Status: Starting within the year, looking to assemble a team, have a decent budget.
Most kids learn to code before they learn calculus. So, what if we use programming to teach mathematics? Instead of focusing on computation, we can help folks learn true fundamentals by zeroing in on thinking + problem solving.
This is not gamification - we don’t want to move random animated characters on the screen for no purpose. Instead, this concept is based on the Feynman Method - programming to learn math will require you putting down your understanding of concepts in an articulate form anyone could comprehend.
This idea can be perfectly applied through an environment designed for math education.Students will be given problems to solve before they’re taught how to solve them: their takeaway from each chapter will be one program. As they keep working through the chapter, they iterate on their code to pass all the test cases of increasing complexity. Once at the end, they learn about more problems they can try solving by writing programs.
I believe this method will create more value than traditional high school classes because students will continuously reinforce understanding by learning everything with proof. A great programming environment will be essential: something like a jupyter notebook, but extremely low setup and with a lot of inbuilt visualization + computation libraries (some of which will eventually be reimplemented by students).
I thought Replit is in a pretty dope position to do this: create repl.school as an public good education product. This will eventually bring all these new students into using Replit, and be good for the company. I reached out to Amjad, and he is down to support + fund a MVP of this project.
I'm looking for people to work on this with me: want to get 2-3 people, and ship a little course and see how it does. I'm thinking about something in either cryptography or trig+geometry!
If you're interested, please reach out. I'd love to hear about: