A better way to practise, and Geometry on the way

A better way to practise, and Geometry on the way

A fair bit has changed since the last update.

Practice works differently now

When you open a lesson, you can now choose roughly how long you want to practise. Polymathy uses that choice to prepare a set of exercises based on where you are in the lesson and how long those exercises would normally take.

Choosing ten minutes doesn’t start a timer. Take as long as you need. It simply tells the site roughly how much work to prepare.

The lesson header shows how much estimated practice you have completed, alongside your progress through the lesson itself.

Hearts have gone too. A wrong answer no longer brings you closer to being locked out. You can try again, look at the worked solution after answering, and carry on.

Experience points now take the expected effort of an exercise into account. A substantial problem is worth more than a very short one. Streaks have also been replaced by field days, which count the days on which you complete some work without giving you something that can be lost.

At the end of an expedition, you’ll see a short report showing what you completed, how much XP you earned, and whether your work opened anything new.

I think this is a much better foundation for practice, though I’m sure I’ll find things to adjust. If anything feels confusing, please tell me. That is particularly useful while the changes are still new.

Geometry

I’m continuing to build the Geometry course. Most of the work at the moment is going into its exercises.

Geometry needs more than ordinary multiple-choice questions. I’ve built tools for working with diagrams, measuring angles, moving points and shapes, and carrying out constructions and transformations. Now I’m using those tools to make the course itself.

I probably won’t wait until the entire course is finished before publishing it. The plan is to release it chapter by chapter, and I’m aiming to publish the first chapter within the next couple of weeks.

It will only be the beginning of the course, but it should be a complete chapter that you can start working through while I build the next one.

The site itself

I’m still not entirely happy with how Polymathy looks.

Some pages remain rough, and parts of the site don’t quite feel as though they belong together yet. I want to make the layouts clearer and give the whole site a more consistent style.

The courses and the learning system still come first, but the presentation needs more attention than it has had so far.

Thanks for being here. Please keep reporting anything that seems wrong or unnecessarily confusing.