Time into an app or set of apps that can teach all of Calculus, more than just Calculus 1. Ryan is pursuing a minor in math in addition to his engineering; this will allow a good front end and back end to the development of teaching students math. A deep understanding of calculus ensures the accuracy of the interactive math in the app. This is Goz's last semester here, and he plans to devote his time after graduation to the quick development of the app. This will be more than just derivatives in the near future.
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