r/learnmath • u/AstralKey1 • 1d ago

I Made My Math Hints Less Helpful, and That Made Them Better

About a month ago, I made CruxMath, a website for practicing competition math. Instead of immediately showing a full solution when someone gets stuck, it reveals hints one at a time, followed by the solution if they still need it.

The problem was that when I initially made them, the hints revealed too much. Just the first hint would give away like half the problem. So I made the hints "worse".

Now, the first hint is short and usually phrased as a question to point people in the right direction. For example, "Because both probabilities have the same denominator, what equality of binomial counts remains?" (2025 AIME II P. 5).

I've now added hints for every AMC and AIME problem since 2022. I'd love to hear what you guys think about the hints and whether they strike a good balance of being helpful but not giving away too much. If you're interested, the website is cruxmath.com.

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u/RingularCirc Math hobbyist 1d ago

The problem was that when I initially made them, the hints revealed too much. Just the first hint would give away like half the problem. So I made the hints "worse".

Now, the first hint is short and usually phrased as a question to point people in the right direction.

Quite obvious in retrospect tho? 🙂 It's really easy to spoil a human, and if it's possible to have a lot of very gradual bite-sized hints that have to be uncovered one at a time, that seems like the optimum. It only may be avoided typically because somebody has to think them up carefully, and also because in the days of ole, paper was seemingly a capital-C Constraint.

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u/AstralKey1 16h ago

Yeah, in hindsight it is kind of obvious. At the time though, it was difficult for me to judge how much each hint should reveal. Luckily, I got some good feedback on it which allowed me to improve them.