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Polypad

polypad.amplify.com

226 pointsivank24 comments

Polypad itself isn’t open source, but many of its underlying math and UI libraries are published by its creator under the Mathigon org [1]. The UI is impressive on its own, but what I find really interesting is that it’s built entirely without a traditional frontend framework. The core is a small library that's a mix of jquery-style DOM wrappers and Vue-like reactivity, templating, and web components [2].

I wish this style of building complex UIs was more common. Having some direct control over the DOM works really well for highly interactive graphics and visual tools.

[1] https://github.com/mathigon [2] https://github.com/mathigon/boost.js

You can get very close to a working version by reverse engineering the javascript with Claude. I got a good version almost an year back. With Opus it might do a better job.

Amplify (neé Desmos) builds great tools and manipulatives that are great for classroom use and curious play. Read more of the pedagogy behind these tools on Mathworlds. https://danmeyer.substack.com/

> Amplify (neé Desmos)

It looks like "Amplify Education, Inc" and "Desmos Studio" (Public Benefit Corporation) are separate entities.

The desmos website still shows that most of the Desmos "math tools" still exist under the Desmos name (graphing calculator, scientific calculator, four function, matrix, geometry, 3D), but that "Desmos Classroom" specifically has been renamed to "Amplify Classroom" [1].

The amplify usage guidelines [2] say that "Amplify does not own but partners with Desmos Studio, the maker of a suite of free math tools, including a graphing calculator used by over 75 million people around the world. (See desmos.com for more information.)"

[1]: https://www.desmos.com/

[2]: https://amplify.com/ac-usage-guidelines/

It was kind of an unusual reorg. Desmos used to have a team making curriculum and classroom activities in addition to the graphing calculator. Most of these were essentially just graphs made in the graphing calculator, taking advantage of features like image embedding and draggable points, wrapped in a little scripting language and slideshow UI. When education people talk about "manipulatives", it's usually these kinds of simpler activities and not the whole graphing calculator.

That team got acquired by Amplify, and eventually the "Desmos Classroom" tool used to make the activities got acquired by Amplify too, leaving Desmos with just the more consumer-focused graphing calculator stuff. Amplify also acquired this other "Polypad" product and kind of merged the two together into what's now called "Amplify Classroom".

I think Amplify is still selling/distributing a lot of the activities that were originally made by the Desmos people.

Yes – CTO of Amplify here.

As a sibling poster notes, the Desmos calculator and math tools spun out to Desmos Studio PBC, which has a bunch of great people – with the goal of ensuring those remain available to all and not tied to a single curriculum provider. The Desmos Classroom tools for social, interactive classroom instruction, and another bunch of great colleagues, are part of Amplify, which together with Polypad and other tooling, make up Amplify Classroom ( https://classroom.amplify.com ), powering terrific IMO math, science and English curricula.

It's been a lot of fun – and a lot of tricky work! – bringing all of these tools and humans together.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that we are hiring, including for Software Engineer, Analytics Engineer, Data Engineer, and AI Engineer positions at various levels :)

https://amplify.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/Amplify_Careers

(Since you're in the thread, can I ask you to give kudos to whoever's kept the original "Let's Explore Geography! Canadian Commodities Trader Simulation Exercise" class code active all these years? I think you might have even changed the multiple-choice component to better support the weird thing I was doing with empty choice text.)

Ha absolutely! :) That's you eh? Very nifty

For anyone reading Dan Meyer's blog for the first time, I'd highly recommend you search the archives for an article about a topic you know well. And use that to help you decide how much to trust Dan's opinion on other stuff, and whether his perspective aligns with yours.

He wrote an article heavily criticizing Math Academy's approach here: https://open.substack.com/pub/danmeyer/p/it-is-fun-to-preten...

But there's no evidence that he's tested it with a student in the target market!

He does link to article by Michael Pershan, who did kick the tires, but again, he didn't use it as intended over any reasonable period of time.

Based on their credentials, both Dan and Michael are people you'd hope you could trust if you want to learn about how to teach your kid math. Dan did his PhD at Stanford (under Dr Boaler) and Michael has been a math teacher for years, and has written at least one good book on the topic.

But they each seem to have a knee jerk reaction to anything that hints that it might replace human teachers, or anything that's only useful to a subset of students.

One of my favorite projects that I ever worked on was an project that is really reminiscent of this. The project was to create a browser-based educational tangram[1] puzzle game for kids. It was filled with neat mathematical challenges like how to implement "snapping" between puzzle pieces. The most interesting was how to detect when a puzzle was "complete" or "incorrect" since there can be multiple valid solutions (and I didn't want to find them all) and the library had to accommodate the addition of new puzzles, meaning the approach had to be generic.

We ended up with some rules like "all puzzle pieces must be adjacent to another puzzle piece", "no puzzle piece may overlap another puzzle piece", and "all puzzle pieces must overlap the silhouette" (the puzzle goal), and "no piece may partially overlap the silhouette".

I didn't really know how to detect "overlap" reliably so I ended up implementing some heuristic methods. I remember tearing my hair out over the way JavaScript numbers worked and figuring out how to reliably compare floating point numbers. Good times.

The github repo for the library is still around. Last commit... 9 years ago, woof, time flies! And of course one of the last commits is "Fix overlap bug". Figures.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram [2] https://github.com/gabesullice/libshapes

The annual Polypad Art Contest is worth browsing through: https://polypad.amplify.com/contest

From last year, this Moonlight Sonata in the 12-15 year old category is awesome: https://polypad.amplify.com/p/3VOW6BLM7AYqhQ

And I'm partial to this creation by an educator: https://polypad.amplify.com/p/hPjJZ4DC2Tpywg

but they're all great

(disclaimer: i am CTO of Amplify)

I'm curious, do you notice an uptick in complexity in submissions, corresponding with AI popularity?

I am super impressed by this. The landing page is GREAT, it really shows you what it can do and I tried creating a polypad and it works just as well as the landing page makes it seem.

I would have loved to have this when I was in school and I can imagine it is a great tool for teachers. I am going to let my kids play around with this.

In rereading my comment it sounds like some sort of lame ad, which I can assure you it isn't. I am just excited about it.

Same! It’s one of those projects where as soon as I scroll the landing page, I can hear the fireworks of ideas going off in my head! It seems to work really well on mobile as well. I think it’s got real visual aesthetic appeal - it takes me right back to the handdrawn colour diagrams in the textbooks when I was at primary school.

I really wish I could find a site for 2D geometry/pedagogy which would "click" as well for me, and be as useful as:

https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

has been. Really miss directly programming in PostScript in Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube.

I've tried Processing and Nodebox, and they haven't quite clicked, and scripting in Inkscape feels clunky....

Geogebra? [1]

[1] https://www.geogebra.org/

I've tried that, and it's never quite worked out for me.

The files need a lot of cleanup/massaging, and for instance, polygons are a series of separate line segments, not a closed path.

That's really cool. A nice touch is how the help is implement with every widget having a little question mark you can click, and it shows a tutorial on the left panel. Also thank you for letting us in without sign up.

The concept is cool, but the UI for navigating the canvas is pretty frustrating. I wish it used mouse actions like zooming with the scroll wheel and panning with dragged right click/middle click.

Amplify bought the company that made it a few years ago:

https://mathigon.org/press

This is the edtech product that my son (2nd grade) has liked the most from school.

Could you please not mess up my back button for your menu :(

I just get "403 Forbidden". What is this website?

An edtech product that illustrates mathematical relationships through colors and shapes.

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