Nicky Case Call 11/10/17

Questions

• Life story
• Goal? Strategy? Company? Community?
• Creating stories vs tools (what’s the plan?)
• His questions on JoyJS
  • Direct manipulation stuff
    • Squarespace for apps: bubble.is, dropsource, thunkable
    • Apart.us
    • Sketch-n-Sketch, FramerJS, Para
  • Marketing: not just for kids
    • real
      • what can it make? where is the ceiling?
    • perception
      • “real coding” is a tough problem
      • which adults use it? what was built in it? (bubble slow revolution)
      • WoofJS - tried to fight “next step after Scratch”
• Advice
  • Help me think through research
    • Teaching kids to code essay
    • Getting girls in tech, loopy
    • FRP visual metaphor UI
    • block library
  • LogicHub?
  • Collaboration
  • Patreon
    • how did that get started? breakdown?
    • content there or on your website?
    • extra time?

Notes

• In Boston for Knight foundation and Mozilla foundation had a joint fellowship
  • PBS Frontline
  • 10 months ending Jan 2017
  • Now hangs with MIT Media Lab
    • Unofficially because no degree or visa
    • Maybe independent contractor at Civics lab
      • Probably won’t get it, but find because Patreon
• Learn to code by making games and animations in Flash
  • Made an entire game without arrays
• His why: understanding. Understanding systems.
• So many directions
  • Making explorables
  • Making tools enables others to make explorable explainations, games, models, learn by making.
  • Another option is contriubting science, not just explaining science. Evolution of trust has a interesting scientific claims.
    • a game theory where people can upload AIs and battle each other out to figure out research questions
• storytelling steps
  1. All about connections
  2. Know who your audience is (so you know their connections) a. Bret Victor is not into programming. He’s just talking to programmers so he’s talking in terms they’d understand.
  3. Start with graph of knowledge / endpoint
  4. Start point: start with why. a. Connect to something they already care about. b. Make them love the question. c. Give them an interesting problem to solve. d. Story e. Big question (how do people learn?)
  5. Figure out best traversal of graph a. Draw 3 outlines first to think about different structures b. Outline look like boxes with words connected by arrows of “therefore” or “but” (South Park guys) c. Can do “meanwhile back at the ranch”
  6. For each node in graph, connect to things people already know a. Metaphors to things people already know about b. Examples c. Show d. Allow audience to “do”
  7. “Kill your darlings” a. Get rid of tangents. b. Get feedback from friends
• his patreon story
  • created right after parable of polygons, Jan 2015, $84
  • grew linerally from parable of polygons until Sept 2015 when released something new
  • advice: don’t work on magnus opus
  • advice: collaborate someone with an audience (like Vi Hart)
  • Dec 2015 another jump: simulate world in emoji
  • October 2016 we become what we behold $600
  • To build a better ballet was timley so got a bump
  • loopy got another bump
  • 4 months ago, evolution of trust was a big jump and continued growth over the next few months
  • In August, gave a pretty popular talk
  • two audiences: 1) lay people, 2) programmers
  • power law distribution, not many above $10
• advice
  • just set up a patreon
  • if you have an audience, make it semi-presentable and polished
    • add images links to all of your projects
    • images headers
    • maybe make a video
  • rewards should be conservative
    • access
    • name in credits
    • limited rewards for drawing character