Half of PhysicsGraph - Thoughts
I enjoy trying different learning tools and I started PhysicsGraph about two and a half months ago for fun. I am now 50% of the way through Physics 1. This is just a dump of my general thoughts so far.
What is PhysicsGraph?
The learning space online is accelerating much faster than I have seen it in quite a while. AI has enabled highly skilled and creative educators to develop curriculums and technology at an incredibly fast rate.
One application you may have heard of is MathAcademy. MA's goal is to combine spaced repetition and curriculum-based learning to create knowledge graphs that develop mastery in all fundamentals before a new topic is introduced. If you have ever tutored, you know that 99% of student issues come from some missed fundamental - teaching Calc 3 usually devolves into algebra they forgot in 9th grade. Spaced repetition and mastery fix this.
Math is awesome, but the natural sciences and applied maths interest me more than any theoretical basis, and I don't believe I have any deficiencies in math in terms of what I want to achieve. So think of PhysicsGraph like MathAcademy but for Physics. Should these even be separate tools? Not sure, but competition is good so why not.
How has it been?
TLDR; pretty good.
I have some gripes with PG, but the team behind it are insanely hard working and you can tell that there's a lot of love that goes into this.
For one, the system is highly engaging. I really enjoy doing PhysicsGraph and look forward to some free time to get some problems done. The method of questioning makes you feel and see the development of a problem and solution, it feels like it is guiding you through building out a problem then throwing you in to do it yourself. They never skip steps.
I have found the lesson writings to be excellent. The creators / AI? have done a great job explaining each lesson into bite size readings. This makes it feel like a textbook with no bloat and each paragraph has 5 practice problems accompanying it.
The team at PG have done an amazing job developing animations and diagrams that convey what is being explained. I would say >50% of these are interact-able and some are so cool they leave an impression (conical lessons are sick).
I never get the same numbers in a problem twice. You do get the same problem types, but the spaced repetition system (I am assuming using SRS) is so effective that it feeds you a review when you forget the general formulation of a problem, this allows you to have to derive it yourself without rote memorization.
Any time I have ever had a problem I mention it in their Discord server and it is solved in less than 2 hours. Insanely hard working team, like I said.
I have returned to my University Physics textbook I was working through and found that anything I learned through PG was able to be applied to differing question types. This was important to me because I had a suspicion that PG questions were hand holding a bit too much, but it seems I was wrong.
Gripes
I have found that a lot of PhysicsGraph issues have come from multiple choice problems - luckily I don't believe they will have any of these left in 3 months. They have removed them from each topic I have completed so far. They seem to be replacing this with the correct ideas: diagramming, explaining answers, and other AI enabled question types. In Math and Physics, you can often get hints from multiple choice problems and lead you in the right direction. It actually trains a bit of a backwards reasoning in students, they take answer choices and reason from there by deduction. It demanded discipline to not use these hints, but if I was tired it was a wrap - I was gonna try to get a hint.
I believe that PG should focus more on derivations. Often times, while doing a lesson, it is easy to just plug and play with a formula you derived at the beginning of a lesson or review. Currently, it requires discipline to start from F = ma or draw out your own Free Body Diagrams again. Until tokens are cheap enough to scan user work, I just don't see this being fixed. But, there should be some mechanism to make sure students are deriving equations or drawing the correct diagrams. This is something that is hard to verify in online work. I am a motivated adult, but if I was 11 I would be scheming my way through this most likely.
This is just a failure of most online Physics educations I have researched. The ability to develop Physics intuition and modeling is not easily machine verifiable. Physics is not about memorizing kinematic equations - at least it shouldn't be. It is about developing the intuition and problem formulation skills to answer any question thrown at you. I think currently, by nature of the medium, it falls a bit in the memorization side. But, you can see them fixing this with each update. From what I have heard, MA has this problem as well and has not solved it either. One day!
The website is often times a bit slow - if mentioned in the Discord they fix it in 5 minutes.
Overall
Overall, I would highly recommend PhysicsGraph to anyone that spends their free time learning. I am doing Physics 1 now, but they have Quantum Computing and most likely more subjects coming soon. I'll update on Physics 1 completion and Quantum Computing completion.