logo

Neil Cicierega's parody song 'Redesign Your Logo', played over a live backing video with corporate PowerPoint visuals. It mocks the infamous Pepsi design strategy presentation.

A short vintage film clip of Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on using computers to spark children's imagination and learning.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.

A 1993 interview in which Steve Jobs talks about designer Paul Rand, who created the NeXT logo. He recounts Rand's insistence on presenting a single design and his uncompromising professionalism.

Roman Mars gives a funny TED talk on vexillology, laying out five basic principles of good flag design and why many city flags fail them.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language. Fry argues against grammar pedantry and for the way language evolves, including the verbing of nouns.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.

Josh Kaufman's TEDx talk argues that you can reach practical competence in almost any skill with about 20 hours of focused practice, rather than the 10,000 hours often quoted. He describes how becoming a parent led him to rethink how adults learn, and lays out a short method for rapid skill acquisition.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Eduardo Briceno gives a TEDx talk on mindset, contrasting fixed and growth views of ability. He argues that believing abilities can be developed encourages challenge, deliberate practice and grit.

Destin of Smarter Every Day learns to ride a bicycle whose steering is reversed, taking about eight months, and compares it with how his young son learned much faster. It illustrates knowledge versus understanding and brain plasticity in adults versus children.

Posy explores segmented displays, from the seven-segment display to alternative designs with fewer or more segments, with patents and history.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

An amateur animation of Tom Lehrer's satirical song New Math, which pokes fun at 1960s math teaching and subtraction in base 8. The animation illustrates the old and new subtraction methods.

Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation of WordTeX, a Microsoft Word template that mimics LaTeX typesetting output. It is a joke research project executed with serious effort.

CGP Grey argues that a classroom works well only for the one student pitched at the average level, and sketches a future of personalized instruction. It introduces the idea of a Digital Aristotle, a tutor for every learner.

Peter Schiff, during his 2010 Senate campaign, argues that government loan programs and subsidies push college tuition up.

Clifford Stoll's energetic TED talk, a wandering mix of anecdotes, a science experiment and thoughts on curiosity, education and technology. He is the author of The Cuckoo's Egg.

An SBS Dateline short documentary on Danish forest kindergartens, where children play freely outdoors, climb trees and use knives with little adult intervention.

jan Misali traces the history of the letter W, including why it is called double u. The video is part of a series of deep dives into individual letters.

Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.

A 1970 demonstration of W. Timothy Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, teaching a complete beginner to play tennis in about ten minutes. He chats with her, feeds balls and gives positive feedback instead of instruction.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.

Conrad Wolfram argues that the part of math taught in schools, hand calculation, is tedious and mostly irrelevant to real mathematics. He proposes teaching math through computer programming so students can tackle real problems.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

A short Portuguese-language excerpt of Gerald Sussman's 2016 NYC Lisp Meetup talk explaining why MIT replaced the Scheme-based 6.001 (SICP) course with Python courses. The full talk is linked in the description.

Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.

A family video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a parent follows them exactly as written, with comic results. It demonstrates how precise instructions must be.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy gives a TED talk on how AI could transform education, with a personal tutor for every student and a teaching assistant for every teacher. He demos Khanmigo, including features where the AI reasons before responding.

CGP Grey discusses flag design principles and grades flags, following the Minnesota state flag redesign. It argues for simple, distinctive flags.

A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.

A family comedy video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a parent follows them with exact literalness, producing chaos. This is the classroom-friendly version.

A five-minute clip of a George Carlin routine arguing that the education system is designed to produce compliant citizens rather than critical thinkers. It ties schooling to the interests of the people who own the country.