[playpause]

I love the format of interactive educational documents, especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.

Check out the archives [1] for more amazing interactive documents by this author.

Can anyone share any more examples of this kind of thing? The OP's archives [1] are amazing.

[1] https://ciechanow.ski/archives/

[GuiA]

https://distill.pub is such a platform for articles about machine learning

https://explorabl.es is a more general hub.

> especially when you can tell that the 'teacher' is also the UI designer and developer in one and there's a very high level of quality and polish. There's nothing quite like it for learning a complex subject.

Agreed. Unfortunately I think this is the inherent limitation to the explosion of such material (Bret's seminal essay [0] was almost a decade ago) - it takes an insane amount of skill, in mostly orthogonal disciplines, as well as a lot of time and effort to make it. Some tools attempt to make them a little straightforward to program, but due to the nature of it you can't really have a one size fits all solution that isn't just a general programming language + rendering engine.

And there is no "explorables industry" to fund the production of those (unlike say, textbooks), so it ends up being mostly side projects for otherwise gainfully employed developers.

It would be amazing to have eg. attempts at building an entire K-12 curriculum around explorable explanations. It's also the kind of work that probably loses in clarity and value when done by a team/committee rather than a single person dedicated to their vision.

[0] http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

[thomasikzelf]

> Agreed. Unfortunately I think this is the inherent limitation to the explosion of such material (Bret's seminal essay [0] was almost a decade ago) - it takes an insane amount of skill, in mostly orthogonal disciplines, as well as a lot of time and effort to make it.

This is what I figured out as well. Often the people that have the knowledge are not the ones who know how to put this on to a webpage in a another form then text and images. Like mygo comments below most explanations are done in interactive news articles but this has to be done with a team of programmers and designers who are working together. I am currently building a tool trying to narrow this gap. The tool is at a very early stage, but I'm sharing early previews at [1]. The goal is to create a tool for interactive visualizations that people without much programming experience can use which outputs something that is more dynamic then just text. Such a tool could never do what could be done with a full blown programming language but I'm hoping to start at an easy to use tool and expand it outwards to more complex visualizations.

[1] https://dribbble.com/shots/12517016-Essay-with-dynamic-backg...

[mygo]

Did you take any inspiration from this Washington Post article? [1]

1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/health/coronavi...

[thomasikzelf]

I did not see that article but that is definitely the kind of thing I want to make possible. Thank you for the link!

This is one example of showing information in an interactive way but there are other forms as well. There are currently around 10 other visual representations in the tool (think maps, presentations etc).

[mygo]

It seems as though it’s a developing trend in web design.

https://english.elpais.com/spanish_news/2020-06-17/an-analys...

Can you share the other presentation forms? I may have some examples for each found out in the wild.

[thomasikzelf]

I sent you an email!

[germinalphrase]

I’m a high school English teacher. If I can be helpful in any way, get in touch.

[mygo]

The Washington Post sometimes does this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-si...

And then Bloomberg's "What is Code": https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-paul-ford-what-is-co...

Slate has some as well, such as their interactive transatlantic slave trade visualization (pause the animation and click on a dot to learn more about the vessel)

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_s...

Although these aren't interactive, I like this person's blog: http://tabletopwhale.com

I try to do the same at STEM Lounge, although it takes a lot of time and effort. I haven't gone full interactive yet (although that's the goal). Just static articles so far. https://stemlounge.com The "muddy america" article took a while.