Building Joyful Interactives

Reading about an idea and wrestling with it are different cognitive acts. A well-designed interactive experience, either tactile or virtual, can potentially merge these aspects: when a learner plays around with concrete examples and experiments with parameters, the ideas involved become conjectures to test, fix, and potentially generalize.

A productive interactive experience is not only about ornamental animation or frictionless learning; it is about agency, immediate feedback, and the productive surprise of being wrong in an informative way. Over several years of building small, purpose-built web interactives, I have found that key decisions are structural: what can the learner change, what remains fixed, and how quickly does the system reflect their move? The process of making interactives is iterative and AI-assisted coding has changed the economics: a pedagogical hunch can become an afternoon prototype, making experimentation cheap enough to take seriously. The human in the loop remains responsible for mathematical correctness, purpose, taste, and care.

This talk will be a case study of interactive experiences (also known as explorable explanations) I have enjoyed working with, along with commentary on what makes them fun and useful.