GoKawiilThe Idea
Online STEM education is, in practice, a library of lecture videos. Think Khan Academy, Udemy, Coursera, MIT OpenCourseWare, YouTube, etc.
But why videos?
Picture a professor teaching a class at a blackboard. The professor is performing a form of presentation: they write an equation while explaining it, circle a term, draw a plot, then point to what matters and continue. Record that presentation, and you have a lecture video. Put it on the internet, and you have the paradigm behind today’s online STEM education.
Producing a good lecture video is really hard. But let's say you managed to do it. Two weeks later, you notice a mistake. Now you have a problem: the video is already finished, and you cannot go back and fix it. In practice, you either leave the video as it is or go back into production and make it again.
While thinking about this problem, a thought occurred to us.
We write code and ship it, but later, we find mistakes, fix them, and ship a new version.
What if we could do the same with lecture videos? What if we wrote lecture videos as source code so that they are maintainable?
Lecture videos as code
Start with what the teacher actually does. The teacher says something, writes an equation, circles a term, then keeps talking. Each of those actions can be described as code:
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