Writing a computer program is often the best way to convince yourself that you really understand a problem. And an already-written computer program is often a good way to document the behavior of a complex system because you can play with it to see what happens in all the edge cases.

So I'm writing curricula that use computer programs as the primary teaching tool. One is for computer science, where the idea is that anyone who can read some python can pick up all the important ideas from a formal CS education without sitting through a year or more of preliminaries. Over time I'm planning to add smaller sections on more advanced topics.

The other curriculum is theoretical physics. There's already a good book that does classical mechanics [1] in scheme. I've hired some postdocs to learn scheme and code lessons in general relativity, statistical mechanics and so on. I do the lessons, solve the problems, and then we talk about what worked and what didn't. I work on this about ten hours a week. After a couple of years I should have knowledge roughly equivalent to an ABD physics grad student, plus teaching material that can take anyone else to the same level from modest beginnings.

I'm looking for collaborators on this project so don't be a stranger. Twitter/email is in my profile

[1] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo...