About Science Spoon

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.