The key to learning math and science online is interactive play

Learning something new takes trial and error. You make a hypothesis, then you discover if you were right or if your thinking was off. Learning is a give-and-take process, and it can be messy — you’re muddling through something new and often challenging. To learn, you need space to explore freely, you need to experiment, you need to be free to make mistakes, and you need to enjoy the journey. How might we design experiences online that encourage these important aspects of learning?

A “blueprint” for interactivity

At a startup called Inkling where I led design from 2009–15, we were focused on how we could help students learn better through a new textbook experience on the iPad. We believed we could use this powerful, page-sized, touch-screen tablet computer—a new medium at the time—to advance learning. Could we make your path personalized and self-directed? What are ways we could make it easier to search, cross-reference, and annotate? How could we make the experience of learning more social? And how could we make the content more multimedia and multi-modal?

We developed a library of interactive modules called “blueprints” that allowed users to explore a diagram through a specialized interaction. We had blueprints for guided tours that would slide and zoom across an image, showing a caption at each step. We invented a “slideline” blueprint that would cross-fade between images on a continuum. A “test yourself” had a mode where labels on a diagram were replaced with text bubbles you could reveal one at a time.

Blueprints were useful because they could be applied repeatably across content types. But relying on blueprints meant that the ways you could interact with content were limited. We never went deep on creating exercises, explorations, or quizzes where the interactivity was intertwined with the learning itself, allowing the user to, say, explore the relationship between supply and demand in market economics, or test real-world simulations in physics.

The Brilliant approach

This summer I met the team at Brilliant and learned more about their approach to teaching STEM online. Lessons on Brilliant are bite-sized and artfully illustrated. They explain topics across math, science, and engineering through fun characters and memorable scenarios. And importantly, when taking a course on Brilliant, you’re asked to engage at every step, through low-stakes quizzes to test knowledge as you go, interactive visual explanations that allow you to explore freely, and puzzles that challenge you to apply your knowledge in new contexts.

Interactive content on Brilliant comes in a wide range of shapes and sizes. For instance, this animated, explorable diagram from a geometry course helps you visualize the surface area of a 3D volume:

In this dynamic illustration from a course on scientific thinking, a learner can explore how much light passes through as they change the orientations of a series of polarized filters:

In this interactive exercise, the learner gets live feedback as they look for the solution to a logic puzzle:

Here’s an example of how a learner struggles their way through constructing a binary search algorithm with tailored feedback at each step:

And in this lesson, a learner plays with a real-time search engine of the Sherlock Holmes corpus to discover the answer:

When I was offered the opportunity to lead design and research at Brilliant, I jumped at the chance. As a designer, I can see the impact that rich interactivity has on learners, and I see the promise of a product experience that considers user motivation, lesson outcomes, and learner goals. It’s my chance to dive back into the world of online education and explore how we can use interactivity to its full potential. And I’ve been inspired by my colleagues to consider how important play can be in making learning come alive.

The Four Freedoms of Play

Most online learning today happens through video, on YouTube, and lecture-format platforms like Udemy, Teachable, or Khan Academy. But the best digital learning experiences draw inspiration from what MIT’s Scot Osterweil calls the Four Freedoms of Play: freedom to experiment, freedom to fail, freedom of identity, and freedom of effort. These freedoms describe the ways we can borrow from the world of games and use play to create engaging learning experiences that stick with you.

• Freedom to experiment means playing with a system, trying out variations, and seeing how a simulation behaves under different conditions. It means tinkering and exploring freely. Experimentation is how breakthroughs are made.
• Freedom to fail means you’re in a safe space. Failing doesn’t mean that you’re doing it wrong, it’s a sign that you’re trying and learning from your mistakes. The freedom to fail is especially important in STEM, where you do have right and wrong answers, but where so many people have been stigmatized by how performance on tests and assignments are graded in school. They come to believe they’re “bad” at science and math, when in fact working through failure states is an important part of how scientists, mathematicians, and engineers make progress in their day-to-day work.
• Freedom of identity means the choice to try on different roles and perspectives. In games of many types, in unstructured play, in improv, taking on different identities from your own helps unlock new ideas and modes of thinking. When learning STEM it could be as fundamental as, “I never thought I was good at this, but seeing it explained this way made it click for me.”
• Freedom of effort means trying as much or as little as you’d like and being able to slide back and forth as you go. You can choose to push until you find the answer on your own, or you can ask for hints or jump straight to the solution. Having this flexibility is an important aspect of play that gives you control over your learning path.

We can use the freedoms of play framework as inspiration as we create interactive experiences that teach math and science topics, helping us make learning environments that are more engaging and more effective.

I believe the future of learning online is interactive play. The best learning experiences online will draw from the four freedoms, tell you stories that keep you engaged, and surprise you with moments of delight. Learning online should not be a passive, sit-back experience, it should invite you to lean forward, ask questions, and challenge yourself.

Interested in working at Brilliant? We’re hiring for key roles in design, research, engineering, marketing, and content.

Have a question or want to reach out? I’m @pcho on Twitter and would love to hear from you.

Thanks to Zandra, Ben, Pontus, Habib, Alex, Sue, Silas, Blake, Eli, and the rest of the Brilliant team.