Comment by lyaunzbe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lyaunzbe | Hacker News Reader

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Man, I'd love to contribute to Khan Academy, especially since they've given me so much already. I can't count the number of times Sal's videos have helped me in my AP Physics and Calculus classes this year. It's too bad I'm still in high school.

I actually had an idea, a couple of weeks ago, that it would be really cool to implement some kind of functionality that brought together real time chat and a "blackboard" capabilities (Canvas and node.js?) to the site, so people could discuss certain topics and simultaneously draw out diagrams/problems/etc. I feel like Q.A. for homework/learning could be done a lot better then what we have currently right now (WikiAnswers, Yahoo Answers, etc). Good luck, I'm sure tons of awesome developers will jump at this opportunity.

Grockit, a test prep startup, does this. They're setup to give test questions to be answered in a given time frame with ongoing chat between room members and there is an optional white-board for drawing on.

The drawing section isn't built by them, it's actually built by an HN poster running, I believe, ExpatSoftware. You could probably make use of his project... Actually, I checked. They're just using Twiddla. I think Twiddla is pretty much what you want. You can free hand what you want and you have an etherpad a click away. Tying it in to KA would be left.

Kamens, is there a way to view all the unanswered questions on Khan Academy? I think it might receive a fair amount of traffic if there was.

Not at the moment, no. We're tackling some lower-hanging fruit, but this sort of community tool is obviously on our horizon.

http://www.mathim.com/ and http://typewith.me/ and http://www.mangamasters.com/paintchat/

Thanks, I didn't know about those. Typewith.me looks pretty well done. My friend and I actually used to use flockdraw when we wanted to draw free body diagrams and circuits. It would be interesting to see, though, how integrating a such a drawchat system into Khan Academy would play out, considering how fast the community is growing and the type of audience it is developing.

Would probably make sense for someone to just write a site agnostic 'drawchat' plugin.

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