I am excited about a new open source project called idyll. Here is how Matthew Conlen, the lead author, describes idyllIdyll is a tool that makes it easier to author interactive narratives for the web. The goal of the project is to provide a friendly markup language — and an associated toolchain — that can be used to create dynamic, text-driven web pages. Idyll helps you create documents that use common narrative techniques such as embedding interactive charts and graphs, responding to scroll...

It is now six years ago that we at USV held our one day mini conference on “Hacking Education.” A lot has happened since then. We have made investments in Codecademy, Duolingo, Edmodo and Skillshare. MOOCs really took off with classes that have been taken by tens of thousands of students. Susan and I started homeschooling for our children. And yet when I think about what is possible in theory it still feels like we are early on. One of the things that I envision is an interactive learning env...

At the end of last year before going away for the holidays, I laid out a miniature program for learning / teaching about rates of change. The first step was to appreciate the tremendous difference between linear and exponential change. It is easy to write down the relevant definitions: in linear growth we take the previous value and add a constant to it, whereas in exponential growth we take the previous value and multiply with a constant (that’s greater than 1 – for a constant less than 1 yo...

In case you come here only on Wednesdays when I write about homeschooling, you might also want to check out Tech Tuesdays (a series that goes back several years). In yesterday’s Tech Tuesday I wrote about computational complexity and gave an example of a program that would take hundreds of thousands of years to run. It turns out to have been an example of exponential growth which happens to, well, grow a lot! That reminded me that I have been meaning to write about rates of change more genera...

There is an amazing tool out there for teaching and learning about Math (and the world) and not enough people know about it. If you have never tried it out before, you should head over to Wolfram Alpha right now. Wolfram Alpha describes itself as a computational knowledge engine which may not mean much to people and the sparse home page with just a search box doesn’t help if you have never heard of it before. But as a starter you could think of it as the intersection of the world’s best graph...

Two previous Homeschool Wednesdays covered the relationship between math and beauty as a different way of motivating the study of math. My first presentation was on spirals and the second one on waves. In each case the main point I am trying to make for our kids is how relatively simple mathematical formulas can generate magnificent patterns found in nature. Another area where this is true are fractals. These self similar patterns often have surprisingly simple underlying algorithms: http://w...

In a previous edition of Homeschool Wednesdays, I had written about different ways of motivating the study of math. In particular I suggested that showing how math can be beautiful may be one way to get some kids interested in it. My first foray into that was showing how spirals occur in nature and can easily be modeled using math. In my presentation this past Sunday I talked about waves. Here it is: Math & Beauty 2: Waves from Albert Wenger When I presented it, the embed on Slide 10 actually...

It is definitely Homeschool Wednesday in our household, as Susan has a blog post out about raising active decision makers. My post today will be about math. There are a great many problems with how math is taught in schools but the one I want to focus on is motivation. Generally math is presented as something you just have to know, i.e. as a requirement for other things. In the lowest form that’s a requirement for passing the upcoming test or eventually the SAT to get into college. This is es...

It is easy for me to remember Pi Day because it also happens to be Susan’s birthday (Happy Birthday!). The digits of pi have some amazing properties and are fun to explore with kids as a great way of learning about math. For instance, here you can search for any pattern in the first 200 million digits of pi (including say the kids’ birth dates). This year I worked with our son Michael on a little program to approximate pi by using polygons with increasingly more sides. The program computes th...

My older son asked me yesterday about how colors on the screen work. We started talking about the history of the RGB color model including early color screen technology. That eventually led to a discussion of how the RGB color space is three dimensional with 256 values on each axis for a total of 2^24 or roughly 16 million colors. Since a display is only two dimensional how would you go about showing the entire color space? From that question we talked about projections (from 3D to 2D) but al...