[mncharity]

The "Unit 1" video presents atoms using aphysical cartoons misrepresenting size, behavior, structure, and properties. Nuclei size by more than 3 orders of magnitude.

One might argue that it's so obviously physically unrealistic and representational, that it's "clearly" iconic. Except that it could easily be made more clearly iconic, but wasn't. And arguments of the form "that's so clearly unrealistic, it won't cause misconceptions" are... just not what happens.

Then there are all the usual problems with computer graphical representations of chemistry, biochem, cell and tissue biology. Where "pretty"-but-misleading is prioritized over the messy multiple representations needed to avoid nurturing a rich ecology of misconceptions.

> thought [...it] looked pretty promising. Did you?

Better than many paper textbooks, yes. Doing the things we know are needed to produce good student outcomes... there's a ways to go. Promising? 3D graphics in general, oh very yes. But this project in particular, I've no idea. The incentives around education content are very dysfunctional. So actually providing deep transferable understanding... is usually not the metric of interest.

[bsmitty5000]

This seems to me like someone criticizing introductory physics courses because they're not taking into account air friction and all the other minutiae from the very beginning.

If someone progresses to the point where these misconceptions really become an issue I think they would be corrected organically.

[mncharity]

> seems to me like [...] minutiae

Or alternately, perhaps it's like students struggling with high-school stoichiometry, with atom conservation, because they've managed to remain unclear on the simple core concept that atoms are real objects, are real, physical, little balls.

> think they would be corrected organically

Yeah, that's a widespread impression. That say high-school misconceptions will disappear as students become undergraduate majors, and then graduate students. It's not been well studied, at least the last time I checked. But at a minimum, there are notable exceptions. If your 5-year old wants to know which finger-paint color to use for the Sun, asking a first-tier astronomy graduate student is likely to get them the wrong answer. Misconceptions turn out to be highly resilient. Which is why creating and reinforcing them is not something to do lightly.