Thank you for making this website, it's really interesting!

I tried your first example, the planar graphs one. It made some sense until the "How many lines fit?" challenge which asks "What is the largest number of edges a planar graph with 10 vertices can have?" - the earlier steps do not remotely explain how to figure out the answer to this question, nor does the hint given when an incorrect answer is entered.

And it's the same with the next challenge after it: "A football is stitched from pentagons and hexagons, with three patches meeting at every corner. Engineers design geodesic domes and virus shells the same way, some with hundreds of hexagons. However many hexagons there are, how many pentagons must such a closed ball have?" - there is nothing earlier to prepare someone to answer this question (except for the fact that this challenge is titled "Always twelve" and the answer is in fact 12 😂).

I'm curious about your background and plans for this project. Are you an educator? And/or do you have connections with educators who plan to use this with students? Is this a solo project so far? What is the likelihood that you'll get bored and abandon this project in a week or a month from now? It is difficult for me to imagine many strangers on the internet volunteering their time to help you develop this when your website doesn't preemptively provide answers to these and other questions.

tbh I am very tempted to remove this post from !opensource@lemmy.ml 🤔

I hate how every single Open Source project recently is just worthless AI slop.

I like all the comments debating that LLM produced education material is garbage but ignoring the fact that the "educational" examples OP provided in the three links are garbage games at best.

This is not learning. Learning is reading and understanding verified content. What AI slops out isn't verified.

If you tell me you've copied what's on Brilliant hence "verified", it's even worse. It's stealing. Do you read pirated books?

For the love of god, take this shit down.

First off: $160 a year for education (about $13 a month) is a steal. I'm not sure why this needs to exist.

Second: ignoring the ethical issues with using Claude so glibly, who is reviewing these lessons for accuracy? Who is making new lessons? Part of Brilliant's deal is having actual subject experts who are at least reviewing the lessons. No AI model is a replacement for that expertise. You can't crowdsource that expertise ad hoc, either (the people who use it are the ones learning from it, after all).

Are you just going to hope Claude can clone some facsimile forever?

I like it! But I probably wouldn't use it right now because I'm studying other things.

I did test it briefly.

My experience was that for subjects I understood already, I could do the tests and follow along easily.

Then I tried Electrochemistry & Batteries.

So a few things. First of all, I can't easily go back and see the work I previously did, so I am doing this from memory. I could go back with a reset. I'm not sure if that's a good user experience that I can't go back to review previous ideas and concepts.

Oh wait, now I am looking at the course and it started over. I didn't ask it to reset my progress. Hmm. That may be a bug?

One thing I didn't like is that if I didn't understand a concept, I couldn't easily get more information on it or additional help.

For example, in this prelude to a question:

Oxidation numbers

For molecules, chemists track electrons with oxidation numbers: pretend every bond is ionic, giving the shared electrons to the more electronegative atom. Rules of thumb:

free elements: 0; simple ions: their charge, oxygen is usually −2, hydrogen +1 (with non-metals), the numbers add up to the overall charge.

An increase in oxidation number is oxidation; a decrease is reduction.

I was confused by this. I haven't studied chemical bonds in a long time. I don't know why I would pretend the bonds are ionic, and I don't really have memorized which atoms are more electronegative. So I read this and sort of get it, but I've also studied this a long time ago...

Now for the question:

Manganese in permanganate What is the oxidation number of manganese in the permanganate ion, MnO4−MnO4−​?

Okay... so we just went over oxidation numbers. I have to pretend there are ionic bonds (I don't know what that is exactly from memory, I know it's a type of chemical bonding). And electrons move to the more electronegative atom. Electronegative atoms wasn't exactly explained clearly here. I don't really know how to determine if Mn is electronegative. I see O4 has a negative next to it. Is this negatively charged Oxygen? Does that imply negative electrochemical properties?

I didn't know, guessed, got it wrong, and then saw the answer:

Explanation

x+4(−2)=−1x+4(−2)=−1, so x=+7x=+7, manganese's highest oxidation state. That's why permanganate is such a powerful oxidising agent: manganese is hungry for electrons.

This doesn't make sense to me. I know the previous screen said -2 was often a number associated metal ("oxygen is usually −2"; it also didn't clearly define what that is. Is that the charge? Is that the oxidation number?)

After that, the next thing is:

Step 5 of 6 Try it Balance a half-equation In acid, purple permanganate is reduced to colourless Mn2+Mn2+. Balance the half-equation: oxygen first (with water), then hydrogen (with H+H+), then charge (with electrons).

I was able to figure out the right answer by trial and error, but I don't actually conceptually understand this.

So my main feedback is that this may help people who have studied things before or want to look up things on their own, but for people who don't understand terms or need remedial help on a concept, there's not really a way to reinforce lessons or clarify topics.

I don't know if every lesson is like this, but the one thing that could probably help this the most would be something like a button for "I still don't understand" that has longer explanations, more examples, and more similar problems. I'm somewhat flexible when learning and don't need to understand everything right away... but I need to be able to get conceptual clarification on something before trying to build on weak conceptual understandings when I'm studying a topic.

I am sure I could step out of the ecosystem and just ask an LLM why I am not understanding certain parts, but that definitely takes me out of the flow.

I am also not trying to re-learn chemistry or batteries right now. (But I'm pretty sure I never learned how lithium ion batteries worked and so if I could have followed this lesson and then learned more about new battery technology, I would have found that interesting. But I had to stop because of conceptual confusion, and I don't want to take the time to have an LLM fill in the gaps. But for me to use this, I would probably need to be able to log in, have my progress saved, and harder modules might need more links to various terms. I did skip ahead and I know that I could have covered chemical reactions first. I did try part of that module and it felt too easy.

For me, if I wanted to re-learn chemistry right now so I could learn more about science and improve my science abilities, I would likely just have an LLM teach me directly because I think it could just be faster.

For people who might be interested in using this, for example, a teenager who wants to take some community college courses in lab work because they want to become a genetics researcher and they want to pre-learn some of the material so the course will be easier later, I just don't know if the explanations are long enough or clarify things enough. Those explanations felt really sparse. I like the structure, I like the diagrams and pictures and those are nice. But just for anything slightly harder, there's no real clarification when there are conceptual misunderstandings.

You could probably create links for terms (like ionic) that help people review what those things are or their definitions. And you could probably create longer deep-dives for people who get a problem wrong or don't feel comfortable moving on and then it would work better.

Best of luck with this project!

I have a request: make them multilingual. A lot of people who would benefit from this sort of thing don't speak English and as a native speaker of a small language, I am unhappy.

Aside from that, great work! A few of the excercises I tried seemed to assume I know a lot of the background already, like what is node, edge, vertex etc.

Interesting, an MIT license project

This post is a perfect embodiment of the discourse over AI happening everywhere. AI? Must be slop. AI? Just a tool bro, judge the result. Throw opensource in the mix, just needs popcorn. My two cents, the initiative is laudable, there's not enough quality free and open source education materials out there, Gcompris for younger kids is good but gets exhausted quickly with age. Now the quality is the question mark when you use a black box like AI, and not talking about copyright that these tools piss on, ironic when producing open source... Obviously you put a lot of effort in it, it has the merit to exist vs the huge effort to create an open source community involved enough in an education project. It's my two cents, I'm not concluding on anything.

Honestly I like it. The few examples I tried worked perfectly fine even on mobile. Can I vouch for the quality and veracity of each and every play? No of course not but I can bear this caveat in mind while not parting with a ridiculous £30 a month or £216 if you want to stump up the money upfront. Fuck wanky subscription services in general, I for one am glad you came up with this and hope you will continue improving it. Well done you!