WME vs. HeyMath

HeyMath is a successful web-based approach that appears to have similarities to WME. Detailed technical information on the commercial HeyMath is hard to find making a detailed comparison to WME difficult. However, some significant differences are apparent.

• HeyMath is not open. WME uses open technologies such as DOM, MathML and SVG and follows W3C recommendtions.
• WME is a distributed system of self-contained websites and features inerchangeable and interoperable educational components through well-designed interfaces. HeyMath makes no such claims.
• WME emphasizes hands-on experiments, dynamic teacher control of student lesson pages and immediate assessment of each student's comprehension. HeyMath seems to deliver fixed HTML, Flash animations and video recordings.
• WME offers per-school, per-teacher and per-class adaptation for an easy-to-deploy and flexible-to-apply system. HeyMath does not appear to use this open distribution approach.
• A Web-services approach and a special-purpose markup language (MeML) can combine to make WME an open system that is powerful and extensible. We see no such plans for HeyMath.
• HeyMath! seems to use visual representation of mathematics as static images, which makes impossible to share content with semantics. The WME employs MathML which enables to publish mathematical content dynamically allowing users to create/submit/edit their own expressions encoding both mathematical notation and its associated meaning.