Brit Cruise

One of the most exciting aspects of joining the Khan Academy team, was the potential to explore new ways of integrating video and software. As a new faculty member, I hope to deliver mini-courses as journeys. These journeys expose a user to a chain of concepts, ultimately leading to a field of study they will be encouraged to explore!

Instead of having the user answer questions after each video, I realized it would be beneficial to have them visually explore key concepts in real-time through exploratory exercises (Brett Victor does this brilliantly). I see this as a vital analysis phase in the experience; the salient aspects are powerful learning mechanism. Perhaps it’s because I grew up playing Will Wright’s video games that I was never a fan of right or wrong answers. Instead, the rewards are a result of your own discoveries:

The original Sim City

With the help of David Sissitka (one of the many awesome volunteers who kick in @ Khan Academy) I was able to deliver some initial demos within 3 days of conceiving the idea:

Do you think you can mimic a coin flip?

Have you ever seen your frequency fingerprint in real-time?

Check out the first two (of many) explorations which are intended to supplement the journey into cryptography series. This is just the first step in what I hope will be a long and exciting experiment in education:

This entry was posted on March 30, 2012 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Research and Projects with tags cryptography, interactive software, khan academy labs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.