I think interactive models are fantastic for learning about systems and how they work. The thing is, it's difficult to design and create these types of models, even today (2018). I don't know that we have created tools that empower non-programmers to build such complex models.
Even knowing and understanding programming, you'll have to spend a considerable amount of time to create such interactive media. This might be worth it if you have an online learning company and you're selling educational content for mass audiences. For the one off technical paper or write-up, the dozens to hundreds of hours it might take to produce interactive media (assuming you already have those hard-earned skills) describing your topic is too much for most.
What if we expand what we mean by "programming" and who we call "programmers"? Decades ago Hypercard enabled regular users to create the kind of interactive media you've described, and to do so easily. There are several reasons it worked so well, but chief among them was the overall metaphor employed: cards, stacks, and everything that goes in (or on) them. These were intuitive to human thinking, and people were able to take advantage of it.
So often computer/software/platform designers use inappropriate metaphors. If you want people to truly be able to "compute" dynamic media with your system, but you trap them in ideas of bits, bytes, words, or today's data structures, you have already lost.
(You wouldn't ask a carpenter to build you a table using quantum mechanics).
What's perhaps most depressing about all of this is that we had better systems (like Hypercard) two decades ago for allowing regular users to do this kind of stuff. Today it's more difficult.
As an educator and non-programmer, I would love a "tool for making tools". I'm constantly introduced to new tools being made for me that don't actually solve my problems. Let me define what would make my work more efficient/effective.
If you happen to have time and are curious, I'd like to point you at BlockStudio [1], a text-free visual programming language that's aimed at beginners learning to code.
Disclosure: It's my own research work, and definitely "work in progress".
The first one is the modern incarnation of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperCard, the 30-year old hypermedia precursor of web and wiki navigation, which was used by many non-programmers.
The second one is the current open-source leader in academic instruction, since it enables live feedback between code changes and the instructional notebook. It has attracted a large community of academic users, but I don’t know if it’s suitable for long term projects.
Agreed. His demos are always impressive, but my biggest worry for him is that he's stuck in demo-land. What's sorely missing is guidance (or code) that can help empower more people to create things like this.
But the reality is probably simpler in the sense that complex things are just that: complex, and modeling them is at least as complex, so it will always be hard, and it's only the meta-ideas that can have lasting applicable value. And he's pretty great at disseminating his meta-ideas.
As a non-academic and a web developer, if I were to publish some work of mine, I have always known that I would do it in the form of a webpage. That way, I can make it as dynamic as I need it to be.
> complex things are just that: complex, and modeling them is at least as complex, so it will always be hard,
I recall reading that a measure of the complexity of a thing (formally) is the shortest possible non-lossy description. This suggests that your insight is correct. The question is how much further can we go in automating parts of the descriptions.
Steven Wittens (author of the MathBox library) has some outstanding articles explaining math concepts with great interactive visuals. Best viewed on a desktop browser:
I was exposed to this in the beginning of my university period and at the time found it mindblowing. But now, many years later, do I actually regret it and wish I hadn't taken this as seriously as I did. Wishing everything I was learning was visualized, and ignoring means of teaching that weren't styled to "my type of learning" (i.e. visual) – primed by posts like this – actually prevented me from taking the effort to learn how to learn via more traditional methods, like through books. It's only now that I've realized that learning purely from visualizations (rather than being just a small aid at the end of personal sweat and effort) deprives you from reaching an end-state of utter subconscious comfort with the thing you're trying to learn. Reading and forcing yourself to parse and make sense of a book brings about a much richer, personal, and flexible understanding which is more interconnected with other things you already grok (and this is not a skill anyone is born with; though different people might have different starting positions).
Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil.
Another problem with visualizations is that they essentially act as a certificate for "final understanding". People play with a visualization and think they understand the thing (like eigenvalues) because someone said this is what you need grok in order to understand the thing. But as any pure mathematician knows, that isn't where true learning ends. Only if you're personally convinced by a proof, without any need for external authority, should you stop making it any clearer. It can take multiple iterations of a linear algebra course to reach full enlightenment of what eigenvalues are. True understanding only comes after you've seen it from many perspectives.
> Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil.
There is a classic Alan Kay talk that touches on this very issue, called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It discusses what the true power of HCI really is: that complex ideas (or even "unthinkable" ones) can be expressed via HCI using some combination of visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic reasoning.
Even knowing and understanding programming, you'll have to spend a considerable amount of time to create such interactive media. This might be worth it if you have an online learning company and you're selling educational content for mass audiences. For the one off technical paper or write-up, the dozens to hundreds of hours it might take to produce interactive media (assuming you already have those hard-earned skills) describing your topic is too much for most.