
Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science - expii
https://www.expii.com/map
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nitrogen
Nice. This is about 70% of the way there toward the fully visible conceptual
graph I've wanted to make or find for years. I'd like to be able to see items
from multiple zoom levels, for example. I want to be able to look at a bubble
that says something like "addition of positive integers", and follow a
sequence of arrows to every academic concept and career that makes use of
addition.

Another thing I want software to do is highlight everything I think I know
(maybe take some quizzes to prove it), ask me what I'd like to know, then show
the graph and list of topics I need to learn in between. Based on another
comment[0] it sounds like it would eventually be possible to use this data to
do exactly that. So again, nice.

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poshenloh
Thanks for your comments! :)

You are describing the projects that are on our roadmap. :) We felt that the
initial conceptual map would be an essential backbone for data-driven guidance
services that we could then build upon it. So, we invested a serious amount of
effort into creating this first pass. The math and science maps were created
through a collaboration led by our Education Director, who has taught in
middle-school and high-school classrooms, and now teaches at the University of
Pittsburgh down the street. The other partners in the collaboration were
alumni of International Math Olympiad teams and scientists from the Hertz
Foundation Fellowship program. :)

We're continuing to iterate on our concept maps, but in the meantime, our
Engineering team is moving forward on more projects which successively build
on our growing structure.

Your encouragement means a lot to us, and we'll keep on trucking!

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poshenloh
We created this interface so that curious people could explore and see how
everything fit together. :)

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voltagex_
Any idea why BlueCoat would categorise your site as "Suspicious"?

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poshenloh
This is a really good question! We don't think we're doing anything
suspicious, and there aren't even any payment gateways anywhere on the site.
To be honest, we weren't familiar with BlueCoat. Do you know what tends to
make them rate a site as Suspicious?

We're just trying to create a valuable free resource, through crowd-sourcing.
:)

~~~
voltagex_
[https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=expi...](https://sitereview.bluecoat.com/sitereview.jsp#/?search=expii.com)

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rawnlq
I feel like physics and calculus has to be more intricately linked together.
Due to how the recursive disjoint partitioning works, science and math gets
disconnected right off the bat.

Also within each topic, having a directed acyclic graph of concepts is useful
for modeling how one might encounter them in school. But outside of formal
mathematical proofs (where something must be true before it can be used to
prove something else), the way people learn things is a lot of more circular
and definitely not a DAG. For example, I understand arithmetic which let's me
understand the purpose of peano axioms which let's me "understand" arithmetic.
If it is a DAG then it's only a DAG of the atomic units of knowledge. After
forming clusters of these units, the edges between two cluster aren't
uniformly in a single direction anymore (even if they are mostly going in one
direction).

Sidenote: You guys don't seem to have anything on graph theory. Is this only
aimed at highschool level?

Anyway, just thought the topic of how to model how people understand
science/math topics can go beyond simple taxonomy by committee or traditional
course syllabus prerequisites. But what you have definitely works and is a
very practical first step!
[http://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/loci/joma/subject-
taxon...](http://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/loci/joma/subject-taxonomy)

EDIT: Khan Academy has a very similar knowledge map that somewhat clusters in
terms of layout, without explicitly partitioning or labeling the clusters of
topics:
[https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard](https://www.khanacademy.org/exercisedashboard).
And here's another example that clusters, but don't hide or merge intercluster
edges:
[http://math.stackexchange.com/a/127182](http://math.stackexchange.com/a/127182)

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j2kun
Once you actually get to an article, having to click "continue" after every
paragraph is mildly annoying.

Edit: I am also not a huge fan of the choice to organize the topics by the
"high school class" they were introduced in. There is absolutely no reason to
break algebra up into "Algebra 1" and "Algebra 2"

In particular, this means you're putting "basics of matrices" arbitrarily with
"Algebra 1" when knowing how to add and multiply matrices has literally
nothing to do with the other topics in that group.

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expii
Thanks for your feedback! All feedback is really useful to us, as it helps us
to continue to polish the product. The articles themselves are crowd-sourced,
and they certainly show signs of being a community that is still growing. It's
possible to create richer articles like this one:
[https://www.expii.com/t/gravity-weight-642](https://www.expii.com/t/gravity-
weight-642)

The main point of our post tonight was to share the current product of the
Topic Map. As the rest of the site continues to grow, we hope that you will
soon learn about it as a useful resource.

Regarding the split of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2: we fully agree that math
should be more connected. We actually experimented with that here, in the
"Theory" section of "Math". You can find that by clicking into "Algebra
Revisited", which you can also find by first going here:

[https://www.expii.com/t/2829](https://www.expii.com/t/2829)

and then clicking on "Topic Map" to see a fully connected version of Algebra.
This is much more theoretical though, and does not align so easily with
standards used in mainstream schools. We chose to make the main sections of
our maps align with standards so that they could be more immediately useful
for the mainstream audience. However, we ourselves are a bunch of enthusiasts
who love to think about how to push the envelope. :)

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chiaro
Yep, in regards to the parent comment, categories like "Algebra 2" don't
really have much significance outside the US.

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fnordfnordfnord
Minor formatting problem. I cropped out most of the screenshot, it's really on
a 1920 width screen. [http://imgur.com/uvZLELW](http://imgur.com/uvZLELW)

I like to think of these as a kind of hierarchy but I'm never quite sure where
to put some things like philosophy, or how much overlap the titles have with
each other (I guess it's not constant anyway).

Math -> Science -> Engineering -> Technology

I've tried to organize them with a mindmap before, but I am never satisfied
with the results.

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andrewzoerb
Hey there, I'm the lead developer at expii. Thanks for finding that bug! Would
you mind telling me what browser you were using when you encountered it?

Thanks

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fnordfnordfnord
Of course! Mozilla Firefox 41.0.2

OS - Linux Mint 17.2 KDE

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andrewzoerb
Hey, would you mind taking another look at the site to see if that bug is
still an issue? Unfortunately, I wasn't able to reproduce it locally, but I
put out a fix that I'm hoping should fix the issue you were seeing.

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fnordfnordfnord
Looks okay now.

