You can see there's no dialogue; the idea is to frame an article as "how might you discover/invent this concept on your own", rather than just directly explaining how a thing works. You are given a fictional goal, and you "discover" the subject matter by building iterative solutions.
I also like that the story encourages experimenting and testing out your mental models, like Liz did.
It's just the particular way they discover things that feels forced to me. The story is all about them coming to their own conclusions and thinking up their own experiments, but - it being a story - you know, it's actually all guided beforehand.
Maybe what irks me is that this concept of a character discovering "on their own" some ostensible deep truth (which is really just the author's personal opinion about something) has been used for a lot of worse reasons in other stories - even though, in this case, the "truth" is perfectly harmless and beneficial.
Anyway, it's always easier to criticize than to create, so I won't say I really have better ideas of how to do it.
I found this video from Veritasium that explains it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA
Even if we assume that people all learn the same way, good learning integrates new facts or concepts into ones pre-existing mental model of the world. Not everyone has the same mental model - of this I am certain. Sometimes new information just hangs on the existing model, and sometimes the existing model needs to be updated. This can make the process seem like everyone learns differently, since different explanations can make more or less sense depending what's already in their head.
On top of that, I think some people have (maybe inherently) very different abilities in things like visualization, memorization, vocabulary, etc... So yeah, I think everyone learns differently even if at some neuronal level it's all the same.
Which is all interesting, but mostly just disproves VARK and similar approaches to describing differences in how people learn. There are still so many different ways to teach someone something, they're just much more holistic ways of teaching than the simple VARK split. That some people learn better from X course of teaching and others learn better from Y course of teaching still seems likely to me(admittedly, just pulling from personal experience and the anecdotes of others on that ). That we don't have a neat way to categorize that might just mean it's too messy to do so, or could mean we just haven't figured out the right way to look at it yet.
This is actually a failure of discourse in many areas of life – "X is hard to solve or haven't thought about it, so it must be that X is different for everyone". Nutrition, Product Reviews, etc. I've learned over years that anyone that claims "X is different for everyone" is most likely exhibiting a defeatist attitude.
The universals about learning, which I've taken away from the discussion, is that active learning and recall is generally effective, while passive learning (e.g. re-reading) is less effective. A good research paper that covers this (which I've mentioned in that discussion) is called "Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology" [PDF]: https://pcl.sitehost.iu.edu/rgoldsto/courses/dunloskyimprovi...
For myself - and I know others respond very differently - I usually want everything in an essay to serve the overarching point. So I find fictional asides pretty distracting. There are exceptions: Imre Lakatos did it well in "Proofs and Refutations", and Douglas Adams did it well too. But it's tough to pull off!
I can imagine TFA re-written without the dumb story being really good. It makes use of spaced repetition, and it does a good job of introducing one piece of information at a time. But I agree; the story part of it is stupid.
To be sure this article isn't in the same league at all. Great teachers are scarce no doubt because few are gifted with the requisite raw talent. It implies you're right, it's hard to produce top-quality written teaching material, after all excellent examples are uncommon, even vanishingly rare.
Fictional kingdom discovers Trigonometry out of necessity.
Other great examples (though in a whole other league) are the phoenix project and the unicorn project, where the characters learn along the way.
Of course the learning and story is "guided" by the author. Every story ever written was.
Yeah, I'm really glad this was the top comment. That style of journalism has become all pervasive today, and the grotesque self indulgence of it is honestly sickening. I refer to it as "college term paper journalism", because they all read like a sophomore English 102 essay.
I liked it, for what it's worth.
It's way too long since I read it, so I can't really compare, but I remember that the whole topic was actively discussed and reflected in the novel. That's something different.
Like, Sophie being a character in a novel was an important plot point of just that novel, if I remember correctly.
people are often helped by metaphor (e.g. "a port is like a mail slot in a huge mailroom...") but i feel like this "discovery fiction" thing is like an inverse version of that... it allows your brain to be creative when thinking through the topic but just focused on the wrong part of the explanation.
I get the idea of presenting concepts in a more natural flow and smuggling in some spaced repetition, but the whole story just felt extremely forced and artificial to me, sort of like a drawn-out sequence of expospeak.
There has to be a better way to include spaced repetition and discovery in teaching.
Edit: Note this correction by Michael Nielsen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30325048