This is all very fertile territory, it's always good to engage!

I get your point about YouTube videos or Wikipedia pages being "more of the same", in a way. There's a kernel of truth to it, but I don't think that's entirely fair - just the fact that Wikipedia has hyperlinks makes it already immensely more valuable as a tool - and of a fundamentally different medium - than a traditional encyclopedia. Same for animated/dynamic/interactive graphics that are trivial to embed in a webpage but impossible to represent on paper or on a TV screen.

But point taken, it feels like computers somehow ~should~ enable something more radical. When pushing for the Macintosh in education in the 80s, Steve Jobs used to talk about how computers might one day enable students to ask questions directly to Socrates about what he wrote and have them answered, rather than not being able to engage with a text beyond reading it. I think that's what you're getting at.

Now what is really interesting about this is that it gets to the core of what we (think we) want from teaching - having a perfectly patient interlocutor to whom we can ask questions, who can clarify misunderstandings, guide our attention, etc. Maybe this is something that we'll be able to build given recent breakthroughs around language nets. I don't think we're anywhere near but it's an interesting lead for sure. A "Socrates chat bot" that could meaningfully answer questions and clarify confusion about what he meant would be very impressive.

Bartosz' work is utterly fantastic, and is part of a broader movement termed by some as "explorables" (https://explorabl.es). Explorables also (unsurprisingly) have their roots in the early days of computer science, where a handful of computer scientists and educators saw the formidable synergy between constructivist approaches to pedagogy, and software ("Mindstorms" by Papert is a seminal text here). There's plenty of cool work in that field from the last half century (which I contributed to in my own minute way when I was in grad school). That general idea - give students computer models to manipulate so they can intuitively develop a mental model for things! - has lots of work behind it.

But does that work effectively scale out, and translate to better student outcomes at a societal level? I don't want to say it's a big resounding no, but... it's not encouraging. We're certainly way past the optimism of the early 2000s OLPC when we thought that all we had to do was give students a laptop loaded with educational software to "fix" education.

To follow one of your points, the explorables website linked above has hundreds of them listed - if they could just be handed off to students and suddenly dramatically improve outcomes, teachers would certainly be doing that.

So we're back to our original question - if this is all stuff we've been doing and exploring for half a century, why isn't it more widespread? Why hasn't it meaningfully improved our issues? [0] Is it because we haven't done enough of it, because we're missing some key insights? Or is it because maybe it doesn't solve the problem in as a fundamental way as we would hope?

And that's where I tend to fall more into the latter camp - education is fundamentally a social process, learning environment matters a lot, students are not always going to be receptive and the role of the teacher is also knowing how to handle that. An adult can tell you "stop screwing around" in a way that computers (or an ideal Socrates chatbot) can't - that's also "education".

A 3rd grade teacher's biggest challenges lie more with keeping their (often oversized) class focused, teaching all the points they need to get to, trying to have a meaningful impact - any impact - on the students who come to school hungry or improperly clothed or fundamentally opposed to learning anything [1] because of a crappy family situation - than a need for more interactive materials.

Here's a nice short video I recently saw of a great math teacher in action; I encourage you to watch it.

https://www.youcubed.org/resources/summer-math-camp-the-dot-...

The value of the teaching here is not so much the content, which could easily be summarized in a sentence and few pictures. The pedagogical value here all comes from the teacher, and how she manages the class, gives everyone a voice, reinterprets their answer in the context of the original question and what she wants to demonstrate, etc.

My question to the reader: do you think this little math exercise for middle schoolers would be as effective as a webpage, no matter how interactive? Or does its value come from the fact that it is a social, embodied, cooperative process?

[0]: One thing that has been repeatedly demonstrated to raise student achievement: giving out free lunches. https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/docs/default-source/research/cpr...

[1]: Here's a fun one I've heard from French teachers: male muslim kids who openly defy female teachers because they were taught non muslim women are not supposed to be sources of authority.