iPad Scratch Pad Improvement

Up until about two years ago, Khan Academy had a much better scratch pad. It had an Undo button. It did not have an eraser that erased the whole object; it was one step at a time with the Undo button, but it was better than the current one, where it is a very slow process, sometimes requiring precision, to erase all or part of what has been written.

In addition, the following changes that downgraded the user experience were made:

1. Scratch pad is now on a different "layer" than the problem, When you're working on the scratch pad, you can see the problem as long as you don't write over part of it. But when you're ready to enter your answer, you have to close the scratch pad and can't see the answer.

2. If you have a lot of writing to do, you can no longer scroll the scratch pad.

3. The scratch pad formerly remembered the last color you chose while still in the same exercise, quiz, test or challenge (problem set). So if you prefer to use just one color for your problems, and that color is not black, you have to choose it for each new problem. (In the old scratch pad, it did default to black the first time you used the scratch pad in a particular problem set.)

Khan Academy claimed they made these changes to improve the "user experience". No, it did not improve this user's experience.

I suggest that you choose Report a Problem, which is at the top of each Support Community page, between the center and right side of the page, and tell Khan Academy that you'd like to see these changes. It is more likely to get the attention of someone in Khan Academy than posting it here.

You may get a knee-jerk response to uninstall/reinstall the app and to clear cookies and cache. While some iPad problems are corrected this way, this issue is for something requested to be added (or added back in), not a bug in the current version. So please mention in your problem report that this is an issue for which uninstalling/reinstalling and cache and cookies clearing won't solve, so they won't tell you to do this.