Tools for students / tools for teachers

The difference between my recent bubble shader and subsequent bubble breakdown is pedagogical: The first shows you the code for a bubble shader and lets you play with it to see what happens. The second takes you through the process of building that code, step by step.

We can think of these two artifacts as the first and second steps in a progression. A logical third step in this progression would be to provide support for people to author their own shader breakdowns.

In other words, the first advance is to create an example of a lesson for students. The next advance is to provide support for teachers to build their own lessons for students.

If the interface to build such code breakdowns is intuitive and friendly enough, it will open the door to more pedagogical content. Rather than such narratives being built only by people like me who already know all the gnarly bits underneath, those narratives can then be built by any teacher who has a story to tell.

None of this removes the need for good storytelling. Building a narrative is, fundamentally, a literary endeavor, however technical is the material being taught.

To build such narratives, it is not sufficient to merely understand your material. You need to have a reasonable mental model of the learner. You need to take that learner on an interesting journey, adding new material gradially as you go, and always keep things interesting.

But a good interactive authoring tool will go a long way toward helping to create good pedagogical narratives. Guess I should get to work on making that authoring tool. 🙂

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