Go to the profile of Douglas H Bradshaw
Douglas H Bradshaw
By day, I help build Blip Billboards. By night I build BrightHike. Otherwise, I’m a husband and father helping to build a large and happy family.

BrightHike Chronicles 1

Chronicling the birth of BrightHike, a DuoLingo for math

“man standing on cliff” by Kal Loftus on Unsplash

BrightHike is a small, infantile side project with a massive ambition: to become the most efficient way to master basic mathematics.

Basic mathematics in this case means all the mathematical concepts taught in the US k-12 school system from counting and arithmetic through algebra and calculus.

And then, because I’m a physicist at heart, I want it to also go from there through the concepts required to intuitively understand modern physics (including mechanics, thermodynamics, electricity and magnetism, quantum mechanics, and special and general relativity). I think many professional mathematicians would be willing to also call that basic mathematics.

Anyway, I started working on a version of BrightHike in March of 2017. By June of 2017, I started to see a part of the magnitude of the undertaking. And I got discouraged.

I quit working on it. I cast about for other interesting projects. I played with Rust. I helped a startup grow. I wrote a draft of my first full-sized novel.

But when I tried to find a larger, more interesting project, I couldn’t find anything that seemed like it would be worth my time. Every idea seemed pale or like a waste of time compared to the concept of using tech to teach math.

So, after hemming and hawing for a year, I’ve decided to really go for it. We’ll see what this thing can become.

Anyway, I made that decision about two months ago and started building a simpler initial version of the site. Here’s BrightHike’s current status:

  1. It’s live!
  2. It has 3 users (not including staff). And . . . all three are my children. This is great for rapid feedback. But it shows where we are in this endeavor — at square one.
  3. It has place holders for 17 courses.
  4. However, there are only 48 questions. Suppose that the target is about 3.5k per course and we want 17 courses. That means we only have just under 60k questions to go!

So, yeah. Not too impressive.

But persistence is massively powerful. And I’ll be reporting next week.