I came across a one-shot interactive version of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The author used a single prompt to trigger a one-shot explorable visualization of an idea, and it stuck with me.
My kids, like most kids, ask lots of “why?” and “what if?” questions. Why is the sky blue? What happens if you dig a hole through the Earth? I usually give a half-assed answer, because the full answer requires remembering or looking up a bunch of science fundamentals I forgot a long time ago and I’m in the middle of eating dinner.
Randall Munroe (the XKCD guy) has two books of exactly these questions, answered with real physics and a lot of jokes. I tried mashing all three of these ideas together: one-shot interactive visualizations, the What if? approach, and my kids’ questions.
Two prompts later I had two artifacts: What if you dug a hole through the Earth and jumped in? and Why is the sky blue?
I’m not that happy with them - I think they both could be a lot more playful and easier to understand for kids, but they’re both immensely better than my usual half-assed attempt at an answer. The next iteration is cheap: give my kids a few minutes with each, watch how they interact, ask what they’re seeing. The idea that visualization triggers a conversation that produces the next visualization is more interesting to me than the artifacts themselves.
Imagine a biology teacher doing this with a class. The tools are already available - what’s missing is the disposition to play with them. Kids have that in abundance.