Khan Academy for iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy for iPhone

itunes.apple.com

39 pointsspicyj19 comments

It's interesting that the first app they got into a store was the Windows 8 version: http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/d23cc2b2-c105-4db3-9946...

Not really surprising though. Bill and Melinda Gates are probably the #1 donors to KA.

The iPad app has been out since last spring...

Ah, makes sense. I assumed too much from comments and titles.

Is anybody wondering when there are going to be new exercises added to khanacademy's math program?

I already completed 95% of all their math exercises(362 concepts out of 380 to be exact) and is waiting for higher levels concepts to master or lower level exercises to reinforce my knowledge.

New exercises are added every so often. For example, some basic matrix math was just added a couple weeks ago. We're currently iterating on our current, lower level ones, to try to figure out what works the best, before we move on to higher level math and other topics.

I put in a feature request to make the exercises input field use type="number" instead of text. Just thought I'd ask again here. I'm trying to get a Nexus 7 set up to do KA and little things like that would help (currently it brings up the alpha keyboard).

Is there any internal discussion about tweaking the site to run on tablets?

Yes, we've been working some on making the website more mobile-friendly -- just last week we added some styles for our topic pages:

http://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra

Visit that page on a phone to see the alternate layout; we're also working on improving support for tablets.

I'll look into making the inputs use type="number"; off the top of my head, there's no reason why we shouldn't make that change.

I have a suggestion for website orientation: the subcategory page for any given topic should be simpler. Just list the subcategories for, say, math, and right underneath those subcategories, list the individual video topics. It's kind of a pain searching for a video on a specific subject, and it would help tremendously to be able to see all of the video titles on one page.

This is a little bit OT, but how was your math before you started the exercises? How long did you tske to complete them? And finally how is it now?

Thanks

Great job, KA! You guys are doing marvelous work, seriously. I can't remember the last time I saw an organization be so well-received by... well everyone. Salman is a top-notch guy.

Surprising that IOS shipped before Android given the higher market penetration of Android in developing countries coupled with Khan Academy's mission.

Simply because the overall time to develop and ship on iOS is quite less than android. KA can learn a lot from shipping and iterating faster. And I am sure the Android version is likely under development and will be out soon.

Eeeeh, iterating on Android can be much faster than iOS. No week-long review wait. Of course, if your iterations are significantly longer than a week, it really doesn't matter.

Iteration doesn't really happen daily or weekly. It's about gathering enough data and the making changes on monthly bases maybe. In my experience I learnt that it's easier and faster to build an iphone app (no fragmentations, no jelly beans or ice cream sandwiches) and show it to a large user base, iterate over it and then work on android.

So far I've found iterating on Android faster. It's also ridiculously easier to do large betas because you don't have to do the iOS provisioning song & dance and deal with a 100 device limit.

I suppose it depends on the kind of app you're writing but I haven't spent much time on fragmentation issues and get reasonable UIs on 7" tablets almost for free.

I really like this. I only have one computer, and it spend the whole weekend on the office. When I'm home I want to learn something, with my iphone. The problem is, the actual MOOC alternatives don't have mobile solutions. Now Udacity allows you to download the videos. But this is not natural and I have to put on my dropbox, open a video at once, and sometimes they have 6 second videos.

Now I can learn when I'm on the bus and on my couch. Thank's Khan Academy!

There have been KA video apps for iPhone for quite a long while now, I was expecting that the official one would have the exercise dashboard and practice problems. Hopefully this will ship in future versions. Thanks KA team.

Any chance of making the source available for learning purposes?

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