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The
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| About
Purplemath
Elizabeth Stapel: The primary developer of Purplemath and the author of its lessons is Elizabeth Stapel. Though she now has a master's degree in mathematics, she never would have believed while growing up that she would one day be a math teacher. In grammar school, her two worst subjects were math and phys-ed ("physical education"). For her high-school years, her parents sent her to a religious school where the prevailing philosophy seemed to be that women needed to be married, not educated. (Yes, those kinds of places still exist.) Upon graduation, her parents put her to work at their church and then at their religious business. After five years of barely paying her, her parents finally had no further use for her and allowed her to try college, so she enrolled at the local state school. One of her first classes covered early-high-school algebra. Ms. Stapel quickly discovered that, though she often found math to be difficult, she had a taste for the subject. She started helping fellow students through the university tutoring service, later becoming a grader for the math department. While grading homework for many professors' classes, she observed common problems that students have and common mistakes that they make. When she tutored, she again encountered these areas of difficulty, and was able to learn which techniques generally helped the students to succeed. These techniques were often those that Ms. Stapel had used to conquer her own confusion when earlier taking these same classes herself. As a graduate student, Ms. Stapel worked in various tutoring and teaching capacities, and learned to incorporate her success techniques into her instruction. These are the same tips and techniques that she weaves through her in-class instruction and the Purplemath lessons. Her basic philosophy regarding algebra is "If I can do this stuff, then so can you!" History of Purplemath: Purplemath began in 1998 as a personal web site created by Elizabeth Stapel. Ms. Stapel's initial site included course-specific materials for her math students. Later, she started adding a few lessons. As she created more lessons, traffic at her personal site increased. Eventually, she decided to do a complete site redesign to create a more professional appearance and to highlight the list of lessons. In order to pick a color theme, she asked her son, then about two and a half years old, which color he liked best. Naturally, he picked purple. Traffic continued to increase, and in 1999 the site had to be moved from its free hosting to its own domain name. When Ms. Stapel struggled to find a name, her husband suggested "Purplemath", and the the name was duly registered. A few years later, "Purplemaths" (with an "s" at the end) was added for the benefit of British-English speakers. Purplemath served 2.7 million pageviews in October of 2008. During the North-American school year, Purplemath uses about ninety gigabytes of bandwidth a month, serving nearly ninety-thousand pageviews each day to more than forty thousand daily visitors. (Fewer pages are served during the North-American summer break.) The average visitor comes to Purplemath directly from a search engine, reading two to three pages of lesson material. Recognition: Thousands of sites are now linked to Purplemath, and thousands of visitors come to the site each day. Purplemath has been listed as an online resource in such books as Cliffs Quick Review: Algebra II. In addition, the following awards and notations have been made:
Purplemath is frequently referenced by About.com, GoogleAnswers, and Wikipedia. Software used in development: Many have inquired about the software used to create the various graphics on Purplemath. Graphs usually begin their life in the Equation Grapher program, produced by MFSoft International. Screen-captures are taken from graphing calculators using the Texas Instruments' TI Connect software. Other graphics are created, and graphs are "tweaked", inside Paint Shop Pro, produced by the Corel Corporation. The animations are also created in Paint Shop Pro, through the Animation Shop plug-in. Mathematical typesetting is done with MathType, produced by Design Science. Page formatting is done within Namo's WebEditor. Contact: Ms. Stapel may be contacted through the contact form or through regular mail at "Elizabeth Stapel, POB 1184, Palatine IL 60078-1184, USA".
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Copyright © 2006-2008 Elizabeth Stapel | About | Terms of Use |
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