School Yourself

Another Monday, Another Release

We've just released an update to School Yourself Beta, with new lessons, updates to older lessons, and a host of additional features. Here's a sampling of what's new:

New lessons on trigonometry

We've added two new lessons on angles (both in degrees and radians) and trigonometric functions (what sine, cosine, and tangent mean, and what their graphs look like). These lessons include six new interactives, and here's a screenshot of one of our favorites, which comes about halfway through one of the lessons:

In this interactive, you can sweep through different angles in the unit circle. For each angle, the height (indicated by the red line) of the yellow point on the unit circle's circumference is the value of the sine function for that angle.

Updates to existing lessons

A major part of the Beta is improving the School Yourself experience with every release. So not only are we adding new content, but we're studying the user experience for every lesson, and listening to what our students are saying.

One requested update was that mixed fractions should be acceptable answers. So we fixed that. We've also updated the lessons on slope and linear functions (some users found the tick marks confusing when the questions were asking for algebraic expressions).

As we continue adding content to the Beta, we'll keep improving the content that's already there. So keep the feedback coming!

New features

Aside from accepting answers that are mixed fractions, we've also upgraded the "laser pointer" that appears in the lessons. The red dot moving around the screen was analogous to a cursor you might see in other online video content. Well, we replaced it with a new highlighter that fades, and early user testing suggests that this highlighter flows more seamlessly with the content.

What's next?

Right now we're hard at work on delivering the most expansive lesson we've ever built, covering a wide range of trigonometric identities. You'll get to work through the various proofs, and seamlessly jump between them when you need one to prove another. We'll let you know as soon as this lesson becomes available.

So that's a summary of what's new with the Beta. We'll let you know as soon as the next update is out. Until then, keep getting schooled!

School Yourself Beta has launched!

If you visited our site recently, you might have noticed a few changes. Our home page now links directly to our brand new learning platform (currently known as "School Yourself Beta"), which was recently featured in the Boston Herald.

The beta is different from all the other platforms out there (edX, Coursera, Khan Academy, Udacity, etc.). We've done away with the lecture and made the learning more interactive. You can "choose your own adventure," and decide how to proceed through each lesson. You can go straight to the interactives, or jump back to earlier lessons needed to get through the next challenge. And as you learn, the platform will make recommendations and adapt to your unique style.

Here's a screenshot of the beta:

This is what you would see on your first visit, so it's recommending the "Introduction" lesson right now, where you can get a feel for how the platform works. Here's something you might see if you try out the lesson on graphing lines:

If you figure out the answer, then you would go ahead and type it in. And if you weren't sure, then clicking on the "I'm not sure..." option seamlessly breaks the question up into smaller parts, guiding you toward the answer.

Our goal is to make math (starting with calculus) a seamless, engaging experience. We're building out the platform more and more every day, and we'll be regularly adding content. Coming soon are some lessons on trigonometry, one of which will guide you through the proofs of over a dozen trig identities, in a way that's far more interactive than reading Wikipedia entries or watching Khan Academy videos.

And because this is a beta, we'd love as much feedback as possible. Let us know what you think!

Piloting our eBooks in Roslyn High School: Day 1

We just spent the day at Roslyn High School (picture below) to begin our first pilot study of Hands-On Calculus with more than 100 students! Roslyn has a total of five calculus classes, four of which will be taking Advanced Placement (AP) exams in May, and all five will be using our textbook. Roslyn previously made headlines with its iPad initiative, but Hands-On Calculus is the first digital math textbook the school is adopting. And during the demos, some teachers even asked for copies of our other titles (Trigonometry and Hands-On Precalculus) for their students.

One great moment from today came when students in one of the AP classes saw one of our interactives involving a moving car (first derivative = speed, second derivative = acceleration, etc.). One student excitedly blurted out that he was learning the same things in his physics course. We set the car to have a linearly increasing speed on the demo iPad, which was being projected to the class, and asked the student what the car's position would look like as a function of time. He said it would accelerate. Bingo:

They've got some really smart kids at Roslyn, and as the year progresses we'll be getting a lot of feedback from them, and we'll be able to make our content even better for them and all our users. We're looking forward to our continued partnership with the Roslyn schools, and to more pilot studies down the road!

Where do rainbows come from? (And our new website!)

We just completed a redesign of our website. And front and center is our new interactive lesson on where rainbows come from (a small sampling of what our future content will look like!).

Everyone wonders at some point where rainbows come from. MIT Professor Walter Lewin offers an outstanding lecture on the subject, but if you're not an MIT Physics major, it can be really hard to follow along. For challenging topics like this one, the content should be personalized: Don't know trigonometry? No problem, here's the explanation for you. Oh, so you already know about optics? Well, here's your tailored lesson.

We've built this kind of personalized experience for rainbows. And on top of that, we've included lots of the interactive elements we're becoming known for. Here's one of our favorites, where you can keep track of how red light bounces around water droplets:

The lesson is full of minigames on how light moves and bends, and how it scatters in water. Even if you've never learned any trigonometry or physics, you'll be able to walk away with an appreciation of where rainbows come from, and you'll probably learn a bunch of cool new facts about rainbows you never noticed before. And over the next few weeks, we'll continue to make additional improvements to the lesson. After all, there's nothing else quite like it out there.

School Yourself presents: "Beat the Odds"

We just launched our first-ever standalone game! It's called "Beat the Odds," and it's a probability game aligned to the 7th grade common core standards. You can play it here (see if you can reach Level 5!).

"Beat the Odds" was also our entry into New York City's Gap App Challenge, an open competition for new education apps targeting middle school math.

Here are some screenshots from the game:

School Yourself at SXSWedu

We just got back from SXSWedu in Austin, Texas. It was packed with presentations, and we got to meet countless educators, publishers, and investors.

We were named one of the top 6 startups in higher education, but our biggest highlight of the conference was when TASA (the Texas Association of School Administrators) announced that our Hands-On Precalculus ebook would be incorporated into the precalculus curriculum of 14 Texas school districts. It was a great announcement, and they put our ebook up on a projector:

Our CEO Zach was interviewed by the local ABC news at our booth at the Startup Showcase event:

A preview of our new question type

We've been hard at work with Part 2 of Hands-On Calculus and we're excited to give you a preview of one of the upcoming features!

One of the common problems in calculus is to find the derivative or antiderivative of a particular function, and students often gain a lot of understanding from this exercise. This isn't easily adapted to something like a simple multiple choice question, though, so we came up with a new question format designed to make these sorts of questions clearer and easier for students to answer.

Using some of the work from our calculator improvements, our new question format allows a student to input single-variable algebraic expressions as an answer. One of the great things about this format is that minor differences in notation are ignored. For example, if a student decides it looks more reasonable to swap the operands of an expression (e.g. 2 + 4x instead of 4x + 2) or uses 0.5 instead of 1/2, the engine will still allow these variations as being correct!

Having these types of questions will encourage students to have a deeper understanding of things like how to apply different rules when finding derivatives, so we're excited to launch this along with the rest of Part 2!