Derivable

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Inspiration

"If you had a time machine and could go back in time, what would be the first thing you would do?" Our response was unanimously to go back in time and visit some of the greatest people of all time - Pythagoras, Euler, Einstein, and Feynman. Without a doubt, these people have shaped the way our world is today - after all, who can imagine a world without E=mc^2, or the discovery of atomic clocks and (eventually) GPS's. At the same time, some geniuses went underappreciated. For example, after realizing his pet theory about the Platonic Solids was wrong, was effectively left with just 20 years of observational data of the position of the planets. Before the invention of any kind of physics, Johannes Kepler was able to figure out that planets actually had a consistent path - that they orbited in not circles, but ellipses.

Our goal with Derivable is to help people understand the insights that lead to some of the most famous formulas and ideas in existence, by time travelling to the past and giving them access to all the necessary information to deduce the ideas themselves. Do you think you could figure out that planets move in ellipses if all you had access to was a bunch of observational data? (Hint: the period of Mars is approximately 5 years)

Oh, and if you're interested in how Kepler figured it out, this is an excellent video by Terence Tao and Grant Sanderson (3b1b) explaining it.

What it does

We strongly believe in the saying, “show, don’t tell”. For a demo and explanation, please check out our video!

Challenges we ran into

Our original idea for the hackathon involved creating a game to showcase the effects of special relativity - length contraction, time dilation, and the doppler effect. However, towards Saturday evening, we began to realize that building something that was as cross-disciplinary and mathematically intensive as our idea was not something that could be done in a hackathon timeframe. As a result, we had to completely pivot to a new hackathon idea with more than half of the hackathon timeframe gone. The time pressure made it difficult to get all of the features we wanted to include into our project. However, if there’s one thing we learned, it’s that with enough energy drinks and food, anything is possible, and we were able to get most of Derivable derive and ready for presentation!

What's next for Derivable

Our plan is to spend some time expanding the categories of questions from mostly pure math to also including other fields, like physics. Additionally, we plan to create an AI assistant that can give feedback on not just the accuracy of the solution, but also if there was a better or more clever way to approach the problem. This instantaneous feedback would help students build problem solving ideas that are cross-disciplinary, and can help them in their everyday lives. Finally, our biggest and grandest plan is to bring Derivable into our base school and convince friends to play it. After all, a tiny bit of competition benefits everyone!

Built With

• nextjs
• supabase
• tailwindcss
• vercel
• vite