FYI that article is an interview with Jo Boaler, the main architect of removing middle school Algebra in SF and California (attempted). Her views are pretty controversial among those promoting math excellence.
That's not to say there isn't anything worthwhile in the article, but figured people would want that context.
I built my kids "the box", which had a similar concept. It was an upholstered box with a frosted acrylic top and a camera mounted inside facing up. You would put cards on top of the box and it would recognize the symbols and take an action, like play a song or read a word. I used large printouts of Data Matrix, as I found that faster and most accurate to decode. The front (up-facing) side would have a colorful design.
In the most advanced version I had it read letters to read a word aloud (eg, a spelling tool). All so I could reenact the scene from Sneakers where they rearrange Scrabble tiles from SETEC ASTRONOMY to TOO MANY SECRETS :)
I've been doing this for the past 2 years with my two older kids (now 5.5 and 3.5) based on the same reddit post this article is about. I've found it works great, though I have high-focus kids. I call it "word cards".
For the older kid, he learned the letters at preschool and then we did the Bob Books together. That worked well for phonics, but we hit a wall with sight words that require memorization. That's where Anki saved the day. We'd do 5 minutes of word cards every morning, and he'd get a token on a reward tracker, which eventually added up to a toy. Worked great for both of us. He's now a fluent reader, and I add unusual words we encounter to the deck, though I've stopped pushing so hard on reading and we just do "fact cards".
For my middle child, I started with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons (TYCTR100), in plain book form. That got her sounding out simple words at 2.5, but it's a really boring process, and I couldn't get her to do 20 minute lessons on a regular basis and didn't want to force it on her. But then I bought a set of TYCTR100 flashcards on Etsy and turned them into Anki cards, and that's worked great. Again, 5 minutes most mornings, though at her age it works better with a short term reward (eg, interleaving with Daniel Tiger).
Apparently my kids said they planned to do "word cards" with their kids when I wasn't around.
Anki is great at what it does, but the main enabler is finding a process your kids will pay attention to. I probably lucked out there.
The first big investments in petroleum were for lighting via relatively clean-burning kerosene. Petroleum as a fuel came later, when they had a lot kerosene byproduct lying around. There's a obvious problem with solar as a lighting solution: you also need good batteries.
But isn't that the "relative" point? A house in Santa Clara doesn't cost $1.4M because it's 3x better than a house in another state, or costs 3x as much to build. It's because there are a lot of other high-salary people in the area who need a house and not a lot of houses being built.
What's the trigger for all the diffusion video projects this week? Are they all at the same conference, or did one trigger everyone to rush to publish? I'm grateful but curious. Animating still pictures from my kids' books is my goal and it seems close to plausible just from this week's advances.
You seem to be comparing an actual, private tech project to what you wished public transit looked like, not what it actually looks like.
Public transit is awesome, but construction costs in the anglophone world are bananas (https://transitcosts.com/).
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