The App IS the Lesson

I stayed up late last week trying to record a lecture video on action potentials for my Neuroscience class. I kept redrawing the neuron, restarting the recording, trying to get the sequencing right. After about an hour of frustration, I stopped and asked myself a different question: why am I making a video at all?

What I actually wanted was for students to explore the process of an action potential unfolding, to interact with it, to discover the pattern before I named it. A video is passive. It shows. It tells. What I needed was something that let students do.

So I built an app instead.

Build What You Need

Using Claude Code, I built a small interactive simulation that scaffolds the action potential process for students. It is tailored specifically to my class, my sequence, my learning goals. No extra features, no unnecessary information, no generic PhET simulation that shows too much too soon. Just the right amount of discovery at the right moment.

Here is the thing that surprised me: the app took less time to build than the video would have taken to record and edit. And it does something a video never could. It lets students interact, explore, and arrive at understanding on their own terms.

The shift: I was not looking for a tool. I was not shopping for a simulation. I was building exactly what my students needed, and the act of building it forced me to think more carefully about the learning experience than any lesson plan ever would.

I shared both apps with my colleagues this week. The Action Potential App and the Demyelination App are live. They are simple, purposeful, and built for inquiry. If you want to see what "build the tool" looks like in practice, start there.

Is Software Dead?

This experience pushed me into a bigger question that I have been turning over for weeks: is traditional educational software dead?

Think about it. We used to search for the right app, the right simulation, the right platform. We evaluated SaaS products, compared features, sat through demos. And most of the time, the tool was close but not quite right. Too broad, too narrow, too cluttered, too rigid.

Now students can build their own. A student struggling with organic chemistry can use Claude to generate a tailored study app. A student mapping historical events can create a custom timeline tool. A student learning Arduino can build a simulation specific to their project. The combination of Claude and NotebookLM has quietly made one-size-fits-all software feel like a relic.

The question I keep coming back to: should we be teaching students how to dynamically create tools in response to their own learning needs? Not coding for coding's sake, but building as a form of thinking. The app is not the product. The app is the process.

Rigor and Creativity in the Same Breath

There is a tension I feel every week between wanting rigorous, measurable learning and wanting students to create freely. Grading makes it harder. Standards make it harder. The instinct to control the outcome makes it harder.

But here is what I am learning: when students build something, the rigor is embedded in the building. You cannot build an action potential simulation without understanding action potentials. You cannot create a study tool without deeply engaging with the content. The creative act and the rigorous thinking are not in tension. They are the same thing.

The challenge is designing assessment structures that honor this. Standard grade formats were not built for student-created software. They were built for essays and exams. I do not have a clean answer yet, but I think the answer lives somewhere in the process documentation, in the iteration, in the visible thinking that building requires.

The real question: How do we build classrooms where rigor and creativity are not competing values but inseparable ones? Where the standard and the project are the same thing?

I am still working on this. But the action potential app taught me something I did not expect: sometimes the best lesson plan is not a plan at all. It is a tool that did not exist until you needed it.

Resources

Action Potential Interactive App

Demyelination Interactive App