Quest Board

A quick way into The Portal Group Discord server is contribution. Here are things we need help with.

Quests

Helpful Tasks

This is the spot for those who don't have expertise in STEM, or are busy with life, but still want to help us. Whether you have only 5 minutes or unlimited time and energy, you can help us and the community.

Explore and Catalog

• Eric has a lot in his mind. Help us find and collect riffs, references, concepts, and neologisms that Eric creates, or that come up in relation to The Portal.

Transcript Editing

• Some Portal episodes and many Eric Appearances are still in need of a transcript, or have transcripts that need further editing.
• Have a look at our Portal Media spreadsheet to find the current status of any transcript.
• Let Brooke or Aardvark know which you'd like to work on. They will provide you with the necessary materials.
• Follow our Transcript Style Guide.

Wiki Editing

• Write a strong, one-sentence description of ideas on their wiki pages
• Rewrite disorganized pages on the wiki
• Build out pages that are stubs (underdeveloped).

Praxis

Help to retell the story of our sciences to new generations of students

• Read
• Make a visualization from calculations in what you've read

Mathematics

• Request visualizations of principles or constructions
• Outline sequences of thought to reach a particular idea

Physics

• Write pages on hard physical problems independent of mathematics

Engineering

• Onboarding to CAD for mechanical engineering (elasticity and fluid sims)
• Affordable projects/kit concepts to understand physics principles in engineering
• Contribute to realizable engineering challenge ideas to improve our world

Computing Science

• Foundations of computing for physics, Numerical Analysis
• Geometric Complexity Theory

Programming

Build a useful piece of software.

Data Visualization (d3-js, chart-js, p5-js)

• Make visualizations with the users.theportal.wiki data

Discord Bots (JavaScript)

• Discord Pin Archive + Management Bot
• Bot that cross posts from Eric's Instagram to the server
• Bot that relays messages across servers

Instragram Bots

• Bot that cross posts from Eric's Instagram to the server

Three-js

• Make our Portal Map work similar to the "Follow Dragon" section on SpaceX's website.

Twitter Bots

• Twitter Archival Bot
• Twitter Bot that responds to tweets from Eric containing keywords with wiki articles.

Be Creative

Show us what you got!

Music

• Learn a silly or fun drinking song, and record yourself playing or singing it, preferably with friends from The Portal
• Make a song that incorporates the podcast's music

Visual Art

• Are you an artist inspired by The Portal? Show us what you've made!
• Help us make visualizations and animations to go along with Eric's riffs and mathematical concepts of interest
• See what others have created on our Featured Artists page

Writing

• Write an essay, blog post, or twitter thread on a topic covered on The Portal.