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Yesterday I celebrated my one-year anniversary on Math Academy. Five courses completed, another almost complete, 19519 XP thus far. 1/2
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Frank Hecker
2.9K posts
Frank Hecker
@hecker
Interests: education as talent development, the fate of artists in a log-normal world. Former work: @FrankHecker. Elsewhere: @frankhecker.com on the azure site.
Ellicott City, Maryland Katılım Aralık 2006
178 Takip Edilen831 Takipçiler
Frank Hecker retweetledi
Last week, we released one of the biggest updates yet on @physicsgraph.
With over 2x the number of nodes, 4x the content, and 5+ new question types, Unit 1 has never looked so good!
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Frank Hecker retweetledi
I really believe in PhysicsGraph. I think what we’re part of with the likes of Math Academy, Alpha School, Recess, etc. is a deeply important thing that is good for the world.
I’m excited to see how education morphs over the next few decades. and feel lucky to be part of it.
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Frank Hecker retweetledi
Subvert just hit 20,000 co-op members and co-owners
I wrote a newsletter about some personal inspirations for building a cooperative: a punk, a priest, and an anarchist
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Part of the revised @physicsgraph Physics I course. (Also, I just noticed that x(t) = x_0 + v_0t + 1/2at^2 looks like the first three terms of a Taylor series.)
Chris@sutherlandphys
One way we're upgrading our physics course is using manim animations for derivations. I want to show you how we go about this. So here's the topic that introduces the second kinematic equation. It consists of 5 short manim animations one after the other, starting with:
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Today is Witch Hat Atelier Day. To mark the release of the anime, here's an old post of mine riffing on a major theme of the show: We can create our own magic with pen and paper, but making it real is not nearly as easy as it is in fiction. #physics #math frankhecker.com/2022/11/03/rea…
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What I find interesting about this is that a single expert with domain knowledge, who previously might have written a textbook, can now create an online learning system that's potentially much more effective in teaching students. Lots of domains waiting for someone to do this.
Mark Worrall@infinitehumanai
Making educational content is painfully slow. A single lesson with explanations, worked examples, and questions takes me a full day. I've been building workflows with Claude Code to cut that to 2-4 hours. Here's what's actually working: Key insight: examples >> instructions. The AI needs to see good lessons, not just read about what makes them good. It also needs the same context a human curriculum designer would: what prerequisites exist, how concepts were previously taught, what question formats work, what cognitive load looks like for this topic. So I've built a pipeline that can: Interact (safely) with my DB - First step was building a CLI for the database and knowledge graph, plus an export/import layer that dumps lesson content to markdown files. This is what Claude Code actually works on, and I review before it gives me the CLI commands to push back to the DB. Scope lessons - Interactive skill that helps define exactly what's testable and references previous lesson scopes to maintain consistency and manage cognitive load. Generate content - Separate skills for explanations, worked examples, and questions. Each pulls from exemplar lessons and the knowledge graph so it knows what to assume (and what not to) as well as how supporting lessons were taught. Create questions - The hard part. Multiple template-aware skills that can run Python to generate and validate coding exercises as well as LaTeX. Less prescription on format, more showing of past examples with clear guidance on the workflow to validate code runs. Run autonomously - An agent that bundles everything and checks its own work. I'm still iterating. The agent creates decent first drafts but I'm finding sequential skill-by-skill with human review beats full autonomy for now. Goal is to stop being the bottleneck on my own content pipeline. 😅 And however autonomous the generation gets, human review is always essential. Products that skip this are basically making QA the user's problem, not theirs.
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Frank Hecker retweetledi
And no, not by talking to an LLM. By taking advantage of emerging online services like @_MathAcademy_ and @physicsgraph based on modern learning science and made available at relatively low cost. Will be extended to more and more subjects over time.
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A very useful thread on scientific literacy for liberal arts folks. I’d add that an intelligent adult who missed out on this could likely learn core subjects like math/physics in 2-3 years spending 1+ hour/day and a few $100s/year.
T. Greer@Scholars_Stage
@zenahitz I’ll bite on this. Let’s say the goal is something like “broad based scientific literacy” — the ability to understand the broad strokes of how the physical world works, as well as fluency in mathematical techniques you’d need to understand the average paper somewhere.
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@Animesh_Tambi @chintanzalani @yrechtman Sure: for enterprise-focused tech cos you can “present an easy UX” to employees (HR when it’s good), to customer economic buyers (sales reps), to customer techies (sales engineers and customer support), to the tech press and analysts (PR, prod marketing, C-level schmoozers), etc.
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@chintanzalani @yrechtman can anyone elaborate more on ‘there are many ways to be hot’
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Frank Hecker retweetledi
For the first time ever, a law has been proposed that would create a business entity designed specifically for artists
It's called the Colorado Artist Company Act
The A-Corp is here
blog.metalabel.com/the-first-a-co…
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@_alice_evans "So how can I make sure the LLMs listen to me?" Make sure all your research shows up in an open accessible format (e.g., blog or open access book), encourage other people to link to and quote it, write for mainstream publications. (May be other ways as well.)
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Follow the Tyler mantra: write for AI!
At present, I think the LLMs are mostly wrong on many aspects of gender history, as their training data is poor.
So how can I make sure the LLMs listen to me?
If I persuade them, then I achieve far greater influence than I would via direct readership.
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the real test for my book is whether me undertaking thousands of interviews across the world and writing notes on the 7000 references in my zotero, then organising that into a clear, engaging structured manuscript will provide a better answer than LLMs will give you in 1 second.
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@julianboolean_ Also her biography of Gibbs was recently reprinted: themarginalian.org/2025/04/24/mur… (note that it is not a conventional scientific biography)
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"In 1922, seven Canadian engineers approached Rudyard Kipling, the poet, and asked him to write a ceremony. What he produced was called the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, and it has been performed in private ever since. Every graduating engineer in Canada goes through it"
if software engineering were to adopt a similar ritual, what living poet should they call upon? Vienna Teng? i cant think of anyone else
which i guess is precisely the problem
alvin pane@alvinpane
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@julianboolean_ The Poetry Foundation site has a number of excerpts from The Book the Dead: poetryfoundation.org/poets/muriel-r… (See for example “The Dam”)
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@julianboolean_ See for example Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_… (Side note: she also wrote a biography of the physicist Willard Gibbs.) 2/2
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@julianboolean_ If she were still alive then Muriel Rukeyser would have been perfect for this. She was very appreciative of the power and benefits of technology while also recognizing the harms that can result when those who create it don’t understand the responsibilities placed upon them. 1/
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Yes, this is an important point. As Math Academy extends the MA knowledge graph with more topics it would enable MA to produce even more specialized courses for particular disciplines, for example, Mathematics for the Social Sciences (something I'd like to see).
Julian@julianboolean_
oooh this looks fun the cool thing is that under the hood courses are not a primitive in MA - it's all just a sea of individual topics in one giant directed graph - which reflects the fact that (esp in math) course boundaries are an illusion and all the knowledge is connected so an MA course (assuming you have developed all the necessary topics) is simply a curated playlist that picks out topics from the graph
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#HoCoMd peeps et al., guess what other new town was/is being developed by Howard Hughes Corp, will have lots of new space waiting to be filled, & has lots of affluent highly-educated parents potentially open to Alpha School and its focus on education grounded in learning science?
liemandt@jliemandt
Huge thank you to @HowardHughesHQ, @DavidOReillyHH, and Jim Carman. Alpha School’s #1 growth constraint isn’t demand. It’s real estate. To scale the best education, we need partners who aren’t just leasing space - they’re committed to bringing world-class schools to their communities. Howard Hughes gets it. Thrilled to bring Alpha School to The Woodlands in Fall 2026.
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Frank Hecker retweetledi
@alexolegimas @Noahpinion As another has noted, “figuring out how to get 1,000 people to care forever” is a rehash of Kevin Kelly’s “1,000 true fans” idea. It’s also hard to do: <frankhecker.com/2023/02/06/pat…>. But someone with insane productivity and obsessive attention to fans could do it, like @DJSTTDJ
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Great substack on the death of Spotify (as predicted by Jimmy Iovine).
Spotify’s business model has been brutal for “middle-class” bands. Recently there’s been movement for these bands to create “walled gardens” for fans, to build relationships w them again.
As AI automates and commoditizes more and more, I think this dynamic will happen all over the economy.
@joelgouveia/note/p-189070285?r=1ds20&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">substack.com/@joelgouveia/n…
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