What This Site Can Do

This page exists for two audiences. Students: it shows why the notes look the way they do. Teachers: it is a working reference for everything you can put in a page, with the source visible in every example.

Everything below is written in Markdown — plain text with a few marks of punctuation that mean something. If you can write a text message, you can write this.

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Text that carries meaning

You get bold, italic, struck through, and highlighted text. Highlighting is the one worth knowing: it draws the eye better than bold when you want a single key term to stand out in a paragraph.

How that was made:

**bold**, *italic*, ~~struck through~~, ==highlighted==

Arrows written as -> become proper arrows: estimate → refine → check.

Keyboard keys look like keys: press ⌘ + K to search.

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Mathematics, typeset properly

This is the feature a mathematics course lives on. Inline maths sits in a sentence: the growth factor is $b=1.05$, so each year the balance keeps all of itself and adds five percent. Display maths gets its own centred line:

$$A=P{\left(1+i\right)}^n=500(1.05{)}^{10}\approx 814.45$$

Fractions, exponents, roots, and symbols all come out exactly as they should:

$$8^{2/3}={\left(\sqrt[3]{8}\right)}^2=4\sin 60^{\circ }=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}f(x)=a\sin (k(x-d))+c$$

How that was made: single dollar signs keep it in the sentence, double ones give it a line of its own.

Inline: $b = 1.05$
 
Display:
$$
A = P(1 + i)^n
$$

No more screenshotting equations out of a document — edit the text and the mathematics re-typesets itself.

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Code (not used in this course — but here if you need it)

This course has no coding expectations, so you will not meet program code in our pages. The site can carry it anyway — coloured, exact, spacing preserved — which matters if you also teach a course that codes:

def compound(principal, rate, years):
    return principal * (1 + rate) ** years
 
print(compound(500, 0.05, 10))   # 814.45

How that was made: three backticks and the language name, the code, then three backticks to close it.

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Headings, and the table of contents

Every ## heading on a page becomes a link in Navigate this page, over on the right — built automatically from the headings, so it can never fall out of step with the page. Deeper headings nest underneath.

A short page reads better without a contents panel; one frontmatter line (enableToc: false) turns it off. Every class page in All Classes does this — an agenda of six items does not need navigating.

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Callouts

Callouts pull something out of the flow of the page, each kind with its own colour and icon:

Note

Neutral information worth setting apart.

Tip

A shortcut, a habit, or something that makes the work easier.

Important

The one thing to take away if you take away nothing else.

Warning

Where people usually go wrong — the $f(x-d)$ sign trap lives in boxes like this one.

Question

Something to think about rather than something to know.

At a glance

Used at the top of task pages for format and timing.

How that was made: a blockquote with the kind named in brackets.

> [!warning] Where people usually go wrong
> 
> The text of the callout goes here.

Foldable callouts

Add a - to start a callout collapsed. Every practice set in Exercises hides its worked answers this way — try before you peek, but the peek is always there:

Worked answer

$8^{2/3}={\left(8^{1/3}\right)}^2=2^2=4$ — root first, then power, because small numbers are kinder.

> [!success]- Worked answer
> 
> The hidden solution.

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Diagrams

Diagrams are written, not drawn — edited in seconds, never needing a graphics program.

graph LR
    A["Plot the data"] --> B["Choose a function family"]
    B --> C["Tune the parameters"]
    C --> D{"Deserves belief?"}
    D -->|yes| E["Predict with it"]
    D -->|no| B

How that was made:

```mermaid
graph LR
    A["Plot the data"] --> B["Choose a function family"]
    B --> C["Tune the parameters"]
    C --> D{"Deserves belief?"}
    D -->|yes| E["Predict with it"]
    D -->|no| B
```

Proportions draw themselves too:

pie title A first paycheque
    "Spending" : 55
    "Saving" : 20
    "Transit" : 15
    "Everything else" : 10

And history fits on a line:

timeline
    title Where our notation came from
    1637 : Descartes : x, y, and the coordinate plane
    1673 : Leibniz : first uses the word "function"
    1734 : Euler : writes f(x) for the first time
    1748 : Euler : ties sine to the circle, not the triangle

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Tables

How that was made: rows of text separated by |, with a line of dashes under the headings. Mathematics works inside cells, which matters more than it sounds.

Representation	Shows best	Hides
Table of values	Exact pairs	The overall shape
Graph	Shape and trend	Exact values
Equation $y=a{b}^x$	The rule itself	What it feels like

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Checklists

How that was made: a list where each line starts with - [ ], or - [x] for one already done.

• Estimate before calculating
• Units carried through the whole solution
• Answer sentence written
• Someone else could follow this page

On the site they are read-only — the boxes show what the page says, and clicking one does nothing. Copied into your own notes, they are how Showing Your Thinking turns from advice into habit.

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Links between pages

This is what makes the site more than a pile of documents.

• A plain link: Sinusoidal Functions
• A link with different words: the mathematics of tides
• A link to a section: Check the units

How that was made: double square brackets.

[[Sinusoidal Functions]]
[[Sinusoidal Functions|different words for the link]]
[[Checking Your Own Work#check-the-units|Check the units]]

Transclusion — one page inside another

How that was made: ![[Page name]] — a link with an exclamation mark in front of it. Here is the help-session schedule, embedded live rather than copied:

Help Sessions

Extra help

When	Where
Wednesday, lunch	The math room
Friday, after school until 4:15	The math room

Drop in — no appointment, no need to tell me first. Bring the specific thing you are stuck on: one half-finished problem beats “everything”. The whiteboards are open during these times too, and yes, you may just come to work near other people working.

More: Getting Help

Link to original

Change the source page and every page that embeds it updates. This is how task pages show the curriculum expectations they address, and how one schedule stays correct everywhere it appears, without anyone maintaining duplicates.

Backlinks

Scroll to the bottom of any page and you will find Backlinks — every page that links to this one, gathered automatically. Open The Exponential Function and its backlinks list every exploration, task, and practice set that leans on it. Nobody maintains that list.

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Hover previews

Hover over Getting Unstuck without clicking. The page appears in a small window. Checking one definition mid-problem does not cost you your place.

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Footnotes

How that was made: [^1] where the marker goes, and a matching [^1]: line anywhere in the page.

The word “sine” is the result of a translation accident.¹

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Tags

How that was made: a tags list in the frontmatter at the very top of the page.

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tags:
  - concepts
  - unit-2
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Every tag becomes a page listing everything filed under it.

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What you cannot see

Two things on this page are invisible in the browser:

1. Comments. Text wrapped in “ never reaches the site. Useful for notes to yourself in a page you are still writing — tomorrow’s hint, next year’s fix.
2. Holding a page back. A page with publish: false in its frontmatter is skipped entirely when the site is built. Write next week’s lesson today and publish it when you are ready.

For teachers reading this

With more than one section, per-section keys like publishForSection1 and publishForSection2 let one shared page be published to one class and held back from another — useful when your two sections sit a few days apart.

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The point of all this

None of it is decoration. Each feature removes a reason for a page to be out of date:

Feature	The problem it solves
Typeset maths	Screenshotted equations nobody can edit
Transclusion	The same text copied into six places, five stale
Backlinks	”Where did we use this again?”
Folded answers	Solutions that spoil the attempt
Holding a page back	Next week’s lesson in a separate file somewhere

Write it once, link to it everywhere.

Footnotes

1. The Sanskrit jya (bowstring) became the Arabic jiba, which a medieval translator misread as jayb (bay or fold) and rendered into Latin as sinus. Every sine curve in this course carries a twelfth-century typo in its name. ↩