The Best Free Online Resources for Math Students
Desmos
We’ve talked about how much we love Desmos before, so we won’t dwell on it too long here. To cut a long story short - every math student should be using Desmos. It can help you check your answers in questions about graphing, simultaneous equations, and more. Recently we’ve been plugging in functions and their derivatives to show student the connections between features on each graph. Read our old post for more ideas.
Wolfram Alpha
Before we tell you about this one we need to quote Stan Lee’s Spider-man: “With great power comes great responsibility”. Wolfram Alpha is an incredibly powerful website that can make your life a lot easier. The problem is that learning inherently requires difficulty. If you use this website to avoid the struggle — you will also avoid the learning.
So what does it do? It can solve basically any algebra or calculus problem. It can do your homework, basically.
You type your question…
And it gives you answers!
Now this is a pretty simple little problem, but Wolfram Alpha can handle a lot:
So here’s our advice — and our warning. Use Wolfram Alpha to check your work. There’s nothing more annoying than a problem set that doesn’t have answers, so use this to generate answers to check your work against. If you know you have a problem in your working out but don’t know where, use this to do each individual step and hone in on your mistake. Please do not use this as a quick and easy way to get out of actually doing your homework yourself.
Bonus example! Wolfram Alpha can graph in 3D, but so can Desmos.
THSC
This one’s for our HSC students!
THSC is a repository of past HSC (and some year 9 and 10) exam papers. The website can be a little confusing to navigate, but it’s a treasure trove once you know what you’re doing. Make sure you consult your syllabus on NESA and ensure that the exams you look at match your course requirements.
It’s also worth noting that many exams from 2020 and 2021 were adapted for the pandemic conditions and will be a different style or include different content than your upcoming exams. Additionally, many courses underwent major changes in 2017, including maths and physics, so the topics tested in exams 2016 and earlier will be different.
If you’re looking for the most recent HSC exams, they can be found on NESA’s website.
We recommend that year 12 students begin using past HSC Trials papers at this time of year (mid term 2) to revise the curriculum that they have now almost finished. We would suggest attempting some trials papers before going back for a more thorough review of each topic because the exams will reveal the topics that require the most immediate attention. If you find a topic that gives you trouble, mention it to your tutor as soon as possible.