Playbook: Building Explore Modules

💡

Your Goal: Help others get a strong understanding of a new topic in a short amount of time.

What you need to do

Your checklist:

Create cards for your topic and include high quality content in each card.

Create highlights for each card, which includes a summary of 3-5 key points for each card.

Create tweet prompts for each section.

Flows well and has a clear structure.
The beginning of the explore is easy to understand, and it gets deeper towards the end.
High quality content, mostly videos. Non-video content only added when needed.
Includes spotlights on companies and/or people that are pioneering the industry.
Time to complete the module is under 3 hours.

The content is recent, unless the information is still relevant.
There is no fluff. Everything is intentional and high value.
Each card has a clear theme.
Be intentional about the first card - make sure it's a high level overview that gets people excited to learn more.
Bonus: make your card titles and highlights engaging/fun.

Repetitive content.
Outdated content.
Confusing structure.
Sub-optimal content. This means there's another piece of content that is better, and a worse piece of content was added instead.

Too long. It could have been shorter.
Not comprehensive. It could have gone deeper, but stayed high level and didn't fully explain the topic.

Prep yourself...

Be excited to learn about the topic.
Be curious and go deep. Remember, this is training on learning how to learn.
Create a structure to save high quality content you come across as you're learning.

Remind yourself...

Learn first. Don't start building the explore module until you understand the topic.
Be organized. Save high quality content and add notes to them. Then when you're building the explore module, you know what content you should be using.
Create a knowledge map. Understand how different areas fit together so you can build a optimal structure for your explore module.
Don't procrastinate. Make sure you're working on this consistently. You won't be able to get it all done in a single day.
Reach out to experts. Test your knowledge by connect with an expert in the industry. Tell them you're building a module to teach other kids about the topic. You have a great reason to network and potentially get their feedback!

Ask yourself...

Are you missing anything important? How do you know if you're not?
Does the structure of the explore module flow well?
Is every card engaging?
Do you have any "holy sh*t" moments that shows the potential of your topic and will get people excited?
Will this explore module help people generate new ideas about the topic?

Below is a suggested flow of what the explore module structure might look like:

Start with something exciting! Get people pumped to spend the next 2-3 hours learning about this content. Make sure the start is high quality and interesting.
Cover the basics. It’s important to cover the basics before diving deeper.
Get technical. You should have the most amount of these cards. Each of your technical cards should have separate themes (ex: for AI, separate cards for NLP, computer vision, GAN’s, etc.). Within the technical cards, build from introduction to technical.
Company and people spotlights. Who are the biggest innovators in the space? I'd suggest having a maximum of 5 spotlights otherwise you might overkill it. But you can combine, for example you might put Google Brain and Geoffrey Hinton in the same spotlight, since Geoffrey works at Google Brain now.
Recent advancements. Showcase emerging applications and any recent, exciting breakthroughs for this tech.
Relationship to other topics. Help people build their "T" - showcase the intersection between your topic and other relevant topics. For example, a card in BCI that shows the intersection between neural networks (AI) and neural communication (BCI).

Other cards you might want to include:

Major barriers to advancement. What's holding this tech/science back right now? Are these opportunities for us to potentially solve? Are there ethical issues we should know about?
Recap. Similar to your overview content, remind students what all the major points (cards) were that you covered in the module.
Courses to go deeper. If you find any high quality courses, it might be valuable to display them in case the person wants to do a Focus in the topic. Don't force this, it's only if you think it would be valuable.

Next Steps: Let your director know you want to make an explore module and send them a high-level plan.

If you have any questions, dm me on Slack ✌️

- Navid

‣