Author: MathX Team
With the mass adoption of personal computing in the developed and developing world, majority of us author a large bulk of our content digitally. Whether it is blogging, writing memos, emailing, texting, making social media posts, or preparing reports, the personal computer has been instrumental in giving us the ability to quickly author, share, search and collaborate on original content.
However, this is far from the truth when it comes to mathematics and science, as majority of us continue to rely on pencil and paper to do our work.
However, this is far from the truth when it comes to mathematics and science, as majority of us continue to rely on pencil and paper to do our work.
This is due to the fact that capturing mathematical and scientific content in a digital format is not simple. Unlike natural language, math and science require us to constantly switch between text, equations, figures, and graphs. This makes the pencil and paper the optimal medium. However, this medium prevents us from being able to collaborate on, search, and share our content. In order to be motivated to author our mathematical and scientific content digitally, we would require sophisticated technologies that can help us switch context on the fly.
At Demonstranda we are focused on creating such technologies. Today, most, if not all, of us type significantly faster than we handwrite. Therefore, by creating a technology that allows you to type math like you think it (as you would while typing an email or text message), we can begin a slow, but inevitable, transition from pencils to pixels.
The first iteration of our technology is MathX, which is a browser-base application. We have currently integrated MathX into two products: MathX Equation Builder for Google Docs and MathMail.
The chrome extension allows users to quickly build complex mathematical expressions and drag and drop the resulting image into a Google document. MathMail allows users to send emails with beautifully typeset equations embedded into the body of the message. Both products are free to use.
Our data suggests that students are not the sole beneficiaries of digitizing this content. Teachers also benefit from this. Specifically, teachers spend an enormous amount of time each week grading homework and quizzes. Most of the time they can’t read their student’s handwriting, which means more time spent talking to the student or asking for clarification. In fact, many teachers no longer grade homework for correctness, but for effort. And we can’t blame them. It’s just too much work.
We believe that digitization can solve many of these and similar issues. We are setting out to create products and technologies that will make this possible.
If you're interested in more information, you can check out the MathX YouTube channel to see the application in action.
At Demonstranda we are focused on creating such technologies. Today, most, if not all, of us type significantly faster than we handwrite. Therefore, by creating a technology that allows you to type math like you think it (as you would while typing an email or text message), we can begin a slow, but inevitable, transition from pencils to pixels.
The first iteration of our technology is MathX, which is a browser-base application. We have currently integrated MathX into two products: MathX Equation Builder for Google Docs and MathMail.
The chrome extension allows users to quickly build complex mathematical expressions and drag and drop the resulting image into a Google document. MathMail allows users to send emails with beautifully typeset equations embedded into the body of the message. Both products are free to use.
Our data suggests that students are not the sole beneficiaries of digitizing this content. Teachers also benefit from this. Specifically, teachers spend an enormous amount of time each week grading homework and quizzes. Most of the time they can’t read their student’s handwriting, which means more time spent talking to the student or asking for clarification. In fact, many teachers no longer grade homework for correctness, but for effort. And we can’t blame them. It’s just too much work.
We believe that digitization can solve many of these and similar issues. We are setting out to create products and technologies that will make this possible.
If you're interested in more information, you can check out the MathX YouTube channel to see the application in action.
