Library
Explore JoySchooler’s lesson series.
A Deep Dive into Large Language Models
Curious how ChatGPT and other LLMs actually work? This self-paced Socratic series takes you behind the scenes step by step—guided by an AI that helps you question, explore, and discover how these models learn. You’ll explore how models are trained, why they hallucinate, and how they learn to be useful. Created based on Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs like ChatGPT.
A River Held Still
Follow the water through a working dam: why its wall is thickest at the base, how falling water becomes electricity, and how the plant answers when a town needs more. Ten investigations for ages 12 and up.
A Shiver in the Air
A loudspeaker never blows air at you, yet you hear it across the room. Follow a sound through a drum thinner than paper, three tiny bones and a coiled tube of liquid into a message your brain can read, then work out why some ears go quiet. Eight investigations for ages 12 and up, inside a working model of the ear.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Read all twelve chapters of A Wrinkle in Time through Meg’s changing understanding of difference, courage, knowledge, and love. Study L’Engle’s original language, imagery, scientific analogies, and character choices.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A read-along series that teaches you to read like a writer as you journey through Twain's novel. Section by section, you'll practice literary analysis — unreliable narration, satire and irony, vernacular voice, symbolism, foreshadowing — while wrestling with the book's big questions: conscience versus society's rules, racism and slavery in historical context, Jim's humanity, independent thinking against blind rule-following, freedom, friendship, and moral courage.
Alexander: The Making and Meaning of 'the Great'
A realpolitik journey through Alexander's life — the machine he inherited, the cities he burned, the empire he couldn't hold — laying out the evidence so you can decide whether he belongs beside Cyrus the liberator or Genghis the destroyer.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
A read-along lesson series for anyone who wants to get the most out of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Read each chapter first, then let the lesson take you deeper — into how the story works, what Carroll was really doing, and how great writers think. Every lesson builds a real skill: literary analysis, critical thinking, and the craft of storytelling.
Allgemeine Chemie I — Atoms, Bonds & Reactions
A deep, Socratic preparation for the first semester of university chemistry, modeled on the Allgemeine Chemie lecture at the University of Hamburg. Starting from the evidence that atoms are real, the course builds up the quantum picture of the atom, uses it to explain the logic of the periodic table, then constructs bonding, molecular shapes, and intermolecular forces — finishing with the quantitative skills (stoichiometry, balancing reactions) every first-year exam demands. Each lesson develops one core idea through questions, predictions, and problems rather than memorization.
Allgemeine Chemie II — Energy, Equilibrium & Electrons (Uni Hamburg prep)
The second half of Hamburg's first-semester Allgemeine Chemie, where most first-years lose points. Discover why reactions happen at all (thermodynamics), why some spontaneous reactions never seem to occur (kinetics), how far reactions actually go (equilibrium), and how these same ideas govern acids, buffers, batteries, and electrolysis. Builds directly on Allgemeine Chemie I, one focused idea at a time, ending with the tools to walk into the exam confident.
Ancient Egypt: The Grand Tour
Travel back 5,000 years to discover how a river built a civilization, who really ruled Egypt, how the pyramids were raised, and why Egyptians prepared so carefully for the afterlife.
Ancient Greece: Gods, Heroes, and the World They Built
A journey through Greek mythology and the real Ancient Greece — from the birth of the gods to clever heroes, warring city-states, and ideas so powerful we still use them today.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Read Orwell’s ten-chapter animal fable closely, tracing persuasion, changing rules, unequal power, and the fate of revolutionary ideals. Build interpretations from exact passages and test claims against evidence.
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
A read-along series for the complete 38-chapter Anne of Green Gables, using the uploaded anne.pdf. Each lesson deepens the chapters just read, develops a reading-as-a-writer skill, and supports interpretations with passages from the uploaded text.
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
A chapter-based read-along of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days in George Makepeace Towle’s translation. Follow Fogg’s route, test interpretations against the narrative, and examine character, suspense, empire, and the calendar puzzle.
Between Floors
Ride inside a cutaway lift and find out what really holds it up, moves it and stops it: a counterweight, ropes that grip a wheel they are not tied to, wheels that travel with the car, a latch on every landing door, a brake held open by electricity, and what catches a car whose ropes have all gone. Eight investigations for ages 12 and up.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
A reading companion for young readers who want to get the most out of Roald Dahl's classic. Each lesson digs deep into the chapters you've just read, teaches you a real reader's skill, and sharpens your eye for what's coming next. The final lessons step back to see the whole book in a new light.
Convex Optimization: Theory, Algorithms, and Modeling
A rigorous, Boyd-inspired series on convex optimization — building from convex sets, functions, and duality to interior-point solvers, proximal methods, and SDP relaxations, with applications drawn from computer graphics and vision.
Coraline by Neil Gaiman
A read-along lesson series that pairs each section of Coraline with a deep Socratic lesson — teaching literary analysis, symbolism, and thematic thinking as the story unfolds, then stepping back at the end to see the whole picture.
Curves, Falls and Spins
Ride a skate park's ledge, pole, loop, teeter, kickflip pad and drone on a working test bench, and find out what a fall keeps, what bends a path and what makes things turn. Six lessons for ages 12 and up, the second of two courses that lead into The Physics of the Hopping Roadster.
Design Your Antweight Vertical Spinner in Fusion
Go from your first Fusion sketch to a fully designed 1 lb combat robot with a real metal vertical spinner. You'll pick verified parts, learn the physics of spinning weapons, design a printed chassis around a bearing-supported weapon, and follow real event safety rules to commission it.
Earth, Moon and Sun
The Earth is closest to the Sun in January, yet that is the middle of winter in London. Work out why, then find out what raises two high tides a day, why the Moon is drifting away, how the small Moon can hide the whole Sun, what keeps the space station up and why spacecraft can leave for Mars only every two years or so. Fourteen investigations for ages 12 and up, in a live model of the real sky.
Editing Life: How Genetic Engineering Works (and What You Can Do From Home)
Build up from DNA basics to how CRISPR really edits genes, then discover what a citizen scientist can genuinely explore with a kitchen, a laptop, and under $200.
ESP32 from Zero: Make Your First Smart Gadgets with MicroPython
Go from a bare ESP32 board to gadgets you control over Wi-Fi. You'll learn what's really happening inside the chip and the circuit — not just copy wiring diagrams — while writing MicroPython you actually understand.
First Impressions: Greetings, Small Talk, and Talking About Yourself
A practice-heavy series for 8th graders on making strong first impressions in business and formal settings. Learners rehearse greetings, small talk, and introducing themselves through repeated roleplay with the tutor playing different adults.
From Coins to Code: 400 Years of Money and Trust
This series explores how modern finance emerged from real human problems, risky decisions, and the crises that followed. Through historical cases, it builds a genuine understanding of the ideas at the core of money, such as interest, lending, shares, liquidity, bank runs, central banking, and digital currency. It shows why each one arose, the problem it solved, and the new tensions it created.
From Sheep to Rug: How a Cozy Rug Is Made
Follow fluffy wool on its big trip, from a sheep's back all the way to a soft rug under your feet. Each lesson asks a puzzle about one step and helps you figure it out.
From Thread to Thing
Investigate how a 3D printer turns a thread of plastic into a bird: the layers it builds, the extruder that feeds the thread and the hot end that melts it, the motors that place every line, the G-code a slicer writes, and the limits that gravity, heat and colour set. Taught on a working desktop 3D printer on a workbench. Eleven investigations for ages 12 and up.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
A read-along companion to Dickens's Great Expectations. Each lesson deepens the chapters you've just read — guilt, shame, class, and what truly makes a gentleman — while training you to read like a writer, one skill at a time.
Hannibal's War: Tactics, Deception, and the Strategy Behind Cannae
A deep dive into how Hannibal fought Rome for fifteen years on its own soil — the battlefield mechanics of his famous victories, the psychology of baiting enemy commanders, and the grand strategy of breaking an empire without besieging it.
How Could This Happen? The Origins of the Holocaust
Trace the path from the trenches of WWI to the edge of genocide. Discover how old hatreds, a broken democracy, propaganda, and step-by-step laws turned neighbors against neighbors — and what warning signs the world missed.
How dd-trace Instruments Your Node.js Code Without Touching It
A hands-on deep dive into the machinery behind Datadog's zero-code-change tracing in Node.js. You'll build a mini auto-instrumenting tracer yourself: hooking the module loader, monkey-patching library functions safely, producing real spans, and tracking context across async boundaries. By the end, the 'magic' of dd-trace will look like engineering you could have written yourself.
Incentives: The Hidden Engine of Economics
A from-scratch journey into microeconomics through its most powerful idea: people respond to incentives. Real stories of bounties, markets, backfires, and clever designs reveal why the world works the way it does.
Inside the Animal Kingdom: Bones, Breath, and Bites
Explore how animal bodies are built from the inside out, how they survive in water and on land, and what their teeth and bellies reveal about their lives.
Inside the Running Engine
Follow the moving parts inside an engine and discover how burning fuel becomes a turning shaft. Investigate the cycle, valve timing, shared pushes and air–fuel balance, then use evidence to explain faults. Six investigations for ages 12 and up.
Inside the Wire: How Circuits Really Work
What is actually moving inside a wire, and why does a bulb light up at all? Through puzzles, predictions and detective work, you'll build a real picture of circuits, from a single battery and bulb to shortcuts, branches and broken circuits you'll learn to diagnose.
Integrals from the Ground Up: Meaning, Method, and Power
A Socratic journey from 'what is an integral, really?' to computing them fluently and using them on real problems. You start with the area problem and the idea of accumulation, discover why the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus makes derivatives and integrals inverse operations, then master the core techniques — substitution, integration by parts, partial fractions — before applying integrals to areas, volumes, and even infinite regions and probability.
Investor Math: Valuing Companies in Your Head
Build the mental toolkit great investors use to size up any company in minutes: market cap, multiples, TAM, growth, and margins — and learn to reverse-engineer what a stock price is really assuming.
Learning with AI
In a world of instant AI answers, real learning is at risk. This series explores the science of how we learn and provides a practical framework for using AI not as a shortcut, but as a tool to deepen understanding through productive struggle and guided questioning.
Leonardo vs. Michelangelo — Two Geniuses, One Rivalry
Follow the real-life rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo through Renaissance Florence and Rome. Each Socratic lesson explores a masterpiece, a clash, or a way of thinking — from Leonardo's anatomy notebooks to the marble block nobody wanted. Students discover not just what these two geniuses made, but how differently they thought, worked, and struggled, and what their rivalry reveals about how great work gets made.
Lightning Under the Floor
Follow the energy through one real electric car, a 2018 Model 3: how it pushes the road, how its motor and inverter make a field that turns, what one icy wheel does to the push, where its weight and its heat go, and how it cruises, brakes, charges and copes with winter. Twelve investigations in a working model of the car, for ages 12 and up.
Marine Biology A—The Living Ocean: Environment & the Invisible Engine
Explore the physics and chemistry that shape life in the sea, then meet the microscopic organisms that power the entire ocean. Learners build a college-level foundation in oceanography and marine primary production.
Marine Biology B—Marine Invertebrates: Body Plans, Movement & Minds Without Brains
A tour of the ocean's spineless majority — from sponges to octopuses. Learners discover how evolution built radically different body plans, then explore how animals without backbones (and often without brains) move, sense, and solve problems.
Marine Biology C—Engineered by the Ocean: Locomotion, Osmoregulation & Reproduction in Marine Vertebrates
A deep dive into three great problems every marine vertebrate must solve: how to move through water, how to keep salt and water in balance, and how to reproduce in the sea — culminating in the extreme physiology of deep divers.
Marine Biology D—Ocean Systems — Ecosystems, Reefs & Conservation
How the ocean works as a system — and what happens when we push on it. Learners trace energy through food webs, explore the ocean's great habitats from vents to reefs, and analyze the science behind overfishing, warming, acidification, plastic pollution, and recovery.
Metal Detectives: One Metal at a Time
There are about 90 metals, and each one has its own secret. Become a metal detective and meet twelve star metals, one per lesson, to find out what makes each one special.
Nothing Touching: How Things Reach Across Space
Through ripples, claps, the Moon and sunlight, discover what actually travels when something far away makes something else move, and why some of these influences need no matter at all.
Peter and Wendy [Peter Pan] by J. M. Barrie
A read-along lesson series for independent readers ages 9–12. Each lesson pairs a chunk of the book with a deep dive into what Barrie is really doing — the craft, the ideas, and the questions that make this story much stranger and richer than most people expect.
Power and the Ideas That Justify It
How do rulers convince people to obey — and how do ideas bring them down? A globally minded, case-driven series exploring how political ideologies are used to claim, organize, and challenge power — from divine-right kings and anti-colonial movements to modern populists.
Pushes on the Ice
Time, slide, pull, weigh, push and ride across an indoor ice rink on a working test bench, and find out what a speed measures, what starts things moving, what stops them, and what a floor, a jet and a cushion of air can push. Eight lessons for ages 12 and up, the first of two courses that lead into The Physics of the Hopping Roadster.
Rivers, Gods, and Clay: The Story of Mesopotamia
Journey to the land between two rivers where humans built the first cities, invented writing, told the first epic stories, and raised temples to the Anunnaki gods — ending in the glory and fall of Babylon.
Roman Numerals: Carvings, Codes, and Pocket Stones
Explore how ancient Romans built their numeral system, read monumental inscriptions, and calculated without zero or place value.
Rooted to the Spot
A tree can never move, yet it must find food, lift water to its highest leaf, stand up to storms and get through winter. Follow one sour orange tree in Seville, from seed to its finest roots, and work out how it solves every problem standing still. Twelve investigations for ages 12 and up, inside a living model of the tree.
Science of Learning
Discover how learning really works — and how you can get better at it. In these short, Socratic lessons, you’ll explore what scientists and great thinkers know about how we learn, practice, and grow. <br><br>From explaining ideas clearly to learning from mistakes and asking deeper questions, each lesson helps you understand your own mind and become a more effective, self-aware learner.
Scientific Thinking
A series of real historical stories revealing the process of scientific thinking.
Slice It, Share It: The Secret Life of Fractions
A hands-on lesson series where you work out what fractions really are by sharing pizzas, cookies and ribbons. Then you put them on the number line, find their hidden twins, and compare them like a pro.
Spin It Yourself: Building Brushed and Brushless Motors from Scratch
Start with no physics background and discover how invisible forces make a wire spin. You'll build a simple brushed motor, then a brushless one, and understand exactly why each turns and how they differ.
Stories That Sell Themselves: Storytelling for Viral Ads
Learn to craft short text and video ads that people actually share. Each lesson pairs a real case from Ogilvy, Dave Trott, or Goodby Silverstein with hands-on practice: you apply every concept to your own ad, building and sharpening it lesson by lesson.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
A lesson-by-lesson companion to Mark Twain's classic, for readers aged 9–12 who want to go beyond the story and think like real readers. Each lesson pairs with a chapter group, builds one deep reading skill, and ends with a 'watch for' prompt that sharpens the next reading session.
The Art of Sinking
How can a steel boat dive, remain underwater and come back up? Investigate air-filled tanks, weight, water pressure, balance and steering inside a model of a historical fleet submarine. Eight investigations for ages 12 and up.
The Art of the Sharpened Joke: Reading and Writing Satire
A journey through the world's greatest satire — cartoons, fables, mock news, and trickster tales from many cultures. Decode each weapon in the satirist's toolkit, then immediately turn around and use it yourself, building toward your own finished satirical work.
The Big Trade: Adding When the Ones Spill Over
A hands-on series for 2nd graders on adding two-digit numbers when the ones add up past 9. Learners discover why ten ones must be traded for one ten, connect that trade to the written method, and pick up mental strategies and ways to check their own answers.
The Energy Is Not in the Wire: How Electricity Really Travels
A ground-up journey into one of physics' most counterintuitive truths: the energy that powers your lamp doesn't flow through the wire at all. Build the ideas of charge, fields, and energy flow step by step until the strange answer becomes obvious.
The Hidden Logic of Prices: Microeconomics from the Ground Up
Discover how prices, markets, and trade-offs really work — through prison camp economies, oil shocks, rent control battles, and used-car markets. Build the core toolkit of microeconomics one deep idea at a time.
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Read The Hobbit closely from its opening invitation to its return home. Follow narrator voice, comic danger, Bilbo's choices, songs, riddles and the competing claims to treasure. After the final chapter, compare the story's patterns and build an interpretation supported by Tolkien's words.
The Hoopoe's Mirror: What the Birds of Attar Tell Us About Ourselves
Each bird in Attar's Conference of the Birds has an excuse — and each excuse is a masterclass in the subtle ways we resist transformation. This course takes you through the birds one by one, not as moral fables but as Socratic investigations into the human patterns behind each refusal. You'll read closely, think carefully, and find yourself in the birds more often than is comfortable.
The Journey Inside You
Follow one drop of blood from your hand through the heart, the lungs and back, and work out for yourself where it goes, what pushes it, what stops it going backwards, how oxygen crosses a wall thinner than a hair, and what a pulse alone cannot tell you. Nine investigations for ages 12 and up, taught inside a working model of the heart and lungs.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
A Socratic lesson series that digs into the ideas, symbols, and moral questions C.S. Lewis hid in plain sight. Each lesson corresponds to a chapter chunk — read those chapters first, then dive in. The final lesson is for those who have finished the whole book.
The Living Boundary
Investigate why skin can hold water in, why sweat does not always cool, and why an unchanged touch becomes less noticeable. Follow growth in hair and nails using interactive skin models. Eight investigations for ages 12 and up.
The Long Way Down
Follow a meal through a working gut model. Investigate how swallowing directs food, muscles move it, chewing and enzymes break it down, and the lining absorbs nutrients and water. Six investigations for ages 12 and up.
The Mystery Outside the Wire: How Electricity Really Travels
When a switch flips, a lamp lights at once, even though the tiny charges inside the wire barely move. This series helps young learners follow clues, from crawling charges to twitching compasses, to discover for themselves where electric energy really travels and why we still need wires.
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
A read-along lesson series that pairs with each section of The Phantom Tollbooth, teaching young readers to read more deeply as they go — noticing symbols, themes, and ideas — then stepping back at the end to see the whole picture.
The Physics of the Hopping Roadster
Run Tesla's 2026 Roadster through the reveal's stunts on a working test bench: launch it, drive it upside down, fly it off a 23 m arch and over five cars, and find out what pushes it, presses it down and lifts it. Eight lessons for ages 12 and up.
The Picture Behind Your Eyes
Follow light through a working eye model. Investigate focus, underwater blur, glasses, pupils, colour and the signals that make seeing possible. Nine investigations for ages 12 and up, using visible comparisons to explain what changes.
The Room Behind the Walls
Open a working 3D bathroom and investigate the systems behind its walls. Flush with the supply closed, find out what stops the refill, work out why an unused basin starts to smell, compare hot-water time and waste, and diagnose unfamiliar faults. Eight guided investigations for ages 12 and up, with predictions, experiments and explanations grounded in the same room.
The Secret Life of a Tree: From Seed to Giant
Follow one tree's whole life — from a tiny sleeping seed to a towering old giant. Discover how trees wake up, eat sunlight, drink through hidden straws, grow taller and wider, stand strong in storms, fight off attackers, and help the whole forest.
The Shapes of Ideas
Train your mind's eye to see the hidden shapes of ideas — when two ideas are secretly the same, when they click together like puzzle pieces, and when one small change turns one idea into another.
The Stairs That Return
Investigate where an escalator’s steps go on the way back, how they stay level on the way up, why their tops are ridged like teeth, what a crowd does to the motor and how the whole machine stops. Use a working escalator to compare tracks, combs, handrails and brakes. Nine investigations for ages 12 and up.
The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann David Wyss
A read-along journey through The Swiss Family Robinson that builds deep literary and thematic analysis skills. Each lesson pairs a stretch of the book with one analytical lens — from narrative voice and setting to providence, ingenuity, and the story's surprising blind spots. Learners discover how a father wrote a story for his own sons, and what that intention planted inside every page.
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
A chapter-by-chapter deep dive into Ellen Raskin's Newbery-winning mystery — exploring what each character's moves reveal about human nature, and how Raskin pulled the strings behind the curtain to trick you, the reader, at every turn.
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A read-along lesson series that pairs each stretch of Kenneth Grahame's beloved classic with a deep Socratic lesson — sharpening your eye for character, language, and theme as you go, then stepping back at the end to see the whole river at once.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
A read-along series that turns readers into literary detectives. Lesson by lesson, learners read a section of the book, then dig into what Baum hid in plain sight — learning to track evidence, spot patterns, question characters' claims, and build real interpretations. Written for readers 8 and up, but the questions go all the way down.
The Young Inventor's Arduino Lab
Built for the official Arduino Starter Kit (any Uno kit with LEDs, resistors, buttons and a piezo buzzer works). Go from a single glowing light to coding your own reflex-testing game.
Thin Blood: How Aspirin and Vitamin E Change Your Clotting
A deep dive into how blood clots and how aspirin and vitamin E interfere with that process. You'll build the biology from scratch — platelets, enzymes, the clotting cascade — then uncover each substance's mechanism and what it means for exercise, injury, and everyday life.
Think for Yourself: Peer Pressure, Media, and Safer Decisions
Investigate how groups and media influence judgment, then practice boundaries, careful risk assessment, and getting help. Ten self-paced lessons with a Socratic AI tutor use research and fictional school situations without minimizing harm or blaming those mistreated.
Think for Yourself: Peer Pressure, Media, and Safer Decisions
Investigate how groups and media influence judgment, then practice boundaries, careful risk assessment, and getting help. Ten self-paced lessons with a Socratic AI tutor use research and fictional school situations without minimizing harm or blaming those mistreated.
Think Like a Forecaster: Robot Battles, Brackets, and Ballots
A self-paced Socratic series for a math-loving young predictor. Using BattleBots as the arena and elections as the second stage, learn to put honest numbers on guesses, grade them, update them as evidence arrives, rate robots with Elo, see how tournament formats reshape the odds, and read prediction markets as crowds putting a price on beliefs.
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island through its 34 chapters. Use original passages to examine Jim’s narration, Silver’s persuasive language, changing loyalties, and the pleasures and costs of adventure.
What's a Company Really Worth? From Multiples to DCF
A hands-on journey through stock valuation: learn to read financial statements, compare companies with the right multiples for the right business, and finally build an intrinsic valuation with discounted cash flows.
When the Sea Moved
Investigate the shape of the planet under the sea by moving the sea itself: the shelves around the continents, the land bridges between them, the gates that cut a sea off, the mountains and trenches of the deep floor, the land below sea level that stays dry, and what the ice on land would do. Taught on a live globe of the whole Earth built from measurements of the land and the sea floor. Eight investigations for ages 12 and up.
Who Will Win? The Art of Smart Predictions
Learn how expert forecasters guess the winners of games, elections, and contests, and how they change their guesses as new clues arrive. You'll practice making predictions you can actually check, and become a sharper, fairer guesser.
Why Nature Branches: The Secret Pattern Behind Rivers, Lungs, and Lightning
A journey to uncover why nature keeps choosing branches over grids, circles, or blobs — and how engineers borrow that answer. From rivers to lungs to lightning, each lesson reveals a different reason branching wins, ending with real nature-inspired inventions and a design challenge of your own.
Write to Think: Clear Essays the Way Real Writers Make Them
A self-paced Socratic series where you learn writing by writing: each lesson pairs short passages from great essayists with your own drafting, as you develop one real essay from a messy first attempt to a clear final piece. Built for a 12-year-old, and sharp enough for any adult who wants to write and think more clearly.
当有人故意伤害你:读懂欺凌与勇气
一个帮助12岁孩子深入理解欺凌的系列课。不只是告诉你"欺凌是不对的",而是带你探索欺凌为什么会发生、它如何影响每一个人,以及你真正可以做的事。