Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

Any brainstorming thoughts on the following? Years back I though of taking something like the OP app, and using it as input to an... ambient interactive implicit curriculum of science and engineering.

So imagine you type "cat". Then maybe you get a picture of a cat. Maybe from ancient Egypt. Or maybe tiles of labeled behavior videos, sleep, walk, eat, etc. Or a yowl. Maybe with a scrubbable intensity plot. Or maybe that intensity is shown as a fast spreading sound ripple, overlaid on a top view of your own neighborhood. Maybe with a draggable microphone, to play with volume, and delay, and doppler. Or back to cat, maybe you get video with a 200 bpm cat's fast heart rate. And maybe an order of magnitude animal mass slider. Slide up to human, to whale, and get the word "whale", video of swimming whale, and a whale's 20 bpm heart swishing. And similarly down to mouse 600 bpm. Or back to cat, ... it's a high-dimensional densely-woven tapestry of possibilities.

When the most popular introductory astronomy textbooks can't even manage to get the color of the Sun right, there seems a need to explore new ways to deliver an understanding of the physical world. Pity child automatic speech recognition is still so poor.

Back down towards MVP, might "type a word, get a picture" be interesting? Not so much? Way too distracting? Other thoughts? Thanks for input.

MVP Like this? I made it for my son: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/word-magic-toddler-reading-and...

I think this application is great! 30 years ago, I emigrated to US when I was 13 years old. I knew only 26 letters and maybe one hundred words. I had to bring up my language skill up to high school level within few years so I can graduate high school and kept my grade good enough in order to enter college. Retain vocabulary through reading is what works for me. It is difficult to remember words without context. Back then, I started with toddler's book then progressed to young adult science fictions. I enjoyed the fastest progress with young adult fictions. I think what you created is very helpful for kid. I will try it out with my son. I am back to Asia now and try to teach my son English.

Nifty! Has it been working out for users?

Any thoughts on whether extending it to animated images might not/work? Might help with verbs?

Bigger picture, perhaps imagine a UI with two panes. One the regular app. And the other, a... bantering play space, where the app can do sciencey interactive jazz improv on what's been said in the regular app. Any feel for whether this would work, or be too distracting? Has anyone seen something like this?

That sounds interesting. A virtual learning environment filled with content that can be dynamically manipulated and discovered through an intuitive sandbox/playground interface.

Yes!

One of the greatest failures of current science education is weaving knowledge integration. We're doing a bit better than Feynman's description of then Brasil, with grad students having memorized an encyclopedia of science factoids, but utterly unable to reason with them. But even now, ask first-tier astronomy grad students "a 5-year old asks, What color is the Sun ball?" and "What color is sunlight?", and it's usual to get a wrong answer to the first, and not uncommon to get a correct answer to the second, sometimes followed a "<pause> that doesn't make sense, does it?", as two incompatible factoids seemingly collide for the first time since Kindergarten. And first-tier physical-sciences grad students' grasp of color can get really wonky. And then there's everyone else. So we're maybe doing better than Feynman's Brasil, but the available room for improvement is not small.

Anyway, interdisciplinary richly-interconnected sandbox/playground play seems it might help?

And I've seen little like that. Years ago, there was a computer game (name escapes me), loaded with a big database of objects. So users, IIRC, could request almost arbitrary "I want to wield a <thing>, while riding a <thing>". IIRC, riding dinosaurs was popular. So imagine using that to informally teach about the world. "I'm sorry, your giant ant collapsed upon creation, unable to support it's L^3-scaled body on L^2-scaled leg thickness. Give it elephant legs instead?"

> A virtual learning environment

And it needn't be entirely virtual. Witness projective sandboxes.[1] I recently saw a talk by Cynthia Breazeal, where a furry robot, mounted on a desk next to a tablet with integrated apps, provides peer mentoring and emotional support. So even if developing visual systems constrain the use of AR glasses to "a shallow-3D virtual screen", we might still leverage mixed reality.

[1] https://arsandbox.ucdavis.edu/

The MVP might be interesting because you could teach kids sightwords by associating an image with a word without having to curated all of the pictures manually.

Nice idea. I've seen teachers teaching scale, struggling to gather images of objects, paired with their size information, making curated image sets helpful. I wonder if a commons-licensed common-word-and-associated-image set already exists? Wikipedia header images might approximate it.

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