I've seen these called "explorables" or "explorable explanations" before and I really like them. I've been collecting notes on them here: https://simonwillison.net/tags/explorables/

Here's the website that coined the term: https://explorabl.es/

This is a really nice collection. Thanks for putting them together. I'm very partial to this writing style as well.

I took a crack at making it slightly nicer to write this style of blog post via markdown with codeblocks you can mark to execute instead of display (and hot reload + gist rendering support)

It makes the source easy to read, even on GitHub preview, etc.

It's what I've been using to write my recent posts.

https://github.com/jasonjmcghee/mdxish

But at the end of the day, content itself and the code that powers it is more important than any framework you might use.

That's a really neat system. Reminds me of Observable Framework, which I tried here https://github.com/simonw/observable-framework-experiments/b... to create this: https://simonw.github.io/observable-framework-experiments/pa...

ah ` echo` is smart - I didn't realize that would properly render in markdown editors / github, hence the comment approach.

That observable system you made here sure renders beautifully.

Thank you for collecting and sharing these. I was so impressed by the submission that my first thought was to find some repository that contains the samples of a similar caliber.

I consider Kerbal Space Program to be the most rewarding game I have ever played. Going into this page I was already somewhat familiar with many of the concepts it presented because I had encountered them during gameplay. However, having the ability to modify parameters was very helpful for visualizing different kinds of gravity assists. The game does not provide a way to do this, so it augments my understanding massively.

I agree that these interactive learning materials are incredibly promising towards actually understanding what is being presented. In other words, this is how I actually grok the concept.

Brilliant.org[1] does a good job of using explorables in their learning materials, some of the best I’ve seen in that category.

That said, Ciechanowski is on another level entirely.

[1] https://brilliant.org/

> I am really surprised almost no one is doubling down on something like this.

I've thought a lot about this – every time a new one is posted. I wish we could live in a world where this is what STEM education looks like. I think that, ultimately, it's just very high labor cost, and edtech is not known for being highly lucrative.

Bartosz does these as a labor of love, and the world is better off for it.

I do think that explorables are useful in understanding, but man I feel overwhelmed with them. I feel like I do my t know when and where to stop. I feel less anxious with a plain PDF or similar. I guess it's a skill issue.

We used to have those educational multimedia CD-ROMs back in the '90s. Look up Microsoft Encarta 97 on YouTube.