Yellowdig Product Update: LaTeX Editor

February 23, 2021

Yellowdig Product Update: LaTeX Editor

Unlocking Student Motivation with Gameful Learning

Instructors everywhere face the same uphill climb: getting students to participate meaningfully—especially in online classes. Despite your best efforts, traditional discussion forums can feel more like boxes to check than places for real learning. What’s the antidote? For many educators, the answer is gameful learning.

What is Gameful Learning?

Gameful learning isn’t about turning your classroom into an arcade. It’s about applying the elements of games—clear goals, meaningful choice, and immediate feedback—to academic environments. Platforms like Yellowdig use points, badges, and accolades to recognize real contributions, making participation feel rewarding, not obligatory.

Why Gameful Elements Spark Engagement

Why do students respond so well to this approach? Because gameful mechanics tap into motivation in ways that rote assignments can’t. When students earn points for thoughtful posts or insightful replies, they're encouraged to dig deeper and share experiences. A little friendly competition doesn’t hurt, either—leaderboards spark engagement and help shy students ease into participation.

Yellowdig’s Approach: More Than Just Points

Yellowdig’s platform is built around the idea that engagement should be authentic, not forced. Points aren’t given for empty “I agree” comments, but for contributions that spark conversation and critical thinking. Students can curate their posts with articles or videos that interest them and receive recognition when others interact with their content. This approach fosters intrinsic motivation—students participate because they want to, not because they have to.

Real Results in Real Classrooms

Instructors using Yellowdig consistently report stronger participation and deeper discussion. One faculty member noted that “seventy-five percent of student questions get answered by their peers,” freeing up their time to tackle more advanced topics. Students say they look forward to checking new posts, sharing resources, and earning recognition for meaningful contributions.

Tips for Making Gameful Learning Work

Set Clear Expectations: Let students know how points are earned and celebrate thoughtful interaction, not just frequency.
Offer Meaningful Feedback: Use accolades and comments to highlight particularly insightful posts.
Encourage Creativity: Remind students they can use links, visuals, or even short videos to make their posts stand out.
Foster Healthy Competition: Leaderboards and weekly challenges can energize participation and keep momentum going.

The Takeaway

Gameful learning turns participation from a chore into an opportunity for discovery and community. With the right design, recognition, and tools, you’ll see students take more ownership of their learning—unlocking not just better engagement, but genuine excitement for the subject.
Ready to see how gameful learning can transform your course? Try out Yellowdig and join a thriving community that believes learning should be as rewarding as it is rigorous.

Yellowdig has always been focused on creating the best environment for any academic use case, from English to Biology. With this goal in mind, we have recently improved the LaTeX editor.

Why is the updated LaTeX Editor important?

It allows students to format equations correctly and more simply.
It helps students work together to solve problems.
It allows easily moving back-and-forth between “what you see is what you get” editing and seeing and editing the LaTeX code.

With LaTeX students can easily communicate their questions about problem sets to other students, instructors, and TAs. This is beneficial all the way from intro to Calculus up to Advanced Astrophysics.

Our LaTeX editor has 2 options to make it easy for all users. The Live Editor and the Basic Editor. By flipping back-and-forth between the Live Editor and Basic Editor, a relative mathematics novice can create equations in the Live Editor using familiar keystrokes and an easy-to-use virtual mathematics keyboard while immediately seeing the translation of that work into LaTeX. This provides a nice gentle on-ramp for learning more LaTeX conventions without being frustrating for those newer to more advanced mathematics.

The Live Editor

The first is the live editor where students can create the formula visually in the editor itself. This is great for most formulas that undergraduate students work on. Part of the beauty of creating a formula in the live editor is that as you see it come to life you may notice a mistake you’ve made.

The virtual keyboard is fantastic for adding the special characters needed to create most complex formulas. This keyboard makes it easy to insert any mathematics symbols into the formula the student is working on.

The Basic Editor

The second option is to use the Basic Editor, which is perfect for pasting existing equations in. This feature may come in handy more for graduate students, or even just students who are more accustomed to the basic editor style already.

See the LaTeX Editor in Action

The formula created in the editor is automatically and seamlessly added to the Yellowdig post. This tool can be used in conjunction with text to ask a question, a poll to see who else got the same results, or even emojis to express how proud they are of their formula… or how confused they are.

We hope that the improvements our development team made to this editor help facilitate learning in any STEM courses in Yellowdig. Building community in these technical classes is just as critical, if not more critical, than in other subjects. We are grateful to be a part of so many students’ learning journeys.

Another Fun Update

You can now search for your network on the SSO login page! 🎉

If you have any questions, please reach out to clientsuccess@yellowdig.com.

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February 23, 2021