Math-me-Up

Math-me-Up makes learning Math more interactive, efficient and fun.

Comment 2

Inspiration

Mathematics is fundamental for many professions, especially science, technology, and engineering. Yet, mathematics is often perceived as difficult by most students. The problem actually lies in the method in which the subject is taught to them. Studying math through e-learning medium and physical interactive medium can supplement the traditional textbook learning, thereby properly embedding key mathematical concepts in their long-term memory. Through the interactive and tech-enabled modules, a particular student's performance can be evaluated for further improvement.


But even without applications, getting better at mental math is a great way to stimulate one’s mind. It develops better number sense and intuition for quantifying the world around us. Practicing mental calculation will strengthen your foundation for learning more advanced math topics.

What it does

This project has been built with a lot of love, and motivation to help others in mathematics. Math-me-Up is composed of a web-app connected to an IoT-based module and an Arduino-based interactive device.


The web-app provides a huge collection of questions from various branches of mathematics like Arithmetic, Algebra, Trigonometry etc of varying difficulty levels. They can browse through the collection and practice solving them, starting from easy questions and gradually moving to the difficult ones. They must try to solve it within the recommended time-limit provided for each question. As we all know, practice makes perfect, so this shall improve their math problem-solving capabilities and understanding of key-concepts.


To make this a fun-affair, an IoT-based device is also used along with the web-app, which shall notify the student though a buzzer when the time-limit is over. Being IoT-based, this device can be set-up at any convenient location, such as near their study-tables or anywhere where they can focus well. The student then does not necessarily have to lose focus by thinking of the time-elapsed as they shall automatically be alerted through this device. Hence, it enables them to effectively fine-tune their timed-problem solving ability.


The Arduino-based device helps to understand binary numbers and their conversions to other number systems, such as Decimal, Octal and Hexadecimal. We're using 4 LEDs each controlled by a switch to represent a 4-bit binary number. As we all know, binary is composed of 0s and 1s which can be understood as ON or OFF state. So, the sate of each switch in the device will represent each bit. The user can toggle these switches to represent various binary numbers. The binary numbers thus formed are converted into the other number systems like Decimal, Octal and Hexadecimal and displayed on the LCD screen.The aim of representing a binary number in the form of LEDs is to help the user learn in an interactive way about the binary conversions as he/she can easily play with the switches to get various binary numbers and see the corresponding equivalent forms of the same in other number systems.

How we built it

We built the web-app using Flask, HTML, CSS, Javascript, Bootstrap and SQLite. The Arduino-based device was built using a hardware emulator with components including 2 breadboards, 4 LEDs and switches , a potentiometer, a resistor and an LCD screen.

Challenges we ran into

Sadly, we didn't actually have an Arduino and its components with us. But, we were able to implement it using a hardware emulator. We faced some difficulty in implementing the timed-alerting mechanism using the IoT module. We had lost a huge amount of time trying to figure out a way to solve it. After a series of trial and error, we finally figured out an efficient way to execute it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

In this short duration we were able to build not one but two projects with different mediums as for teaching mathematics. We take pride in having been able to build fully functional prototypes within 48 hours. We had multiple brainstorming sessions where we were able to come up with more interactive way of learning binary conversions for students who have a hard time with that and for students who understand a math concept but does not feel confident in themselves we made an IOT-based device with a web app containing questions with limited time for each question to help them practice a particular topic. Getting out web app connected to IOT working was a important moment for us. All these milestones made us very proud because we are progressing towards something that can really help students with mathematics all over the world.

What we learned

We learned how to use databases in the web-app using SQLite and how to interact with it through the Flask back-end.

What's next for Math-me-Up

We're planning to expand the functionalities of Math-me-Up by making more Arduino-based devices to demonstrate and teach many more mathematical concepts and theorems so as to have a simpler way of learning proof of theorms through interaction with other components of Arduino and so on.

Share this project:

Updates