Designing Agents of Change
Designing the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer — the neuroscience and learning theory behind the Primer, prior art, system requirements and tradeoffs, major design issues, expert interviews, and unresolved technical problems.
Like most Sci-Fi nuts, I’ve dreamt of building the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer ever since reading The Diamond Age*.
I went to Stanford in 2017 to explore all the ways we can use Artificial Intelligence and advanced algorithms to aid human learning and cognitive development, so I saw my d.media class at the d.school as the perfect time to finally explore the Primer.
I had 10 weeks.
*For those not familiar with the Primer, it is considered by many to be the best example of an artificial intelligence agent for human learning/cog dev. Kind of the silver bullet for education.
Why build the primer?
Scaling one-on-one tutoring is seen by many experts and researchers as the silver bullet for human cognitive development, and by extension solving a host of economic and social issues for society. But how do you make one program to fit any human mind? The solution has to be adaptive, both in terms of subject matter expertise and feedback —i.e. it has to interact with the learner in a personalized way, keep them motivated, and remove mental and phycological blocks to learning.