Greetings HN,

I am Siddharth, the founder of Primerlabs. I have been working to create a new learning medium called Primer explicitly designed for self-learners or auto-didacts. You can think of Primer as a book that talks.

The problem that Primer solves is:
How can one learn difficult things on their own without the aid of a human tutor?[1]

Learning independently is a complex problem because of the time and effort it takes to truly understand something. Without any external pressure or deadlines, self-taught learning journeys often get abruptly stopped in the face of the first sign of an obstacle. Anyone who has attempted to learn something independently will quickly realize that learning isn't simply reading a book on a subject or watching a playlist. You have to memorize information, review things from time to time, work on a project trying to utilize the newly acquired knowledge so on and so forth.

I faced this exact problem in 2015 when I was in the last year of my college and decided to learn computer science on my own. I watched video lectures, read recommended books, made flashcards using Anki, did the assignment/quizzes, etc. I found the process of learning online quite cumbersome. Note that this was in college, where I had lots of free time. When I started my first job, it became more difficult as I had lesser time.

I realized that the process of learning on your own is not as straightforward as it seems. Therefore, I decided to put my thoughts into how we can design a better learning interface. There are only three main problems that a learning medium must solve for effective learning for learners.
The Problem of Attention
The Problem of Reflection
The Problem of Retention

Primer is designed to solve these three problems. Primer is not an AI Chatbot. I wrote a whitepaper[2] describing how we can create a dialog-based tutor without AI back in 2018, and Primer follows mostly the same way described. Primer is a better book than a better MOOC.

The way Primer work is the following:
First, you have a conversation with Primer. You can respond using a button or sometimes text inputs. There are also quizzes such as MCQ, Reorders in the middle of the conversation, which you have to complete to proceed. You can add notes and questions right into the platform.

You will soon notice that Primer doesn't understand your text-based responses. It might feel useless to reply, but your responses make an essential part of the platform. When you revisit a completed topic, you will find that your responses help you recover and recall what you have learned. Also, your responses and notes, questions are added to your personalized notebook. You can check a sample personalized notebook here.[3]

Your responses and notes form what I call the memory breadcrumbs which help you retain and recover information better. Check out this comic-based post [4] I have written to understand the idea better. Thoughtful responses make better memory breadcrumbs.

Another thing I would like to point out is courses on Primer can never be completed. Well, you can finish them, but I would like you to think about them as unfinished projects that you will have to revisit multiple times to truly understand.

Those familiar with Neal Stephenson's work The Diamond Age will find the name and nature of the project quite apt. The second biggest inspiration for working on Primer comes from a short story written by Scott Alexander. Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.[5] Primerlabs intends to be a group of people who continually strive to simplify ever-increasing complex human knowledge and make it accessible to those who desire to learn.

The first course released is on Python, which is completely free. It's a 440-page book that you can complete in around 12-15 hours on Primer. Had it been a video-based course, it would have easily crossed 60 hours. Primer accelerates knowledge acquisition.

The purpose of today's post is to demonstrate Primer medium rather than the Python Programming course. You can even say that the medium is the message.

My hope for Primer is that it has a similar effect to Personal Knowledge Management as Bootstrap did for CSS designing. Rather than starting from scratch and typing out each equation and code, you start with a basic set of information and build upon it.

Please feel free to give feedback on Primer and let me know how to make it more useful for you.

Tl;dr? Here is a Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/_Wzard/status/1416500216832806912

[1]: Similar to Bloom's Two Sigma Problem.

[2]: https://github.com/PrimerLabs/Whitepaper/blob/master/article...

[3]: Sample Personalized Notebook: https://assets.primerlabs.io/Python-1/Personalized+Python+-+...

[4]: Memory Breadcrumbs Comics: https://primerlabs.io/comics/memory-breadcrumbs-comics/

[5]: Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/