2013 was the most intellectually exciting year of my life.

Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas

To quote Bret Victor, Mindstorms is "perhaps the greatest book ever written on learning in general." Papert shows how people learn and how we can design computer systems to fit the learning process, especially for math. This book is extremely dense with insight and is fundamental to where I am today, both geographically and intellectually.

How Children Fail

John Holt observes children in his classroom and slowly develops ideas about why even "good students" are doing poorly. In doing so, he unpacks the school experience and shows in plain English why modern schools are terrible environments for learning. This book instantly made sense of my personal experiences in school and I will never be able to think as I did before. Everyone who has anything to do with education needs to read this book, and probably all his other books.

Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

This is not what I want to share. The actual thing that blew my mind from Bret Victor this year is currently unpublished. This talk is only a glimmer (and a confusing one, at that) of a much, much larger set of ideas that I suspect humanity will be trying to come to terms with for hundreds of years.

Designing for Tinkerability

There is no complete statement of the Lifelong Kindergarten principles, but this is the closest. A recognition of the power of playful exploration and how we can design tools facilitating it. I worked on the Scratch website for 7 months this year at the MIT Media Lab and picked up a lot through osmosis, including some great friends. :)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

More than anything, this book captures the process of scientific discovery, including the initial excitement and subsequent confusion and horror as discovery collides with the rest of society. Probably the best distillation of a time period ever.

What the Doormouse Said

A fantastic history of the beginning of computing, something I've studied quite a bit in the past year. Like The Making of the Atomic Bomb, it captures the time period well.

Deschooling Society

The incendiary writing style obscures what is otherwise a valuable vision of what education could be. I'm not really sold on any of the specific ideas, but the broad ideas are an essential perspective on education thinking.

Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy

What a true computing medium could look like and why it's important. I can see this book being completely unintelligible to most people, but I read it at exactly the right time to really get it. This was crucial in my understanding of Bret Victor's and Alan Kay's work.

Screenwriting 101

Action Scenes: Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3

Acting 101

Tangible Details and the Nature of Criticism

Beautiful, clear analysis of every aspect of film. I can never watch a movie the same way again.

Somerville STEAM Academy Innovation Plan

The most important experiment in education I know of. Every part of the plan for this new high school is thoughtfully designed in ways that are consistent with social justice, education theory, the Somerville community, and reality. Particularly important to me was seeing how the ideas of Seymour Papert, John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and Ivan Illich can be combined responsibly in practice. It's to-be-determined whether the plan will work, but for everyone's sake, I really hope it does.