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Nils retweeted
May 11
Among the many reasons I enjoy @JeremySternLA profiles is he knows how to skewer and celebrate tech in equal measure. Most mainstream media only knows how to do the former, and they lack the redeeming quality of being funny
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Turns out googling and chatbots did not devalue knowledge.
Knowledge is what enables thinking.
Most skills are EXPRESSIONS of knowledge.
In the words of a wise colleague:
"When you're trying to read about butterflies and you don't know what a butterfly is, you're f*****!
Mar 28
You cannot teach critical thinking. You can teach domain specific expertise, which enables you to think critically about that domain. Brilliant chess players do not make great military commanders.
More problematically, people who think they have great critical thinking skills are often the ones who get hoodwinked by any fashionable idea, because they lack the domain expertise to interrogate nonsense.
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Watch me slide into 1000 DMs in the next 24h 📳
Playcademy will turn Epic game designers and developers into epic Education Engineers.
Join the revolution!
Mar 25
In the coming days, employers will see a stream of resumes of once-in-a-lifetime quality folks. An important thing to understand is that Epic never lowered our hiring standards as we grew, and the layoff wasn't a performance-based "rightsizing" as companies call it nowadays. It's a sound bet that anyone with Epic Games on their resume is in the top few percent of their discipline.
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Schools buy teacher materials from 5 different publishers. Hundreds of teachers then apply their individual training and experience to classroom delivery.
When a student fails a standardized test, how can anyone tell what went wrong?
The solution is vertical integration!
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"Real world skills" are just knowledge in disguise.
By making K-12 (general knowledge) 10x more efficient, we unlock time for the development of specific knowledge, which is orders of magnitude more valuable.
This is how Alpha High students outpace experienced professionals.
Mar 14
I've been teaching 100,000 fake students for 2 weeks.
and used them to build the best AP prep system in the world.
I took Qwen 3 8B models and gave them simulated human memory.
Now every night thousands of simulated students start with zero knowledge of the social sciences. Their only training is our adaptive curriculum. They work through it, then take a full AP (advanced placement) practice exam.
The first batch averaged a 3 on their exam. (~45th percentile)
Then the agents looked at where they failed, and improved the algorithm. Again, and again, and again.
Two weeks later, the average is 4.43 (~80th percentile)
This is such an insane number because the curriculum they worked through is ONLY basic knowledge and comprehension.
They were never taught how to build an argument, contextualize evidence, or even shown the exam rubric.
...And yet they're averaging 80th percentile on an exam that requires all of it.
Basically built a machine learning feedback loop for edtech.
Spoke about this at @clawcon & @sxsw last week. This is just the beginning.
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Happy Monday!
If you are questioning what you're currently doing in the face of the AI revolution, or any social or political upheaval, let me remind you:
It's Time to Teach!
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Nils retweeted
Mar 6
We agree with Carl that reading comprehension is downstream of vocabulary knowledge.
That's why we've been working with him and Sarah Cottinghatt on a vocabulary app that has better pedagogy and is also 10x more fun than the braindead owl.
Coming soon to Alpha School!
Mar 5
When students can’t find the "main idea", the problem is almost never a missing strategy.
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Part Two in my series on how we at Alpha School are turning learning science into an engineering discipline.
This one dives deep on the basic formula of learning:
learning outcomes = engagement * learning efficiency
Hoping to "engage" the skeptics in an interesting discussion!
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You RUIN schools by allowing kids to use screens for "BAD" things (cheat, doom scroll, distract others).
You IMPROVE schools by allowing kids to use screens for "GOOD" things (direct instruction-based apps, research for project in area of interest).
What's confusing about this?
Parents are waking up to how bad screen time is for kids. Schools that have banned phones are seeing extraordinary results.
@esaagar breaks down the vibe shift, and says parents are now asking to get rid of school-issued Chromebooks and switch back to pencil and paper.
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Carl, Sarah, Zach and I are working on a blueprint of how to turn learning science into an engineering discipline.
We are turning learning scientists and pedagogy experts into instructional designers and developers into education engineers.
Feb 17
Anyone interested in instructional design needs to read this. And if you're a developer and want to work with a great team applying DI and science of learning principles, get in touch with Nils. The science of learning is being applied in innovative new ways in Austin Tx.
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Our goal with Playcademy and Timeback is to build the best K-6 arithmetic and reading programs on the planet.
Everything else is downstream of that.
If you're a dev and want to start working on education, this is where you should focus.
Feb 16
One of the teens I tutor in reading told me the progress he has made in our reading classes have carried over into his other classes and everything is easier
I periodically ask the kids I tutor if they notice their other classes, and life in general, getting easier since they are improving their reading
Mainly to help them see how important reading is for basically everything we do AND because its an easy way to show them how they have improved - we can celebrate this for a nice confidence boost
This is obvious to us adults but for kids/teens it isn't always as obvious so we need to point it out!
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If all teachers instead ran Timeback microschools, we'd save 20% on education and teachers could make 3x what they currently make.
If you're pro teachers, you should be pro Timeback.
@grok
How many teachers are there per student in the US? Not administrators, actual working teachers.
Then, how much money does the US spend per student, including government, parent, and NGO spend?
If every teacher now started a micro school, such that all students are evenly distributed across teachers, and took 80% of the current spend per students as a fee, how much more money would they make than they currently do on average?
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