Chapter 7 Ramsey Theory Website
Project by: Romina Rahmani, Joseph Gray, Parmvir Singh Dhillon, and Pratham Vij.
\(\textbf{Summary:}\) Our group's goal was to create a website that includes interactive examples, video solutions, notes, and biographies. We want the material to be based on this course, but we hoped that the practice problems would be mostly unique and difficult to find in other textbooks or parts of the internet. Our target audience for this project is anyone, but we especially hope to inspire younger demographics (who maybe have only been exposed to computational courses such as Calculus) to develop an appreciation for University–level Mathematics and Ramsey Theory. Some given examples tried to apply Ramsey Theory applications to everyday scenarios (such as the dinner party problem), to make the content less abstract and more understandable and applicable to a general demographic.
We firmly believe that the best way to learn and reinforce our knowledge of mathematics is through teaching to others and that redesigning the course material with our own words, examples, and solutions is an excellent way to retain what we have learned this semester.
Our website is live, available and fully functional. We?re excited to inspire and educate through the project.
Our website can be accessed through the website URL or it can be run locally by cloning our GitHub repository. The repository includes a README which gives a short description of the project and information about how to run the project locally.
\(\textbf{Description:}\)
We created a header with all the menus, which is present on all pages. This allows users to easily navigate between different pages and provides a better user experience.
The home page is what the users first see when visiting the website. It includes a short description of the service our website aims to provide, as well as two buttons, About Us and References.
We used Microsoft Designer to create the website?s background. In addition, we added pigeons to the background as an homage to the Pigeonhole Principle since it?s somewhat the backbone of the content we learned.
The “About Us” page provides information about our team members:
Name.
Major.
Picture.
short description about the team member such as why they chose their major, hobbies, etc.
The goal of this page is to both appease those who were curious and show that ordinary people can start getting interested in and pursuing mathematics.
The biography section includes the link where the image of each mathematician was downloaded from. However, other than images, all the content for the website is taken or adapted from the course, so we decided to dedicate a separate page for references. This page contains information about the course, such as the course outline and the course textbook.
In addition, we have included some information about Dr. J and Jeremy on this page for additional recognition. The images and information for this section has also been cited.
In the “Biography” section, users can learn more about different mathematician's lives and their contributions to the field which aligns well with our main goals to inspire others.
Mathematical excellence is generally not seen as a desirable goal for younger demographics and is rarely depicted in the media in the same way that sports, music, film, or other industries are. By showing the history of famous mathematicians and their discoveries, we can both show that there are interesting goals to reach in mathematics and that passion for the subject is all that is necessary to become a mathematician.
Users can view and download the course lecture notes from the section “Notes”. Users can learn about different topics by seeking additional information to fill in the provided skeleton notes.
We have also added a Punjabi version of the Pigeonhole Principle in this section. We learned that this is the first online resource that has Ramsey Theory in Punjabi. This allowed us to make history in a way.
Section “Questions” includes interactive examples which are coded problems that are applications of material learned in the course. Users can pick from a selection of problems and enter or choose an answer. After submitting, their answer will be immediately validated.
Due to the interactivity component of this section, the format of most of the questions are multiple choice, true/false and user input. While we have included some proof based questions, we tried to limit the number.
“Video solutions” are based on the coded examples. These video solutions solve the problem step-by-step with accompanying commentary and written steps. While validating users' responses can be helpful, they might need additional support to understand the correct answer or verify their answer is correct based on the correct reasoning.
In addition, this section can be particularly helpful in the case of proof based questions since there?s no interactive component.
We believe that this section be helpful for those who learn better through visual and audio input.
\(\textbf{Outcome of Project:}\) The website was developed using React.js and Node.js. We then used AWS Amplify to host the website. Amplify automatically scales availability and performance based on usage which will be useful when we have more users who access the website.
We were able to use Amplify within AWS?s free tier, however, this tier doesn?t include adding custom domain name.
To add a custom domain name like ?ramseytheory.io? would cost anywhere between $17 USD to \(\$\)40 USD which is this part was left out of the scope of the project. We used GitHub for version control and to make the project available as open source in the future. Since any changes to the code will be reflected on the live website, the main branch of the project has been locked and is read only. We will open the project up for contributions from the community once the project has been graded and appropriate protection rules have been applied to the repository.