Aims
Maths can be hard enough without the added challenge of how you're going to send it. Our mathematical keyboard aims to allow people to easily express their ideas no matter where they are.
The problem
It's a situation many of us have faced, we are struggling with a maths problem so we contact our friends for help. Your friend then rushes around to find the nearest pen and bit of paper to try and solve the problem. But what happens if your friend is out or doesn't have anything to write on nearby?
People are busy and often out doing things. In these cases, it's extremely tricky for them to help you even if they know the solution.
The solution?
Simple, a keyboard enabling you to type a variety of maths symbols. Phones are capable of producing these symbols and all common forms of messaging support them being sent.
The support is there; now it's time to use it to enable communication of maths like never before.
What about existing solutions?
There are indeed solutions out there that solve the problem of typing maths, e.g. TeX, however, these have a learning curve. This is a result of a computer having a physical keyboard, meaning we must represent symbols with combinations of characters on this keyboard.
Since phones have a soft keyboard that can be dynamically updated with new symbols, this problem doesn't exist. What you see on a key will be added to the screen - no learning curve!
Furthermore, logically grouping symbols should make it easy to navigate to exactly the symbol you require at any given point.
Our priorities:
- Support mathematical communication for a variety of contexts.
- Allow for day-to-day use without irritation - from looking around current options we felt this wasn't the case.
- Have a logical menu system making it easy for users to find what they're looking for.
Future functionality:
- Add predictive text support
- Add further language support options
- Add more customisation of the keyboard theme
- Enable features such as gesture typing and voice typing.