About Eureka! Learning System

What is it?

  • Eureka! Learning System is an on-line program for teaching technical subjects such as mathematics and science.
  • Eureka! is offered completely free of charge to all who want to use it.
  • Eureka! material is organized as a large set of short topics with lots of explanation, interactive illustrations and questions to test your understanding.
  • Eureka! emphasizes practical knowledge, but presents the material with adequate explanation of the more abstract topics that support the material
  • Eureka! is organized to teach its material much as in a college course. It is not a reference document like MathWorld or Wikipedia. Reference documents are valuable resources and Eureka! often provides links into them, but they are not organized for structured instruction.
  • Eureka! is self-directed. You should be able to start at any topic and work through the instructional text and do the exercises. If you find something that was presented in a previous section that you do not understand, you should be able to navigate directly to material to help you out.
  • If you create a personal account on Eureka! you can keep track of your progress and test scores.

    • Is it complete?

  • Eureka! Learning System is not complete and never will be. Like a library of books, subjects will continue to be added. Look at the current Table of Contents to see what exists now and what is planned for the future. The topics shown with a grey background are available now and those shown with a white background are planned be added later. Even the Table of Contents is not complete and new topics will be added in the future.

    • Who should use it

  • Eureka! covers material understandable to students from high school through post-college graduates
  • If there is a topic that you want to know more about or have long forgotten, then Eureka! might just be the tool for you.

    • Why should you use it?

    Eureka! does things that a textbook, video or a lecture cannot do.

  • You, the student, are always in control of the pace of learning.
  • You have immediate access to supporting material if you don't understand something.
  • You have immediate feedback about your understanding of the material. No need to wait a day for exercises and exams to be graded.

    • How to use it

    Working with your browser

    Eureka! is web based and you will use a web browser to access the material. All of the familiar web browser navigation tools are available to you, such as the button that returns you to the immediate previous page.

    There are many web browsers available for you to use and not all of them deal with the features of Eureka! the same. We have tried our best to limit features to those that are common to all web browsers, but sometimes this is not possible. You will possibly find that text fonts are not as expected and that the figures in sections (code called applets) need a little coaxing to work right.

    You will also navigate in Eureka! by clicking on color coded links in its pages. The following discussion talks about most of the links you will need to know about.

    How to get help

    Eureka! does not come with a user manual or a conventional Help facility. How to use the system is intended to be mostly obvious. But when some function of the system is NOT obvious, you can get immediate help that explains what you need to do. For example, there are places in figures and exercises where you are asked to enter a number in a field of a figure. The first time you run into this you may be unsure about what to do. Eureka! will help you if you ask. Just click on the text requesting the operation and a page will pop up with all you need to know, and, if appropriate, a simple exercise that lets you practice.

    Try clicking on edit a number for an example of a help page with a practice exercise.

    How to check your understanding

    Eureka! keeps a dialog with you. Material is presented and discussed and then you are asked some questions to help you decide if you understand the material. Eureka! asks questions in two forms:

    Stretch your mind

    This dialog presents a set of questions that you are asked to think about and come up with a reasonable answer. For example, here is a stretch your mind question set from one of our sections:

    Exercises

    This dialog presents a set of questions with gradable answers that you are asked to answer.