Early look into Khan Academy iPad app

https://plus.google.com/115675748062237570841/posts/JGthmsiU6aN#115675748062237570841/posts/JGthmsiU6aN

by DanielRibeiro • 15 years ago

105 23 15 years ago

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keke_ta• 15 years ago

Change in education.

genki2• 15 years ago

I thought that looked really interesting, but then I did a double take. Is this app an interactive exercise app that's tied to the Khan Academy videos on the related topic, or is it just a portal directly to said videos? What exactly can the student do with the app?

From his description, I see 'interactive transcripts', but I'm not sure exactly what that means...

I think there's a big difference between showing a student how to do things, and giving the student the ability to clearly demonstrate an understanding of the things you're trying to teach. I don't know what the ultimate goal of this app is, but I hope at some point there will be student interactivity such that exercises can be attempted and directed, specific feedback can be generated...

edit: oh look, it says exercises are coming in the next release. I'm not sure how I missed that! I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

chriskelley• 15 years ago

FTA: "Exercises will be coming in the next release."

Looks like this first release is a viewer+, but impressive iterations will not be far behind.

The breadth of Khan Academy's granularity for interpreting a student's understanding is staggering. The second half of Salman's Ted Talk shows how granular it gets: http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_rein...

In my opinion, the most impressive part of the Khan Academy approach is the emphasis they have put on demonstrating a student's understanding of the concepts - as demonstrated in that Ted Talk. The fact that the entry-point is "videos on the web" is a simplification of their overall mission.

genki2• 15 years ago

Thanks for the video link! I'll check it out. I admit to hearing a lot about Khan Academy but not having had much time to actually investigate what they offer...

OneWhoFrogs• 15 years ago

Khan Academy has had exercises for a while now. It's probably one of the best open source projects to work on, in terms of impact and how easy it is to contribute. You only need to know HTML and a little JavaScript. The exercises are modular, so you don't need to understand the whole codebase in order to work on it. Plus, saying "I've contributed to Khan Academy" is a pretty cool thing to put on a resume.

For all the upvotes Khan Academy gets, though, there really aren't that many contributors. I'd encourage everyone reading this with an afternoon to spare to try writing an exercise for KA.

https://github.com/Khan/khan-exercises

tokenadult2• 15 years ago

Just for friendly advice to the Khan Academy exercise developers, I'll repost my FAQ about the distinction between "exercises" and "problems" in mathematics education. It would be great to see more problems on the Khan Academy site.

FAQ begins here:

PROBLEMS VERSUS EXERCISES

I frequently encounter discussions among parents about repetitive school math lessons, so a few years ago I prepared this Frequently Asked Question (FAQ) document about the distinction between math exercises (good in sufficient but not excessive amount) and math problems (always good in any amount).

Most books about mathematics have what are called "exercises" in them, questions that prompt a learner to practice the concepts discussed in the mathematics book. By reading one mathematics book, and then several more, I learned that some mathematicians draw a distinction between "exercises" and "problems" (which is the terminology generally used by the mathematicians who draw this distinction). I think this distinction is useful for teachers and learners to consider while selecting materials for studying mathematics, so I'll share the quotations from which I learned this distinction here. I first read about the distinction between exercises and problems in a Taiwan reprint of a book by Howard Eves.

"It is perhaps pertinent to make a comment or two here about the problems of the text. There is a distinction between what may be called a PROBLEM and what may be considered an EXERCISE. The latter serves to drill a student in some technique or procedure, and requires little, if any, original thought. Thus, after a student beginning algebra has encountered the quadratic formula, he should undoubtedly be given a set of exercises in the form of specific quadratic equations to be solved by the newly acquired tool. The working of these exercises will help clinch his grasp of the formula and will assure his ability to use the formula. An exercise, then, can always be done with reasonable dispatch and with a minimum of creative thinking. In contrast to an exercise, a problem, if it is a good one for its level, should require thought on the part of the student. The student must devise strategic attacks, some of which may fail, others of which may partially or completely carry him through. He may need to look up some procedure or some associated material in texts, so that he can push his plan through. Having successfully solved a problem, the student should consider it to see if he can devise a different and perhaps better solution. He should look for further deductions, generalizations, applications, and allied results. In short, he should live with the thing for a time, and examine it carefully in all lights. To be suitable, a problem must be such that the student cannot solve it immediately. One does not complain about a problem being too difficult, but rather too easy.

"It is impossible to overstate the importance of problems in mathematics. It is by means of problems that mathematics develops and actually lifts itself by its own bootstraps. Every research article, every doctoral thesis, every new discovery in mathematics, results from an attempt to solve some problem. The posing of appropriate problems, then, appears to be a very suitable way to introduce the student to mathematical research. And it is worth noting, the more problems one plays with, the more problems one may be able to pose on one's own. The ability to propose significant problems is one requirement to be a creative mathematician."

Eves, Howard (1963). A Survey of Geometry volume 1. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, page ix.

I have since read about this distinction in several other books.

"Before going any further, let's digress a minute to discuss different levels of problems that might appear in a book about mathematics:

Level 1. Given an explicit object x and an explicit property P(x), prove that P(x) is true. . . .

Level 2. Given an explicit set X and an explicit property P(x), prove that P(x) is true for FOR ALL x [existing in] X. . . .

Level 3. Given an explicit set X and an explicit property P(x), prove OR DISPROVE that P(x) is true for for all x [existing in] X. . . .

Level 4. Given an explicit set X and an explicit property P(x), find a NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT CONDITION Q(x) that P(x) is true. . . .

Level 5. Given an explicit set X, find an INTERESTING PROPERTY P(x) of its elements. Now we're in the scary domain of pure research, where students might think that total chaos reigns. This is real mathematics. Authors of textbooks rarely dare to pose level 5 problems."

Graham, Ronald, Knuth, Donald, and Patashnik, Oren (1994). Concrete Mathematics Second Edition. Boston: Addison-Wesley, pages 72-73.

This digression becomes the subject of a, um, problem in Exercise 4 of Chapter 3: "The text describes problems at levels 1 through 5. What is a level 0 problem? (This, by the way, is NOT a level 0 problem.)"

"First, what is a PROBLEM? We distinguish between PROBLEMS and EXERCISES. An exercise is a question that you know how to resolve immediately. Whether you get it right or not depends on how expertly you apply specific techniques, but you don't need to puzzle out what techniques to use. In contrast, a problem demands much thought and resourcefulness before the right approach is found. . . .

"A good problem is mysterious and interesting. It is mysterious, because at first you don't know how to solve it. If it is not interesting, you won't think about it much. If it is interesting, though, you will want to put a lot of time and effort into understanding it."

Zeitz, Paul (1999). The Art and Craft of Problem Solving. New York: Wiley, pages 3 and 4.

". . . . As Paul Halmos said, 'Problems are the heart of mathematics,' so we should 'emphasize them more and more in the classroom, in seminars, and in the books and articles we write, to train our students to be better problem-posers and problem-solvers than we are.'

"The problems we have selected are definitely not exercises. Our definition of an exercise is that you look at it and know immediately how to complete it. It is just a question of doing the work, whereas by a problem, we mean a more intricate question for which at first one has probably no clue to how to approach it, but by perseverance and inspired effort one can transform it into a sequence of exercises."

Andreescu, Titu & Gelca, Razvan (2000), Mathematical Olympiad Challenges. Boston: Birkhäuser, page xiii.

"It is easier to advance in one topic by going ahead with the more elementary parts of another topic, where the first one is applied. The brain much prefers to work that way, rather than to concentrate on ugly technical formulas which are obviously unrelated to anything except artificial drilling. Of course, some rote drilling is necessary. The problem is how to strike a balance."

Lang, Serge (1988), Basic Mathematics. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. xi.

"Learn by Solving Problems

"We believe that the best way to learn mathematics is by solving problems. Lots and lots of problems. In fact, we believe the best way to learn mathematics is to try to solve problems that you don't know how to do. When you discover something on your own, you'll understand it much better than if someone just tells it to you.

. . . .

"If you find the problems are too easy, this means you should try harder problems. Nobody learns very much by solving problems that are too easy for them."

Rusczyk, Richard (2007). Introduction to Algebra. Alpine, CA: AoPS Incorporated, p. iii.

pama• 15 years ago

Cool---since this is developed by Resig himself, it will become my main benchmark for fluent jQuery mobile/HTML5 on the iPad.

DevX1012• 15 years ago

While we wait for this, are there any open source examples of well designed HTML5/jquery ipad web apps?

Game_Ender• 15 years ago

Why wait? He posted the source code on github: https://github.com/Khan/khan-mobile

vailripper3• 15 years ago

I thought that Apple had requirements that any applications be written in native code, doesn't this break that if it's written in html5? Looking at the github, the entire source is html/js...

spicyj• 15 years ago

There's no such requirement. At one point, they required everything to be in native Objective-C code or HTML/JS (both were allowed) but they have lifted even that restriction.

vailripper3• 15 years ago

No kidding - that's great to hear.

ColinDabritz• 15 years ago

Off hand, browsing the source, it looks like a web app (index.html, CSS, JS). "With offline support" makes more sense in that context too, as you would expect a native iOS app to be mostly 'offline' anyway (sans perhaps streaming video).

I think this means it's a website designed for iOS and using the new HTML5 offline storage stuff for local operation.

That would be more up John Resig's alley as well.

That's pretty cool!

vailripper3• 15 years ago

Yep - we recently built a mobile app that utilizes local storage for offline support, with sync functionality for when users are connected again. HTML5 really opens the door for some awesome stuff.

soegaard• 15 years ago

Note that you combine the two approaches. In a native app you can embed a webkit window and show HTML/Javascript. Since the Khan exercises are written in Javascript this could be the plan (but I don't know).

grogs• 15 years ago

Yep, anyone wanting to do this: PhoneGap.

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

Super dumb question coming up. What is this?:

   <script type="text/html" id="subtitles-tmpl">
      <%each sub in subtitles %>			
         <% if ( sub.text ) { %>	
            <li data-time="<%= sub.start_time %>">
               <span class="time"><%= Math.floor(Math.round(sub.start_time) / 60) %>:<%= pad( Math.round(sub.start_time) % 60 ) %></span>

I haven't seen this type of script templating before? Is this just standard? Part of jQuery? Part of something else.

vindvaki• 15 years ago

Looks like micro templating; see http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

kenjackson2• 15 years ago

Thanks to both responders. July 2008 -- I'm only three years behind the times. Catching up. :-)

mrkurt• 15 years ago

Looks like this: http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

Early look into Khan Academy iPad app

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