MathEasy

Inspiration

The idea for Matheasy started with a sixth grader playing with numbers and developing a passion for finding new ways to solve math problems. Back in the day, this sixth grader, one of our team members, began to play around with exponents, and he learned about derivatives through summation notation. However, many middle and high schoolers find math the most challenging subject.

Our team believes this struggle is primarily due to teachers teaching math one-dimensionally and only allowing the student to solve the problem in one way. This approach severely limits the student; instead of understanding the problem and learning problem-solving skills, the student simply learns the process of solving the problem. This limited perspective leads to difficulties in later math, as the student does not understand basic math concepts.

So, we created this website to offer multiple ways of looking at the same problem. Each topic comes with three distinct ways of learning the same problem, and throughout the website, we sprinkled interactive activities. We decided to teach the beginning chapter of Algebra 1, which includes an introduction to variables, evaluating equivalent expressions, substitution, and division by 0. Our goal as a website is to be a separate resource for students to turn to when they do not understand a concept, so we do not have any grading systems or anything that could cause stress. Instead, our final review is a game.

What it does

Matheasy allows students to view multiple math lessons from different angles. Each topic contains three lessons that teach with different wording and interactive activities. The site also includes a final game built-in Scratch, as well as a functioning calculator that can process multiple advanced math processes such as sin and calculating the nth root.

How we built it

We built Matheasy in HTML and CSS. We built many of our small scripts with py-scripts, then we built our calculator and multiple choice questions with JavaScript. Finally, we built our final review game in Scratch.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was connecting to a server to save usernames and passwords. We ended up using Userbase because it seemed to have the most resources. However, the downside was that we were limited to 100 accounts.

By the end of the time we had to submit our project, though, we realized that the login page had major flaws. The login page included two pages in one, with one being the actual login page and the other being a profile page. We had a profile image that would take the users back to the profile page, but about 10% of the time, it would take them back to the login page while they were still logged in. So, on the very last day, we had to cut both the profile and the login pages.

Another challenge was integrating the calculator into the Nav bar. Our whole team had only sightly worked with HTML before, so the classes that were offered helped us immensely. Without a ton of HTML and CSS experience, this seemingly easy task proved to take around 5 hours of experimenting with different processes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud of the CSS behind the Scratch game, our advanced calculator, and our multitude of lessons to tutor in math. One of our biggest feats was simply writing all the content you can find on the website.

What we learned

We learned so much about HTML and CSS as a team. Altogether we had hardly any experience in HTML and CSS, so making this website was a difficult process. We also learned a ton about JavaScript since none of our members had even used JavaScript before. We also learned about integrating Python in HTML by using PyScript.

What's next for Matheasy

Hopefully, in the future, we can add personalized accounts and all of Algebra 1 to the website. From there, we can expand and try to reach and help as many kids with math as possible.

Built With

• css
• html5
• javascript
• pyscript