Scenes from The Explorables Jam! (Patreon)

Hi all! Sorry I didn't update in a while – I forgot to mention I was going on "vacation". I say "vacation" because I ended up working on stuff anyway... including co-organizing an in-person Explorables Jam kickoff event!

On July 28th/29th, Chris Walker (creator of SineRider) and I hosted a small Explorables hackathon. There was collaboration, lightning talks, mini-presentations, and best of all: food that was NOT pizza.

(pictured: a few Explorables jammers!)

My favorite part was at the beginning: totally unplanned, on their own, the jammers took a couple whiteboards, and used them to brainstorm dozens of ideas! Then, using sliced post-it notes, they voted on what ideas they liked/could help with. These would help them form their teams. Spontaneous self-organization!

There were videos recorded of the lightning talks & the mini-presentations at the end. (We'll post these online eventually!)

In the meantime, though, the jam is still going! This was just the in-person kickoff event. The full jam runs for three weeks online, and ends Aug 19, in one week. I'd like to highlight a few in-progress explorables that caught my eye: (at least, they have screenshots posted online)

(from top-left to bottom-right: cellular automata, honeybee democracy, arithmetic, the mandelbrot set, epicycles, fourier transforms, puzzle design, graphs of functions)

I'm excited to see how all of these turn out! A dozen-plus new educational interactives online, for all to play and learn from. You'll find them all after the jam ends, at: explorabl.es/jam 

Thank you to everyone who made the in-person Explorables Jam kickoff a success! ❤️

Explorably Yours,
~ Nicky

P.S: While on "vacation", I had a chance to reflect/talk with friends about my process & projects. I don't want to cram too much in this post, so I'll write another Patreon update in a few days. (You like "behind-the-scenes" posts, right?) Long story short: I got stuck on the "Learning How To Learn" project, because of its ridiculously huge scope – so, I'm narrowing it down to something more useful, hopefully more valuable. Stay tuned!