what if we had

What if we had an automatic handwritten equation solver (AHWES), specifically made for education? There are lots of AHWES available in the market right now that use convolutional neural nets and natural language processing to function. Usually, they are made for researchers, or people just working on math, but I’m interested in its functionality in the educational field. We’ve all been there before, the first time you are actually paying attention in a lecture, only to notice that we are wasting precious minutes in the tedious trivial mathematics for the problem. Or you look up at the board in confusion, but you see a mathematical error 5 steps back—and now you are too afraid to call the lecturer out on it. Lecture time should be used for teaching, and tech can help with that. On a smartboard, let’s create a similar AHWES, that is constantly tracking what the teacher has written down. Once it notices that there is an equation on the board that can be solved, it would give the teacher a notification that the equation can be solved, and after pressing on that notification, would show a breakdown of the mathematical problem to the teacher and they could choose to do with that information as they like. Trivial mathematical simplification has always been an issue in the science fields of education, lectures should be spent on learning, not on these tasks. Let’s change that.

Ciao!

  • Krish
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