Show HN: Expii – Zoomable interactive map of topics in math and science

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!

It sort of reminds me of Paperscape [1] but more on the style of wikipedia since it invites you to edit it.

Organizing knowledge is way harder than it seems.

Instead of for topics, I would personally like to see this implemented for courses and their prerequisites (and perhaps the topics in each course) in order to keep track of your own learning or plan out what you would like to learn in the future.

[1] http://paperscape.org/

I think the possibility of multiple explanations has a great value beyond just providing a "better" explanation. They also allow a different mental model to be expressed, which in my personal experience was very helpful in learning new concepts in mathematics.

In school, you are often taught a very strict mental model based directly on the books and then hammered with very similar examples hoping you will understand it after the n-th one. But what lead the concepts to "click" in my head were often somewhat different mental models (which I think are different for each person). That initial mental model can then be more refined and adjusted to be more in line with the textbook one.

I'd rather read 10 explanations that are a bit different and the understanding with 10 examples than to read 1 and hammer that in with 100 examples.

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

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. :)

Thanks