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Comment by max_ | Hacker News Reader

This is the future of STEM education.

Well written, decently comprehensive interactive documents.

I think such formats should be prioritised instead of textbooks for creating learning materials.

I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this. Brilliant comes close, but its not at this level.

Everyone in Edtech seems to be running towards AI gimmicks.

Thank you Ciechanowski!

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I've seen these called "explorables" or "explorable explanations" before and I really like them. I've been collecting notes on them here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/explorables/

Here's the website that coined the term: https://explorabl.es/

Thank you for collecting and sharing these. I was so impressed by the submission that my first thought was to find some repository that contains the samples of a similar caliber.

This is a really nice collection. Thanks for putting them together. I'm very partial to this writing style as well.

I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)

It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.

It's what I've been using to write my recent posts.

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/mdxish

But at the end of the day, content itself and the code that powers it is more important than any framework you might use.

That's a really neat system. Reminds me of Observable Framework, which I tried here https://github.com/simonw/observable-framework-experiments/b... to create this: https://simonw.github.io/observable-framework-experiments/pa...

ah ` echo` is smart - I didn't realize that would properly render in markdown editors / github, hence the comment approach.

That observable system you made here sure renders beautifully.

I consider Kerbal Space Program to be the most rewarding game I have ever played. Going into this page I was already somewhat familiar with many of the concepts it presented because I had encountered them during gameplay. However, having the ability to modify parameters was very helpful for visualizing different kinds of gravity assists. The game does not provide a way to do this, so it augments my understanding massively.

I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.

Brilliant.org[1] does a good job of using explorables in their learning materials, some of the best I’ve seen in that category.

That said, Ciechanowski is on another level entirely.

[1] https://brilliant.org/

> I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this.

I've thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it's just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.

Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.

I do think that explorables are useful in understanding, but man I feel overwhelmed with them. I feel like I do my t know when and where to stop. I feel less anxious with a plain PDF or similar. I guess it's a skill issue.

We used to have those educational multimedia CD-ROMs back in the '90s. Look up Microsoft Encarta 97 on YouTube.

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