teaching kids

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.

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.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG argues that gifted kids can be seen as special needs, tracing a path from the gifted label to burnout and perfectionism.

Kate Gregory argues at CppCon 2015 that C++ should be taught without starting from C: no char* strings, printf or raw arrays at first, with references before pointers.

Folding Ideas examines weird, algorithm-gamed children's content on YouTube, from automated toddler videos and educational spam to exploitative prank channels. It looks at how autoplay and recommendation systems reward this material.

Felienne Hermans presents Hedy, a gradual programming language for teaching kids that moves through levels from almost no syntax toward full Python. The talk covers why error messages and syntax are scary for beginners.

A short Whitest Kids U' Know sketch, with Spanish subtitles, in which a man repeatedly announces he wants to kill the president. It satirizes how speech and threats are policed.

A Whitest Kids U Know sketch built around the idea that saying certain things about the President is illegal.

Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

A short 2010 parody sketch titled 'All The Cool Kids Use Ruby' about an absurd initial consultation. It is a spoof of tech-hype culture.

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

Not Just Bikes argues that car-dependent suburbs rob children of independence, contrasting North American suburbia with Dutch cities where kids walk and bike on their own. It is the creator's remake of an earlier video on the topic.

A commentary video by YouTuber PaymoneyWubby reacting to children's content on the Musical.ly app, which became TikTok. It highlights the child-safety concerns of young kids dancing on a public social platform.

Jamie Oliver shows school kids how chicken nuggets are made by blending skin and mechanically reclaimed meat, as part of his school lunch campaign. The kids react with disgust.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

The Pinkfong Baby Shark Dance children's song video, one of the most viewed videos on YouTube.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

A DEF CON 23 talk on researching whether a commercial quadcopter could be forced to land by interfering with its GPS signal, inspired by a neighbor's kid's drone. It covers the research and the legal and technical issues encountered.

Writer and artist James Bridle shows how strange and disturbing children's videos on YouTube, from surprise eggs to algorithmic mashups, are produced for ad revenue. He argues they reveal problems in a data-driven internet.

A five-minute C-SPAN clip of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath testifying to a US Senate committee that screen time, including in schools, harms children's learning and cognitive development.

Veritasium argues that every new technology, from motion pictures to TV, was predicted to revolutionize education and none did. It asks what actually could, drawing on the host's physics education research.

Music video for the LazyTown song "You Are A Pirate" from the children's show. It is a short, catchy kids' number.

Rebecca Watson's video critiquing physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's earlier video on gender care for transgender minors, arguing it mishandled the evidence.

People Make Games investigates how Roblox relies on young, often child, developers to build its content while paying them very little. It covers Roblox's monetization model, the revenue split, and the harms to kids who make games on the platform.

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.

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.

Hungarian folk dancers from Sapientia University act out the quicksort algorithm step by step, with music. It is part of the AlgoRythmics series of sorting algorithms performed as dance.

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.

A 1940 Bell Telephone educational short teaching customers how to use their new dial phones and why the change was happening. It is a period piece about rolling out a new technology to ordinary people.

A short classic Sesame Street clip in which a mother sends her young daughter to the store to buy a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter.

Ben Eater's short update announcing his plan to build another 8-bit computer from scratch on camera. It kicks off the breadboard computer series that became widely known.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

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.

Andrej Karpathy builds a GPT from scratch in code, following Attention Is All You Need and GPT-2/3, in about two hours using PyTorch. He connects it to ChatGPT and assumes familiarity with his earlier makemore videos.

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.

Veritasium's Derek Muller gives a Perimeter Institute livestream on how AI might change teaching and learning. He draws on past technology shifts and cognitive science to argue that learning requires effortful repetition.

Joel Grus's JupyterCon talk explaining why he dislikes Jupyter notebooks. He covers hidden state, trouble with reproducibility and testing, and how notebooks frustrate teaching. He shows his preferred workflow and what Jupyter could change.

A reupload of Joel Spolsky's talk teaching spreadsheet users the Excel features they are probably missing, such as keyboard navigation, named ranges, tables and lookups. The original disappeared and this copy comes from the Wayback Machine.