What will the new site cost?

A good question that we thought long and hard about. Although I would love to help provide people with free homework help from quality tutors and experts...it turns out you can't really do that for free . Currently, our homework answer service is actually located at www.mathwarehouse.com/ask where a few teachers and experts have been giving their time to answer questions.

However, it soon became clear that there were not enough experts/teachers who were willing to give substantial amounts of their time to answer all the homework questions(There are almost 2,000 questions right now. It's not a small job)..so I found some very smart people to help out with the questions, and the website has been funding their work for a few months.

This lead to my thinking about the best way to connect experts who can answer math questions with students who are willing to pay for help with their homework. We came up with the following system:

-Anyone can ask any question for free!

-However, when you ask a question, you state how much you would be willing to pay to buy the help that you need.

-Any expert can answer the question. If you want to answer a question, you write a preview of your answer (and the full answer), only the preview will be sent to the question asker.

After you get your answer, you can give the tutor a rating and write a comment-this will help the future students who might want to work with that tutor.

New Site is Coming Along

I am really excited about the progress we are making with the new site. Right now, our homework question and answer service uses http://www.question2answer.org/ software--an open source easy to install application. It's a great product for what it does --which is provide a stackexchange like question and answer board.

However, after using question2answer for some time, there were too many ways in which it did not meet our needs including: 1) not providing any kind of compensation for the experts who tend to answer all of the questions 2) offering a rather inflexible user profile accounts that lacked features we wanted like user ratings, comments 3) not providing the sort of hierarchical organization that subjects tend to have (ie calculus is a subcategory of Math while Java is a subcategory of Programming). To be completely clear, I think that question2answer is great, but it is just not a marketplace.

But if we are going to create a marketplace for math homework help, it became clear that a different platform was needed, and we are getting there. The new site looks awesome (see the screenshots at the bottom). It is a veritable homework marketplace where you can post math homework questions, state how much money you would pay to get help. After that tutors/experts can reply by sending you a preview of their answer. If you like their preview, you can buy the answer to your question. Here are some screenshots:

What is Calculus?

A few days ago, I honestly could not tell you the answer to the question "What is Calculus?"

Yes, I did take calculus (even did well on the AP exam) but it's been a long time (we're talking decades not years here) since I did anything involving calculus. Yes, I could take a simple derivative but, frankly, I just didn't remember much more than that.

However, a friend of mine (who spent several years as an electrical engineer before becoming an AP calculus teacher) and I started a new site dedicated to Calculus and higher math. To clarify our roles, he brings the calculus to the table and I bring the 'make it a web page.' I hope that this site will become a useful resource for any calculus student and teacher!

Anyway, I will not paraphrase the whole page, but if you want to know "What Calculus is", then simply visit this page. Trust me, if I got it, so will you.

Math Resources: Slope of a Line

Since this is a blog about Pain Free Homework site (www.painfreehomwork.com) I thought it'd be fitting to talk about a topic that causes many student's pain: Math. Hopefully, this will help alleviate your math homework pain!

I wanted to dedicate a post to a topic in math that just doesn't go away: The Slope of A line. It comes up in calculus, algebra and even, often, in geometry! At the bottom of the post, is a picture of the general formula from slope , and I wanted to list out the best resources (to my knowledge) for understanding slope of a line:

• Interactive Slope Applet -Great applet lets you drag 2 points around to explore how the slope formula works
• Slope of A line Tutorial - A great one stop place for understanding how slope works, includes power point style walk through, many examples, pictures
• Slope from Graph -
• Slope Formula Calculator -Type in two points and this baby'll do the rest!
• Slope Worksheet - free pdf with answer key on slope

If you know of other good resources on slope, let me know in the comments!

Mortgage Calculator-Fee Cool New Tool

I wanted to write a quick post about great new free online calculator/tool for anyone who wants to see how mortgage payments and amortizations work.

Meta-Calculator.com's free online mortgage calculator provides much more than just a simple loan amortization table. It also shows you, graphically, how much of your money goes to towards the principal and how much goes to the interest. You can see this as both a bar graph and a pie chart.

It's definitely a handy fee online tool for anyone who is either thinking of getting a mortgage or simply wants to understand how the payments look over time.

Changes are Coming

Math Warehouse.com 's question and answer service has some major changes coming...more details to follow over the next week or two.

Meta-Calculator-Awesome free calculator

If you are looking for an awesome free online graphing calculator, check out Meta Calculator .

It's list of features are really comprehensive and have already been listed at length in other blogs including Tutor Vista's blog post about the calculator , this blog post of the calculator or this one!

For those of you who want a very quick overview of the calculator's features,t hey include

• Graph up to 7 equations


• Output a table of values for each equation


• Trace points of each equation


• Solve Systems of Equations


• Calculate Regressions


• Perform other advanced statistical analysis like T-Test, standard deviation

Try the calculator out and, if you like it, you can buy the app version for your iphone/ipad. Either way, enjoy the free online version!