Goals and Priorities
Teach students math in a pedagogically sound way. The Socratic team prioritizes support and features based on how many students it will help based on statistics from the questions we get from students around the world. This isn't a perfect metric because it's limited to the students asking questions on our platform, and we want mathsteps to help any math student. So if you're working on helping students with Calculus, we would love to see mathsteps extended to provide that help and to work with you to bring that to life!
Mathsteps currently covers: Simplifying expressions, with the following exceptions:
- Negative exponents issue
- Negative roots issue
- Expanding an exponent over parens e.g. (x + 2)^2 issue
- Fractional exponents issue
- Expanding an exponent over fraction e.g. (2/3)^2 issue
Solving for a variable, with the following exceptions also in issues:
- When x is in the denominator issue
- A square root is involved issue
- Absolute with a variable (mathsteps does not currently support multiple cases, which is a limit to implementing this) issue
We are hoping to add support for:
- Factoring of quadratics (initial version coming soon) issue
- System of equations issue
- Finding a derivative
- Trigonometry
- Multi-variates e.g. x^2*y^3
- log/exponentials
The most impactful enhancements as identified by Socratic from student questions are as follows:
- Fixing the exceptions to simplifying expressions and solving equations mentioned above
- Factoring support for quadratics
- Systems of equations
- Simplifying multi-variates
- Differentiation
- Integration
- Trigonometry
Although mathsteps has hundreds of tests, there are still many bugs to find and fix. We hate giving students the wrong result, and love it when people fix any of the edge-cases that may arise.
Tracking when a math error happens, for example division by 0.
Necessary for absolute values. Need to be able to define a case for which a set of simplifications/solutions are valid.
Necessary for solving a system of equations. Equations need to be able to be manipulated together (substitution, elimination etc.)
This is more important in a world where we want to define a domain of a function.