math1
A learning website for North Carolina Math 1 that starts with how each topic is used in real life.
Overview
Project overview
My own product, built around a question every Math 1 student asks: what is this for? There are nine units. Each one starts with how the skill applies to money, work, or everyday decisions, then moves into practice problems with step-by-step solutions and a game built for that unit.
Approach
How I approached it
Every Math 1 teacher hears the same question, and most courses answer it last: when am I going to use this? This product answers it first. Each unit starts with the money, the job, or the decision the skill helps with, and only then gets into the math.
The nine units are grouped by where they apply. Your Money covers descriptive statistics and compound interest, Your Job covers linear functions and systems, and Your World covers quadratics. Navigation follows the same idea: each unit sits at a point on a coordinate plane, placed by when in life it starts to matter. Three units are finished and playable. The rest are shown on the plane and marked as in progress, so students can see the whole course before it is complete.
Every unit has the same structure: why it matters, the concept, practice problems, and a game. Practice problems are generated instead of drawn from a fixed set, and each one has a step-by-step worked solution, so a student who gets it wrong can see how to solve it. Each game is built around its own unit’s skill. The blueprint look of navy, cyan, and graph paper came after a first version looked like every other education template, which is why the visual design is so specific.
What was delivered
Deliverables
- Nine NC Math 1 units grouped into three areas of life (Your Money, Your Job, and Your World) instead of textbook chapter order
- Three units finished and playable: Descriptive Statistics, Linear Functions, and Compound Interest
- Every unit follows the same four steps: why it matters, the concept, practice problems, and a game
- Step-by-step worked solutions for every generated problem, so students see how to get the answer instead of only being marked wrong
- A separate game for each unit, built around that unit's skill instead of a generic quiz
- Navigation drawn as a coordinate plane, with each unit placed along a life timeline at the point where it becomes useful
Key decisions
- A blueprint-style look: navy, cyan line drawings, a graph-paper grid, and the self-hosted typefaces Bricolage Grotesque, Hanken Grotesk, and JetBrains Mono
- I redid the visual design after the first version looked too generic; the blueprint style was the fix
- Practice problems are generated, so students can keep getting new problems on the same skill
- Tested on phones as well as desktop, since most students use their phones