Why it is shaped this way

About this site

This is a hands-on-first curriculum in neuroengineering, written for one biomedical engineering student at the University of Utah and then for anyone else who finds it useful. It is patterned on Khan Academy in scope and on a handful of much better-written sites in execution.

Build first, understand second

The order is not a stylistic choice. Students who wrestle with a phenomenon before they are given the explanation learn the explanation better than students who get it first; the research literature calls this productive failure and "a time for telling." So every explainer here opens by pointing at something you have already seen on your bench or in a simulator, and no explainer is allowed to open with a definition.

The other things that measurably work

• Retrieval beats rereading. The recall prompts and the review queue.
• Prediction before reveal. The "predict before you look" cards.
• Worked, then faded, then open. The first project in a phase is a full recipe; the last is a goal and a parts list.
• Difficulty labelled honestly. Motor imagery is marked humbling because it is.
• Progress as exhibits. The plots, numbers, and build logs you produced, not points or streaks.
• Learner control. Prerequisite chips, "stop here" lines, and collapsed deep dives, so you decide how far to go.

Voice

Explainers follow Bartosz Ciechanowski's interactive essays: "we" and "let's," the phenomenon before the definition, figures you can touch, no hype. Build logs and strategy pages follow Julia Evans: first person, honest about confusion, exact part numbers, "here is what surprised me."

Simulated versus real

Every interactive figure is labelled. Most are simulations, built from physical models good enough to teach filtering, artifacts, and volume conduction, and not good enough to publish. The Web Serial plotter shows real data from your own board. Where the site links to datasets, they are real recordings.

Dates and verification

Facts about labs, companies, and deadlines change. Pages carry a "checked on" date and the Utah map marks every entry as needing verification against its own website. The curriculum is built to be edited: every lesson is a Markdown file, every glossary entry is a line in one YAML file, and adding a build log is one new file.

Adding your own build logs

Use the build-log form: it walks through what you did, what went wrong, and what you measured, saves as you go, and exports a file ready to drop into the repo. That folder is the portfolio.