Reimagine digital learning experience
Learn more interactively
A friend claimed that the future of apps will be experience-based, not utility-based. What does that mean? For instance, I use Uber's app to get a driver, so the entire design and the product need to give me the shortest path to reach my goal. That's my expectation too; if they ask me to watch a 30-second TikTok video whenever I need to enter the app, I will probably be mad.
But my friend claims our technology should allow us to play with curiosity and multiple uses of it. It should allow us to explore but with a designated route.
The user who instantly understands the purpose and processes of a technology is compelled to respond in specific, directed ways. Once learned, these habits preclude user experimentation, modification and intervention. For this reason, we must insist: clarity in design is not always an advantage. On the contrary, there is currently a crisis of straightforward labels and instructions. — The curious interface
Making the design unclear sounds dangerous, but it is an interesting contrarian idea to explore. Products like Padlet, Heptabase, Obsidian, mmm are some examples that present her ideas. They provide some mediums (like nodes, edges, website interactive elements).
Though I’m not a person who usually uses apps to look for pleasant experiences (I only played PSP during middle school and that’s all), her idea is intriguing. It is because if my ultimate goal is to make learning an experience itself, creating better digital experiences does matter.
As I’m building interactive elements to help people learn concepts better, I do learn the power to engage multiple forms of stimulus, colors, visuals, interactive responses, sounds, can be very powerful. Both for digesting knowledge and learning with better motivation.
Current learning mediums we have today
Here, we need to talk about medium, and I will only spend time discussing digital forms of mediums. Most of the learning mediums we encounter online are either texts or videos. Texts from books or blogs, and videos from recorded lectures and YouTube. If we discuss programming education, we also have running the code online as a medium.
Some traditional mediums can be good if carefully designed, like 3Blue1Brown, which is able to engage sounds and very good visual breakdowns.
Some companies like brilliant.org are able to engage user interaction to learn and play on devices in a creative and crazy way.
Because of my friend’s question, I start to wonder if there is a possibility to combine the two: some tool that we can give people the power to create some tailored interactive learning experience?
Padlet, Heptabase, Obsidian, Notion are an empty playground, but their interactivity mostly focuses on creating a new note page and how to connect the knowledge among each other. Can we make it more interactive like Brilliant.org? When knowledge is being presented as an experience, not as an input?
Brilliant.org is so good at coming up with interactive components to help people "witness" a concept. Can we make it more general like a note page that people can create and integrate?
Yeah haha... I know this is a very hard problem because generalization might ruin customization. But the thing is if AI can generate images, codes, and respond to people, the generalization might not be “generalized.” For instance, when I’m building my tokenizer app, most of my code is generated by AI. This suggests there are indeed opportunities to allow AI to use texts, videos, and code to create a better digital learning experience.
Digital learning idea today
Today, my friend and I were ideating on how this alternative medium might look like. For instance, what if I taught a class on how to prepare for interviews on algorithms and data structures?
Every day, people who take the class will need to go to the same cafe (habitual environmental setup).
They will send a photo of the coffee to me or they can drink the coffee animation.
They will prepare a pen and pencil for the problem, with an example of my notebook on how I did it.
They enter a problem with AI-generated solutions in the background.
They get 20 minutes to think and write down their ideas and solutions.
They will submit their solutions with AI or my feedback.
They will get some habit tracking visualization to see their progress.
What I like about this idea is that it maximizes the fun experience for learning on a subject people usually perceive negatively.
However, I’m not quite satisfied with the specificity since it teaches nothing on how we can think about solving algorithm problems because it’s not in enough depth of the subject (My dillema on Why most AI curriculums suck).
Compared to the tokenizer website I show you in the beginning, they are both visualizations with interactivity, but one allows learners to interact with the knowledge, another with the experience. Since the idea is early on, I still allow the idea to have space to iterate and grow because the overarching question: How can we rethink learners’ digital learning experience? is quite meaningful to me. And I think both the progress and the experience of learning both matter.
Real learning is like going to a gym
Andrej Karpathy said learning should be like going to the gym, and all these TikTokers who make learning videos only make people feel good without learning in depth. I strongly agree with it.
Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn. — Andrej Karpathy
That’s why I criticize my own idea so hard. Viewing learning as entertainment like a 20-second TikTok is quite different from the joy of figuring out difficult and complicated concepts through some sort of struggling. Their entry barrier to start is also very different (Andrej’s video has a very high entry barrier but very high quality).
Is there any way we are able to inject that effective learning and sweating process with a simple, fun, and easy-to-create medium?
