Grant Sanderson: evaluation

Transcript context

…I've heard about it. As someone who doesn't play games and then did play it, it's fantastic. It's absolutely well done in every possible way that you could want something to be well done. Critical on that is the nature of how problems are solved. The reason people are recommending it to me is because the feeling of playing the witness is a lot like the feeling of doing math. It's non-verbal, you come across these little puzzles where the simple mechanics of one puzzle inform you about the fundamental mechanics that become relevant to much much harder ones such that if you do it with the right sequence you have the feeling of epiphany in ways that are very self-satisfying. You come away feeling like you should be able to do something like this for math and maybe you can. It's just that it's so hard to make a game at all that there's just not the rate of production that you would need to explore to get enough games out there that one of them hits. There's a lot of math videos on YouTube. It's okay that most of them suck. It's okay because you just need enough that when someone searches for the term that they want they get one that is good and scratches that itch. Or that you know they might get recommended something that is bringing a question to their mind that they wouldn't have thought about but they become really interested once it's there. Whereas with video games, you're also spending a lot more time as a user on each one. Rather than a five minute average experience it's a many, many hour average experience. You ask the same question on text. I don't know if I accept the premise that there's not the same advances and innovation in the world of textual explanations. Mathagon is a really, really good example of this. It’s like the textbook of the future. It's basically an interactive textbook. The explanations are really good. In so far as it doesn't have more of an impact or more of a reach it's maybe just because people don't know about it or don't have an easy means of accessing something that recommends to them like the really good innovations happening in the world of textual explanations in the way that youtube has this recommending engine that tries its hardest to get more of these things in front of people. In the world of actual written textbooks, there's so many that I like so much that I think it would be a disservice to talk about that medium as not making advances in terms of more and more thought put towards empathy to the learner and things like that. Should the top 0.1% of educators exclusively be on the internet because it seems like a waste if you were just a college professor or a high school professor and you were teaching 50 kids a year or something. Given the greater scale available should more of them be trying to see if they can reach more people?…

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