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 also wrote a bit of code that let’s you slice through the color cube and display that slice on screen.

As we were playing around with that using Khan Academy’s visual programming environment, my son discovered some wonderful color patterns more or less by accident. That led to a discussion of generative art. And as it turns out the Khan Academy environment is based on the Processing library which has been used for years for exciting generative art projects. So I helped my son to take what he had stumbled upon out of there and put it on a web page. With a little more work we figured out how to enable fullscreen mode. You can see the results here.

Talking through all of this provided a great example of how knowledge hangs together and how context provides motivation. Each progressive bit of exploration here was motivated by the territory we were finding ourselves in. It is a stark contrast to our fragmented experience of education in school and even to this day online. As we are creating more and more of atomized learning objects, reassembling them in new ways around these kind of journeys is a tremendous opportunity.