About Science Spoon

June 1, 2025

My son's 2025 team made it to the round of 16 and placed 13th in the Nation! His school's 2023 team made it to Nationals and finished 17th, and so the 2025 team goal was to place in the top 16 (both to one-up the 2023 team and because places 3-16th award $1,000 to the placing schools and so they just missed the money last time). So we were happy they made their goal and that Science Spoon helped their team study.

Since then, we've spent about $100 and have imported most of the rounds from sets 12-15. Our goal is to finish up the audio review for these sets by the end of June.

Once the audio review for those sets are done, we will begin looking at importing the high school questions. As a graduating 8th grader, my son wants to get those questions in as soon as possible. But it's going to take a lot of review (there is more chemistry and those questions take more formatting work), and so we'll see how many we get in. I hope that we'll at least get in the 2020+ sets.

So far enabling ads has made the site less than a dollar, and as it has cost about $500 so far to set up the domain/ssl/hosting/AI voice processing (not to mention the time put in), at some point I will set up a paid plan for a few dollars per year that will hide ads from registered users. I want to make sure we do this right though, so I'll have to set up an LLC, make sure I have accounting processes in place for paying taxes, etc., etc., etc., first. So registered and logged in users will have ad-free experiences through the end of the year. And ads will display to those that aren't logged in.

In the meantime, if you'd like to:

  • Support ScienceSpoon, please contact me!
  • Want a custom feature added or other interface change? If you can make a good case for it, I can probably do it. If it's not hard and something I think a lot of people could gain from, I'll add it. If it's a bit more esoteric or would take hours to do, I might request support to do it.

In any case, we hope this site helps you on your science learning journey.

April 2, 2025

My son qualified for the Middle School Science Bowl Nationals on the Missouri team! Also, since I last updated this page, we've added Flashcard mode, Audio mode, and a host of other features. The audio mode in particular is expensive though. (The AI reader works okay, but most questions take a few adjustments [especially equations]. And it's expensive! All told, a single round costs about an hour of my time and $2 worth of AI time, so a set costs about $30 and quite a few hours of review. Because of that, I'm probably going to need to set up paid accounts.)

February 22, 2025

My eighth grade son is participating in the Middle School Science Bowl. When his preferred question site went down in early January 2025, I told him we could probably make a better site with more functionality in a month or two. (I have 25 years worth of experience making physics-related websites, and the initial website was pretty basic.) Thus, ScienceSpoon was born.

In January we focused on setting up the question database by importing 10,000 questions directly from the original NSB PDFs on the U.S. DOE website. Being PDFs, these were difficult to parse as mathematical equations involving exponents, subscripts, minus signs, and fractions exported poorly. We've updated thousands of questions since then, but there are likely issues we have missed. If you run across a problematic problem, report it and I will fix it quickly.

In February, we focused on creating the website front end, terms, account system, and 3 questioning modes: Competition, Rapid-Fire, and Study. We also implemented question tracking and stats on registered users' profile page. Finally, we implemented fast question flagging for logged-in users so that they don't have to leave their flow to report a question.

In March, we plan on: 1) finishing the problem import (some of the original PDFs were corrupt, so we were only able to import ~95% of the problems); 2) adding more features for our registered users; and 3) making our website more friendly to web crawlers so that students can find us.

As it cost a few hundred dollars to set up the domain/ssl/hosting (not to mention the time put in), I will be enabling ads to offset the server costs. If there is demand, I will set up a paid plan for a few dollars per year that will hide ads from registered users. If this interests you, let me know here.

If you'd otherwise like to:

  • Support ScienceSpoon, please contact me!
  • Want a custom feature added or other interface change? If you can make a good case for it, I can probably do it. If it's not hard and something I think a lot of people could gain from, I'll add it. If it's a bit more esoteric or would take hours to do, I might request support to do it.

In any case, we hope this site helps you on your science learning journey.