Inspiration AP Physics is one of the hardest exams a high school student can take. Before the 2025 redesign, AP Physics 1 had one of the lowest pass rates of any AP exam; under half of the students passed. I myself have taken these classes as a high schooler and struggled a lot. Throughout my journey, I tried to find a tool that could help me with these topics, but I unfortunately never really found any. That is why I made my own AP Physics Study tool. Quanta. Quanta exists to give every AP Physics student a tutor.
What it does Quanta covers all four AP Physics courses - Physics 1, Physics 2, Physics C: Mechanics, and Physics C: E&M, all up to date with the 2025-2026 course framework
Learn - deep, exam-focused explanations of any topic, structured into intuition, key equations, a derivation/deeper dive, a worked example, common mistakes, and exam tips. Solve - a problem tutor that takes any physics problem and returns a full worked solution that teaches the method: strategy, symbolic-then-numeric steps, a sanity check, and pitfalls. Quiz - unlimited AP-style practice questions for any unit or a mixed review, at four difficulty levels, with instant explanations, an optional AI-graded free-response question, and a study log that tracks progress. Formulas - a clean equation reference for every course. How we built it Backend: Python + Flask, with four JSON API endpoints: explain, solve, quiz, grade. AI: the Anthropic Claude API. Each endpoint uses an engineered prompt with a shared physics-tutor system prompt. The quiz endpoint asks the model for strict JSON and parses it into an interactive UI. Frontend: vanilla HTML/CSS/JS - no framework - with KaTeX for real equation rendering and marked.js for formatting. Curriculum: the unit structure and formula reference are stored as data in the backend, verified against the College Board's frameworks. Technical depth Math-safe markdown pipeline: LaTeX spans are extracted and protected before markdown parsing, then restored and rendered with KaTeX, so equations never get mangled by the formatter. Structured AI output: the quiz feature prompts for and parses strict JSON, with fence-tolerant extraction, turning a language model into a reliable question generator.
Real-world impact Quanta is usable by any of the hundreds of thousands of students who take an AP Physics exam each year. Because the content is AI-generated rather than a fixed question bank, the practice material is effectively unlimited and adapts to whatever unit, difficulty, or specific problem a student is stuck on. This could help thousands of kids like me, who struggled a lot taking AP Physics. I want other students to be more successful taking AP Physics than I ever was.
Challenges Getting LaTeX to survive a markdown parser cleanly. Designing prompts that produce rigorous, exam-accurate physics rather than hand-wavy explanations. Verifying the curriculum against the recent AP redesign, since most prep material online is still outdated.
What's next Per-topic mastery tracking and spaced-repetition review. Diagram and free-body-diagram generation. Photo upload so students can solve a problem straight from their worksheet.
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