Expii is an online free educational service that provides fun and creative ways to learn math and science. It focuses on mathematics and science differently than other free educational services, such as Gooru.
The content on this online free educational service is put up by crowd-sourcing. Each question or topic has more than one explanation. This helps a variety of students who have different approaches while learning. It allows you to enter your own explanation of a question too. The rating system lets you choose the best answer.
In addition to that, Expii gives a set of math and science problems for the users to solve every week. These questions are engaging and make you think creatively. Each set has 5 to 6 questions with varying difficulty, and mostly the last one is really challenging.
This online free educational service also maps its educational content into a domain based map which divides each topic into a set represented by a circle. The content is represented by a rectangle. It makes easy for the users to navigate into the choice of topic they want.
Expii has developed this website keeping in the curriculum of US national standards in mind. The content is aligned with the common core standards of mathematics and science in the US.
So let’s explore this wonderful educational website!
Study From Explanations, Add Your Own Explanations
This online free educational service provides you rich content for math and science topics. As you open the main page, there will be list of topics or explanations that have been recently added. These explanations may also include questions to make you understand the topic better.
Above the list of recently added explanations is a button to ‘choose a topic to explain’. Clicking this will take you to the topics that need content. Each topic is marked by red, yellow and green that signifies the the amount of content. Red has the least content while green has the most. Yellow is in-between. You can click on any of the explanation/topics to browse and edit them if you feel they lack content.
The interface to edit a topic is a simple one. You can add images, videos, graphs, shapes etc. While explaining a topic you can even add quizzes which helps the user to grasp the concept using the questions.
The explanations can also be browsed through the Topic Map (discussed later). On an explanation’s page, you can rate an explanation, solve its problems and even share it. You can add your own explanation to the topic and even add questions to it to make the readers understand better. This is done through ‘share topic’ button on the bar or by clicking ‘share’ on the top right-hand side of the topic explanation. A very good feature provided here is that you can edit the previous explanations too.
Weekly Newsletter of Maths and Science Problems to Solve
Expii Solve is one of the most important features of Expii. The users are provided with a compiled weekly set of creative and interesting questions. In each set, there are 5-6 questions; each differs from the previous one in terms of difficulty. The last question is said to be almost impossible. Each question is crafted to make you think out of the box and creatively to solve them.
You can access Expii Solve from the left-hand side of the main page, where there is a list of weekly released math problems. You can also click ‘Notify Me’, so you’ll be notified in your email inbox when the next set of problems release. Scrolling down the question provides you links to help with the question as well as reveals the answer to the solution.
The Topic Map
The Topic Map is basically a map of topics which you can navigate through. It makes your work easy if you want to browse a specific domain of mathematics or science. To access it, click on ‘Topic Map’ on the main page’s top bar. It will open up with topics of Math and Science represented as different sets, represented by circles.
You can navigate through each set and access its sub-sets till you find the topic you want to access. The actual topics with content within the circles are represented by rectangles. They are also coded by color based on the amount of content they offer, which has been discussed in the beginning.
So if a user wants to know about Viruses, he/she can click Science>Biology>Diversity of life>Viruses. Even here there are further sub-topics like structure of virus, virus replication, diversity of viruses etc. You can browse even deeply in some cases when the topics are broader.
Clicking on the rectangles direct you to the topic’s/explanation’s page, which have been discussed earlier.
The Search Bar and Notifications
Other features of Expii include a common search bar and notifications. You can access them from the top of the page. The search bar will provide you with related results on the topic you searched. The notifications will notify you of the responses, ratings you get or if your explanation is edited.
Final Thoughts
Expii is really an awesome free educational service that will help students get more friendly with math and science. The feature I loved most was Expii Solve where the questions I came across were engaging as well as modeled around funny and exciting anecdotes. Solving them were equally challenging as fun.
I did not find any shortcomings on this website but I do think it should have a dedicated team to put up a lot of content everyday. I hope this free educational service comes up with more features in the future that can prove valuable to educators and students alike.
So what’s your opinion on Expii? Do share it in the comments!
