Ask HN - An App That Does Your Homework???

3 points·davidsmith8900··5 comments

Has something like this been created? Would people be interested?

I've written such a software for my Maths classes in 5th to 9th grade. Instead of doing my homework, I've programmed all the new stuff we've learned (calculate gcd and lcm, primes, factorization, geometry, stuff like that...), entered my homework and let my software compute the results. I later even implemented a solver for linear and quadratic equations which I was pretty proud of.

I did all this programming first in QBASIC, than in PowerBASIC which gave me a nice speedup. Fun thing is, since I was quite young back than, I didn't knew how to define functions in BASIC which complicated my code quite a bit.

I showed this software (which I've called ADDIMATH) to my math teacher, and he loved it! He even bought one copy for 0.50 Deutsche Mark on a 1.44MB floppy. He proudly told parents and other teachers about my software and allowed me to use it for my homework as long as I wouldn't give the software to my classmates.

- What about if you wanted the software to run as a mobile app?

Here ya go:

Math - WolframAlpha

History - Wikipedia

Science - Wikipedia

Language - Google Translate

etc.

- Thank you wesleyac. I really appreciate it.

I think the real question is, "what is the point of homework"?

Rather than creating an app that does your homework for you, I think it would be more useful if we created apps that determined whether or not you needed homework in the first place and gave you the right amount of homework based on how well you're doing.

As an example, you could look at the work that the Khan Academy is doing: http://www.khanacademy.org/about/blog/post/58354379257/intro...

Have you read Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age? What do you think of it?

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