Comments on: Free/open math textbook written in three days

By: chuckpederson

chuckpederson — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 19:22:00 +0000

Having worked for a small educational publisher I agree — a textbook is more than a couple lines explaining a concept. It takes thousands of hours per grade to create complete worked examples (having full step by step solutions that explain the problem solving process), mathML equations, graphics including charts/graphs/diagrams and practice questions — lots and lots of practice questions will full solutions so students can practice what they are learning.

Then it takes a tremendous amount of time, particularly in mathematics, to edit the whole book. Every mathML equation and every question needs to be examined and the questions solved independently of the solution to ensure they are accurate.

Then, finally if you are publishing in XML you need to have a technical person go through the document to ensure that it is valid, well-formed and will render properly.

One math concept would take, on average 0.5 days of effort for a team of 5 people (2 writers, 1 graphic artist, 1 editor and 1 technical XML person). An average math course in the US is 1/5th of 180 days of instruction which equals about 216 instructional hours. A math textbook will have about 100 concepts to present in those 216 hours which means it will take 5 people 50 days (almost 3 months) to write a single text book.

A handful of teachers cannot possibly write a high quality, curriculum aligned and comprehensive resource in a weekend. It just is not possible.

By: Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 15:48:00 +0000

So, they Finished it?

By: paul

paul — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 14:29:00 +0000

When I was in college, it was widely told that our calculus professor had written the textbook in two weeks, on a bet. And it might as well have been in finnish. So this one will be better if only on price.

By: IndexMe

IndexMe — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 13:17:00 +0000

May be the first math textbook to refer to Wolfram Alpha! (not counting Wolfram Alpha’s own interactive textbook)
Chapter 17, end of first paragraph via translate.google.com: “Functions can also easily draw
graphic calculators on the computer or the software (for example Wolfram Alpha).”
Based on PDF GlyphGryph mentions, http://cloud.github.com/downloads/linjaaho/oppikirjamaraton-maa1/current_draft.pdf

By: flaggday

flaggday — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 00:15:00 +0000

Without being able to read Finnish, it looks like what they wrote might be equivalent to source code for slides to use in lecture, or bare bones Wikipedia entries on high school math topics. Obviously not a complete text book, and I’m pretty sure it’s the easiest part. Example problems work through in detail, practice problems throughout the chapter, and a collection of practice problems with answers available and others with a teacher’s key… these are most of what most students will use in a math text. And they have to be chosen carefully to be representative and of appropriate difficulty, carefully laid out, and painstakingly proof read or they’ll be worse than useless.

That said, hopefully they’ll keep pushing and get to a useful point.

By: Joseph Francis

Joseph Francis — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 22:04:00 +0000

A Finnish math teacher can write 2 textbooks in 120 days. If 1 group of Finnish teachers working together can produce 1 textbook in 3 days, how many Finnish math teachers are in a group?

By: Félix Desrochers-Guérin

Félix Desrochers-Guérin — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 19:38:00 +0000

Well, this one is written in LaTeX, so it kinda does have source code.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 17:32:00 +0000

I laugh every time they describe a book as “open source”, as though they had source code.

By: GlyphGryph

GlyphGryph — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:58:00 +0000

https://github.com/linjaaho/oppikirjamaraton-maa1/downloads

The download is in pdf format.

By: CH

CH — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:14:00 +0000

According to the linked post it’s not in a day but in three days, and hopefully ready tomorrow.

By: twianto

twianto — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:08:00 +0000

Yeah… cool idea but very far from completed. Most chapters are 100 lines (2 pages) max, many even almost empty. They _started_ writing it on a weekend which is cool in and of itself.

By: retepslluerb

retepslluerb — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:06:00 +0000

Look for a pdflatex sooftware suite.

By: ssll

ssll — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 14:45:00 +0000

So, how does one go about converting LaTeX to PDF?

By: Andika Triwidada

Andika Triwidada — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 13:48:00 +0000

you can convert from LaTeX format to more common ones like PDF

By: ssll

ssll — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 13:43:00 +0000

Those links just go to lines of code, is there any way to read it as it would look in a textbook?

By: Jouni Elo

Jouni Elo — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 13:17:00 +0000

They are just here: https://github.com/linjaaho/oppikirjamaraton-maa1/tree/master/sisalto
Mind though that the material is in Finnish (as it is written by teachers from Finland).

By: ssll

ssll — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 13:05:00 +0000

Could someone familiar with github’s interface clue me in on how to get to any of the textbook’s pages?