Exorcising Myself of the Primer by Andy Matuschak

The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (View Highlight)

My most cherished learning experiences have involved diving into a topic, trying things, getting my hands dirty, living and breathing it. (View Highlight)

We needn’t (and shouldn’t!) think of these dynamic media from a purely didactic perspective. The Primer’s nanomolecular microscope helps Nell dip her toes into cellular biology, but it’s also a tool which makes expert biologists much more capable. It’s not a toy representation, a cognitive dead end which Nell must discard as soon as she builds an intuition. It’s a tool which can grow with her into legitimate practice, a tool which in fact expands the frontiers of practice for the entire field. (View Highlight)

If you make experts more capable, similar ideas will often also help novices; but if you focus on educational use, you’re unlikely to transform real work in the field. (View Highlight)

Responsiveness also manifests through rich feedback, which the Primer provides continuously and often immediately. (View Highlight)

But critically, in these periods, I felt my hard work paying off. I had confidence that if I kept pushing, I could reach whatever I was chasing. (View Highlight)

The Primer isn’t an encyclopedia; instead, it uses mythic stories, vivid characters, and immersive environments to create and maintain emotional connection. And the dialogue is performed by a professional who devotes her life to expressing care for Nell through her voice. (View Highlight)

There’s a built-in narrative structure, but Nell’s choices and actions turn each page. It feels to her as though she’s causing the story, not passively consuming it. My own highest-growth experiences all have this authorial emotional texture. (View Highlight)

Control must be inverted, so that while guidance and support are offered, learners have ultimate responsibility for their own agenda. (View Highlight)

Lots of learning happened, but learning wasn’t the point: it was subsidiary to some other meaningful purpose, often pursued in community with others. (View Highlight)

I’m suspicious of isolated learning—learning for learning’s sake. I most enjoy learning when it’s part of some larger meaningful activity, and when it helps connect me more deeply with other people I enjoy. (View Highlight)

Instead of isolating people within a virtual world, we must weave support into life as people participate ever more richly in the real world. (View Highlight)

It’s possible to design interactive environments which help people understand complex ideas through simulation and realtime feedback. It’s right to care enormously about motivation and aesthetic experience. Scaffolding and dynamic support can help people reach further. Designed environments can support social connection and community participation. (View Highlight)

And if we’d like learners to apply new skills or to recognize new patterns fluently, they’ll need practice, or some other intervention which will let them consolidate those memories for automatic use. (View Highlight)

Discovery learning emphasizes the concrete. That’s great for intuition-building and engagement. But much domain knowledge relies on abstraction, and it’s often not clear how to introduce that kind of understanding without explanation. When material is introduced without abstraction, we often find that students struggle to transfer what they’ve learned from one concrete case to another. (View Highlight)

Our system should be designed to help us engage in the projects and interests we find meaningful, rather than to “achieve learning goals”. Our system should be woven into the world around us, where the things we care about are happening, instead of in a fantasy world confined to a screen. Our system can support engagement by helping people participate more fully in their interests, and by amplifying the intrinsic satisfaction which results—rather than by aiming for entertainment, and hoping for meaning as a side effect, as the Primer does. (View Highlight)