Happy 2023!  With the new year came an important milestone for Problem-Attic:  it now has upwards of 350,000 questions!  In this email we’ll highlight the new content, starting with titles which were already on the main Select page.

• State Assessments.  All questions released through summer 2022 should now be in the database. (If we missed something, please let us know.) This includes about 1000 new questions each from CO, MD and NC, and another 3000 from AZ, MA, ME, MS, RI, and PA and TX.

• NY Regents and NYS 3–8.  The database has all exams through last August, including Spanish translations for Algebra 1, Living Environment, and Earth Science. 450 new Spanish Competency questions are there, too. (Look in World Languages.)

• NC Math Contests.  For NC State, WCU and UNCC, we added about five years’ of questions, or 1500 total. We’re now caught up with all tests (pre-COVID), and a topical sort will follow soon.

On the main Select page in Problem-Attic, you’ll also see these new titles:

• Illustrative Mathematics.  We created a separate link in the top-right panel because the database grew so large!  We added more than 8000 questions for grades 3–5 and high school, both lessons and practice. (Middle school was already there.) This is an excellent curriculum—math teachers, please check it out.

• UT Austin Science Olympiad (ATXSO).  This is the start of a big move into SciOly!  We’ve got two years covered so far, 2021 and 2022, with nearly 6300 questions for Divisions B and C.  They’re organized by level and subject.

• NASA Space Math.  These questions, about 3000, are for teaching applications of math through space science. They’re organized by original source or “booklet”. (A big thank-you to the main author, Dr. Sten Odenwald!)  Our plan is to re-organize all or most of the questions by topic or NextGen Science Standards. If you’re interested in working on such a project, you can get details here.

There’s a new feature in Problem-Attic which is connected to the growing database of questions. It’s called Public Frameworks.  Briefly, it gives you a way to customize the database for a specific purpose. Currently, there are more than 20 frameworks available for you to install—and you can easily build your own. We’ll tell you more about this in a separate email. But you don’t have to wait. There’s already a re-alignment of questions to MA, TX and VA science standards, New Visions Math (NY), and two math textbooks. See this page to get started.

Everything described above is freely available when you sign up for Problem-Attic. For teachers at subscribing schools, we’ll quickly mention two updates:  the Pre-Alg to Pre-Calc database has roughly doubled in size, to about 19,000 questions; and, on the panel called Additional Math and Science, you’ll see a new title, IM Paired Practice Questions.  It has about 4700 original questions to go with the Illustrative Mathematics curriculum. To learn more, click the info button on the panel.