[ColinWright]

This comes up again and again, and I think absolutely there is space in the world for a site that takes people through some of the basics,and then iteratively deepens. I'd be happy to provide supplementary/complementary material where appropriate.

Part of the problem is that people don't know what they want. Another part of the problem is that people ask about really advanced things that they are not ready for, and where they don't have time to dedicate to learning the basics.

So you have a challenge with what to include, how to arrange it, how to get people hooked,and how to get them to put in the sustained effort needed to gain a genuine understanding, rather than a superficial "I know what's going on."

For your own interest ... what would you start with?

People seem to like the idea of studying (or more accurately, to have studied) Linear Algebra, and perhaps Graph Theory.

I wonder what else ...

[wadd1e]

>Part of the problem is that people don't know what they want. Another part of the problem is that people ask about really advanced things that they are not ready for, and where they don't have time to dedicate to learning the basics.

Yeah I do totally see that, and my idea is to make a resource that gives you the value that you extract out of it, although it's a fine line between making yet another boring textbook and a resource that is engaging but also informative.

>For your own interest ... what would you start with?

This is where I am a bit torn, because on one hand, I'd love to jump in to cool stuff that people learnt _how_ to do but were never taught the ideas behind them. For example, integral substitution seem to be taught in this rather boring way where you're told to mechanically execute a bunch of steps that people just need to memorise to pass their exam.

I'd love to jump right in and derive the idea of a substitution from the Reimann integral definition, and go into some detail about the intuition behind it. And then perhaps I can explore more calculus like the idea of limits(which are typically another terribly explained) and then move on to Taylor series expansions etc.

But at the same time I don't want the barrier of entry to be really high, so mabye starting with the idea of derivatives, and then approaching higher level topics might be a better structure?

[EA-3167]

As far as sites like that go, I wonder if modeling it on a previous success like Physics Forums might not be a good idea? A combination of solid moderation, experts who want to volunteer their time, a hefty and accessible knowledge-base, and fellow learners in the mix seems to be key.

The fact that we're talking about HS level helps I think, since the number of applicable experts is pretty high.