Answers are everywhere.
Thinking is rare.
Anyone can ask a machine for an answer. VisuaLearn teaches children the habits of mind inside the great algorithms, in ten minutes on screen, then sends them off it to try for real.
Pip is drawn with math: three circles x² + y² = r² and a parabola for the smile. Every hop is a parabola too: y = 4h·t(1 − t).
The idea
Information can be found. Judgement has to be grown.
The great algorithms are not just computer code. They are the best ways people have found to think through a hard problem: cut it in half, put it in order, look near before far, find the simple pieces underneath. Children who learn these habits can use them for the rest of their lives, with or without a screen.
Lessons
One habit of mind per lesson
- 01 Halve the problem When you're lost, rule out half of what's left with each question. Binary search
- 02 Make order first A tidy pile is quick to search. Some ways of tidying are far faster than others. Five sorting algorithms
- 03 Look near before far Explore in ripples to find the shortest way, or dive deep and back up. Breadth- and depth-first search
- 04 Count smarter Make a ten, clone a row, share fairly. Tricks beat memorising. + − × ÷, fractions, powers, π and more
- 05 Solve a smaller copy Many big problems are the same small problem, repeated. Recursion · coming
- 06 Weigh every path The shortest route on the map isn't always the quickest one. Dijkstra and A* · coming
- 07 Remember what matters Put things where you can find them again in one look. Hashing and caching · coming
Why it works
Built on how brains learn
-
Guess before you see
Every step asks the child to predict what happens next. Trying to come up with an answer, even a wrong one, makes the real answer stick far better than just watching.
Generation effect (Slamecka & Graf, 1978); retrieval practice (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006); errorful generation (Kornell, Hays & Bjork, 2009). -
Pictures and words together
Each idea is shown as a moving picture with one short sentence beside it, never a wall of text or a busy screen.
Dual coding (Paivio, 1971); multimedia learning (Mayer, 2001). -
Hands, not just eyes
Every lesson ends with something to do with cards, coins, paper or people. Ideas you have acted out with your own hands are the ones you remember.
The approach behind CS Unplugged (Bell, Witten & Fellows), used in classrooms around the world. -
Short, then stop
Ten minutes, then a daily limit. Short sessions spread over days beat long ones, and they leave time for sleep, play and people.
Spacing effect (Cepeda et al., 2006).
These are well-studied principles of learning. VisuaLearn itself has not been tested in a trial yet. When it is, we will publish the results here, good or bad.
For parents and teachers
Designed to be put down
- No ads, no accounts, no tracking.
- No streaks, points, badges or notifications.
- No autoplay: a lesson never rolls into the next one.
- Every activity prints on one page, for home or a classroom of thirty.
- Works on old laptops and phones, anywhere in the world.
Covers every lesson. When time is up, the lesson pauses and suggests the offline activity. Children can add five minutes twice a day. Saved in this browser only.
In class: 10 minutes together on screen, with the class voting on each prediction. Then 25 minutes in groups with the printed activity, and 5 minutes comparing results.