The Pixel Factory
acko.net
acko.net
By contrast, making the fancy animated version takes 20 hours, plus another several hundred hours (or perhaps 1-2 orders of magnitude more) to build the framework underneath. Even better would be to make interactive explanations, but that would take dramatically more work than even the animated version.
If someone can spare the time to do it, it obviously has tremendous value, but each animator can only explain a tiny number of things in this medium, compared to, say writing a whole book with the same amount of effort. It’s similar to the contrast between telling hundreds of stories around the campfire or writing a novel vs. animating a few minutes of a Disney film.
Ideally we’d have ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators working on creating such explanations, sharing tools and ideas, coordinating effort to build more complete curricula, etc., but there’s not currently anyone paying them to do it, so today there are only a handful, working as volunteer hobbyists. There’s no incentive for current educators (say, college professors or high school teachers or textbook authors) to spend their time making this kind of thing, since it’s not an established and recognized genre yet, and a vanishingly small proportion of them have the requisite skills.
Uni lecturers can actually work on these sorts of things if they are so inclined; I remember one lecturer who had developed such a system, with the assistance of one of his students for part of the time as part of a research project, all as a part of his job at the Uni, not as volunteer work.
You are, of course, quite correct that the actual implementation of such a thing would take a long time; I’m familiar with this as I’ve been working on a number of more advanced interactive things and visualisations as part of some Rust training materials that I’m producing (“a book” is such a sad way of expressing such a rich subject). These things definitely do take a long time, but if they’re done well, they seriously are well over an order of magnitude better than the alternatives.
Most of all, I just want people to see things like that so that they realise just what is possible. Slides! Oh, such shackles we needlessly place upon ourselves. Static text! Oh, the vistas of imagination never explored, never seen, never even imagined.
I really appreciate this presentation and I can't imagine the amount of work that went into making look it effortless and seamless.
And most of it, even in the best universities, flies right over the student's head, or they understand how to handle the abstraction and notation, but lack an intuitive model of what's going on in their head.
>By contrast, making the fancy animated version takes 20 hours, plus another several hundred hours (or perhaps 1-2 orders of magnitude more) to build the framework underneath.
Once it's built though, it can be delivered to billions of students.
There's not even a contest between the quality of this and some lecturer's doodles -- this is an order of magnitude better.
And if we want, we can always augment it with a lecturer explaining the graphics further and going into detail.
>Ideally we’d have ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators working on creating such explanations, sharing tools and ideas, coordinating effort to build more complete curricula, etc., but there’s not currently anyone paying them to do it
That's the problem -- noone paying them --, not that it's too difficult or expensive.
If anything we spend several orders of magnitude more on BS such as dog toys anually that it would cost to hire those "ten thousand skilled animator/programmer/educators".
The other issue is that presentations with shiny graphics probably aren't the best way to teach, either! I can give the best lecture or presentation in the world and still have a room full of students who couldn't reproduce even a tiny bit of it. The reason for the slow pace of lectures is to break up material into small, reproducible bits: we want students to understand the ins-and-outs of the cross-product, rather than just leave it as another wikipedia link to follow when there's time later (ie, never). That said, good course design will have some 'overarching themes' or big examples that are returned to time and time again, filling out more details as students have more depth of knowledge. This is often missing in, eg, intro calculus courses, though there are exceptions.
I'm not trying to be discouraging. A great presentation can go a long way to making things understandable. For example this video explaining jpeg worked for me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2aEzeMDHMA
My point is only that fancy graphics and animation are not enough. The presentation actually has to get it's points across. Maybe this one worked for everyone but me but it didn't really work for me. I don't really know what to suggest to make it better. Maybe it all made more sense live with more talking.
There were a few "bugs" For example slide 22, bi-linear filtering, pixels can't be 2 colors so that slide made no sense.
On the positive side I would love to know what software to use to make presentations easy. Yea, I get the author made his own but in general, making animation is hard work. Worse, once I've made them, even if they didn't end up being good for explaining I put so much work into making them that I can't justify starting over for something that works better. So, anything that would make that process not be so much work would be amazingly helpful.
Someone only has to do this once, in the 20+ hours it takes, and any individual student in the world can peruse it. Or any lecturer in the world can make use of it in their class.
http://acko.net/blog/how-to-fold-a-julia-fractal/
It's amazing and I really wish all future science educational materials are like this.
His framework MathBox is a really great step in the right direction and I hope it's picked up for some future material. Imagine learning calculus or physics from this? It would be a snap! It really solves the visualization problem in math education. Now imagine building interactivity into it---the possibilities are endless.
http://acko.net/files/fullfrontal/fullfrontal/webglmath/onli...
(Shares some slides with the new one)
I think it's been on HN before, It was the first WebGL site I've seen that just worked.
Wow, yeah. I'm using an old laptop with Ubuntu. Firefox ground to a halt, crashed and then my computer spontaneously rebooted.
It really does go to show how much of a difference presentation goes to aid learning and (more importantly) understanding.
Of course, as soon as you use WebGL, users expect the visual quality of an AAA game. What you tend to get is crap like this.[1] It's possible to get the GPU to do great things for you.[2] But that's a programming exercise. Good 3D content is expensive. Most of the WebGL demos available either have very little content, or are recycling old video games.
All this technology, already deployed, and little good content for it.
[1] http://montagejs.github.io/beachplanetblog/ [2] http://madebyevan.com/webgl-water/
I've worked around some really shitty canvas performance by switching to a WebGL backend, because of dumb memory leaks on IE.
The way animation illuminates an understanding of the holistic wholeness rather than the discrete part normal education teaches, is so underutilized in education.
Heres to hoping someone soon will specialize in creating animated educational material.
The problem, is soon as I finish, the pipeline will change, technology will switch, and it will soon be archaic. This is a huge amount of work!
I applaud the herculean effort and great result.
Does anyone know if the author has written or presented on his workflow as he goes from idea, to concept, to rough draft, to finished product? I'd really love to learn how he goes about it... Pixel Factory was so dense and clear thinking, beautiful, intuitive. Wow.
It's still a great well crafted presentation. I've been given a much better understanding of some graphics concepts than I otherwise would. Will definitly come back and finish it.