We do applied research on how one person can do many things well (for a cost normal people can afford).
Affordable, efficient, and relaxed.
Our objective is to drive down three costs of learning: the amount of effort, the amount of money, and the amount of time.
We do this by building what the mathematician Seymour Papert called Microworlds—interactive objects that embody a skill, topic, or art form.
We design these objects and pair them with proven, plainspoken advice on accelerated learning.
We've built what we believe to be the world's first portable Comparator Mirror, a device popularized by the late, great David Hockney in his book and film Secret Knowledge.
Comparator mirrors allow novice artists to reproduce masterworks, as in the documentary Tim's Vermeer.
Notably, we've developed speedy ways to internalize the mirror's most useful features, making it possible to draw equally well without it.
Our current prototypes are portable, work with regular sketchbooks, and cost $10 or less to produce.
We're building a collection of free digital synthesizers that encapsulate music theory at a graduate level—think “the Omnichord, but for professionals.”
Rather than approaching the problem as building “toy synths” or prioritizing a preconceived notion of “accessibility,” we're following the Microworld dictum of “low threshold, high ceiling, wide walls.”
Our current iteration is Perfecto: A Musical Microworld, currently under active development.
We built luaturtle.com, the first feature-complete port of Turtle Graphics for the Lua language. It's available free on the web.
Our next phases are a desktop port using the LOVE2D game engine, and a full, free, online Lua course.
We're also building new mathematical microworlds with the same “low threshold, high ceiling, wide walls” philosophy as Turtle Graphics. They work with both augmented reality and no screens at all.
The death of college essays at the hands of ChatGPT is not difficult to understand: essay-writing went from a practical means to stress-test your understanding to another box that students have to check.
Nevertheless, the power of writing as a means of learning is as strong as it has ever been.
We've built a system to make college-level nonfiction writing a self-led tool for learning with a tight feedback loop, and you never have to insert AI-generated text into your writing.
We're in the early stages of building a body of language learning curricula that can be used to teach any target language, in any native language, with minimal, optional use of AI, and the ability to work solely with human teachers.
Our target speed to proficiency, based on the work of the renowned language teacher Michel Thomas, is two weeks.
Reach out about collaborating or road-testing our prototypes.