Explorable Explanations
Redefining Learning through Interactive Discovery
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When I was teaching Economics courses in college, I realized that Game Theory was one of the topics that piqued my students’ interest the most, but it was also one of the most difficult to fully comprehend. While researching for ways to make learning more experiential, I stumbled upon Nicky Case and The Evolution of Trust, an interactive guide of why and how we trust each other (the main pillars of Game Theory). My students loved it.
I then learned that Nicky has built all sorts of mini simulations to model math, biology, social sciences, programming, psychology, and art…
At its core, he’s turning complex concepts into playful, relatable experiences. It’s a fascinating approach, and it's the format we're exploring today.
📰 What’s the format?
Explorable Explanations. The essay1 which coined the phrase refers to Explorable Explanations as something that enables and encourages truly active reading. The goal is to change people's relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. An explorable explanations wants text to be used as an environment to think in.
Some other words used to describe Explorable Explanations are: interactive non-fiction, active essays, simulations, or teaching through play.
💡 Before you continue reading, I highly recommend you try out any of these Explorable Explanations. They’re fun, and will give you a better sense of their magic. Quickly scan this list and choose the one that caught your attention.
🎛️ What are the features?
Explorable Explanations usually work best to explain a system, a model, or a network of cause-and-effect. Here are some other characteristics:
It starts with a hook
Hooks should pose interesting questions. Instead of getting ahead giving answers to questions no ones’s asking, you've got to make learners love your question. The goal is to make them curious.
In The Evolution of Trust, the hook is a question posed in the form of a story: why & how did WWI soldiers create peace in the trenches?
It gives learner a concrete experience
Keep in mind the overlaps of Do & Show & Tell. Not everything has to be fully interactive. You can play with combinations. According to Nicky Case, the trick is to pick an experience that will be a good foundation for everything else you'll be building on top of it.
It ends with a question
Most of Nicky Case’s Explorables end with a sandbox. A sandbox is an environment that allows learners to experiment, explore, and create without a strict set of guidelines or fear of making mistakes. This concept is borrowed from the idea of a children's sandbox, where there's freedom to play and build in an unrestricted space.
In the beginning, I start by giving the player my question. And at the end, I want them to explore their own questions. ━ N. Case
Another benefit of including a sandbox is that learners aren't restricted to the author's choice of examples. Learners can come up with their own questions and make their own discoveries. A sandbox also opens a model up for scrutiny. Learning becomes co-creation, not instruction.
💡 Why is it effective for learning?
In his book 🔎 "What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy", (YouTube series here), James Paul Gee presents a series of educational principles based on the autonomous learning experiences of video game players. A lot of these principles are found on Explorable Explanations, too. Here are three of my favorites:
✅ #1: The learner is presented with a challenge
Let’s do a quick exercise.
If you spend the same amount of time looking at both lists below, from which one do you think you'll recall more words?
Studies show you'll remember 3x as many words from List B. Here's why: when you encountered the words with blank spaces, you stopped. You stumbled briefly then figured it out. You experienced a microsecond of struggle. You didn't practice harder when you looked at List B. You practice deeper.
Experiences where you're forced to slow down, make errors and correct them make for more profound learning.
By withholding an explanation, an Explorable Explanation can be more effective. It gets the learner more motivated to seek it out for themselves. James Paul Gee calls it the PLEASANTLY FRUSTRATING principle. Nicky Case calls it a cognitive gate.
✅ #2: The learner can try things
You don't learn how to ride a bike from a lecture. While research on Learning Styles has been debunked, research is also clear that when we are meaningfully engaged through multiple senses (audio, visual, kinesthetic, etc.), we learn better. James Paul Gee calls this principle MANIPULATION.
Parable of the Polygons is a playable post: half-game, half-blog-post. It lets learners discover how small individual biases can become large collective biases... and how we can reverse it.
✅ #3: The learner thinks in systems
The world has many complicated parts that work together. An Explorable Explanation is like a mini-version of this with its own rules. And when you make choices, things happen because of those rules. Thinking in terms of systems is a foundational part of scientific thought. Gee calls this principle Systems Thinking.
Syrian Journey is an interactive story based on real Syrian refugee stories that makes you actually think (and thus learn) about the dilemmas that refugees face.
There are many other learning principles that support the efficacy of Explorable Explanations: scaffolding, letting learners have different roles, simplifying complex systems, making them practice… I’ll share some links to help you dive deeper in the final section of this post.
🥁 Recommendations
So what does it take to build your own Explorable Explanation?
Engage with some Explorable Explanations to understand how they work. (Check out some of my favorites at the end of this post).
Think about what do you want to explain in the form of cause → effect.
Turn your idea into a model with rules that logically lead to the intended result. Your model should be visible and you can start simple (all models of the world are simplifications, anyway!)
Form should follow function. You don’t need high technical skills. Marginal Revolution University built a simple game about externalities using a tool called Typeform originally made to create surveys.
Playtest: Test your Explorable with real humans and get feedback to improve it.
Other recs:
Don't try to explain everything with something interactive. Use interactivity only when interactivity works best.
Explore and play around with some tools. Here’s a list with tools that require little or no programming. I’m sure that AI is already making this job even easier and easier, too.
Explorable Explanations are great for teaching ideas. I’m not sure yet if they could also be effective for teaching skills.
🏷 Summary
Explorable Explanations transform complex theories into engaging, interactive experiences. This format goes beyond traditional text-based learning, allowing learners to actively engage with content through a playful yet profound exploration. By incorporating challenges, interactive models, and systems thinking, these explorations make complex subjects accessible and memorable.
📚 Further “Explorations”
Some of my favorite Explorables:
An audio tour of Mexico City, seen through its street vendors (The Pudding)
Internet Artifacts or The Deep Sea (by Neal Agarwal)
Ableton’s Making Music (My husband is a musician. I’m sure I just made him proud)
How to Remember Anything Forever-ish (Nicky Case)
Vonnegut’s Story Shapes (by Extraordinary Facility)
The Case of the Slow Websites (by Wizard Zines)
Further Readings
Reinventing Explanation (Michael Nielsen)
How can we develop transformative tools for thought? (Michael Nielsen)
Why books don’t work (Andy Matuschak)
👉 Coming Up Next
How do you give learners more agency and choice? How do you personalize their learning experience? Stay tuned for our next edition coming up January 11th, where we dive into the thrilling world of "Choose Your Own Adventure" learning. Get ready to choose, explore, and discover… Until next time!
http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/