Making the Lesson, Not Planning It

A month ago I wrote about how the app is the lesson. This week I crossed a quieter threshold. I am no longer building apps as enrichment, or as a special-occasion tool. I am building them instead of planning. The app is the planning. The act of designing the interaction is the act of thinking through what students need to do.

I can see this getting addicting, and I am not entirely sure that is a bad thing.

The Withdrawal App Became a Guest Lecture

The clearest example from this week was an app I built on the neuroscience of withdrawal. It leverages clips from Basketball Diaries, Leaving Las Vegas, and Beautiful Boy to ground the synaptic story in real human stakes. I am proud of this one. It walks students through how the synapse works normally, how a drug changes synapse activity, how the body compensates, and what happens at withdrawal.

Then I used it as the spine of a guest-lecturer activity I called Company Development. Students broke into small companies, each assigned a drug (alcohol, cocaine, meth, ecstasy, fentanyl), and each company had three roles. A graphic designer built an infographic, by hand or with Canva or NotebookLM, that walked through the four stages with strategic callouts instead of paragraphs. A videographer used Play-Doh and a ring-stand overhead camera to make a stop-motion explainer using only voice and hands. A computer scientist built a public-facing web app explaining the same four stages, and got a half-day of consulting time to learn how to deploy it publicly. The whole team submitted as one Google folder with all deliverables and the live URL inside. Ten points per role, thirty total.

What I keep noticing about this kind of project is that the rigor lives inside the building. You cannot make the infographic without understanding the synapse. You cannot voice over the Play-Doh without owning the sequence. You cannot deploy the web app without choosing what to keep and what to leave out. The assessment is the artifact.

The pattern: Build the app, then let the app become the lecture, then let the lecture become a project where students build their own apps. The teacher's tool becomes the student's task. The loop closes.

The same week, I made a review game in the same format. I am loving this review-game pattern, three rounds of ten questions with a scoreboard sidebar and a timer. Building it took about as long as designing one good quiz, and it lives forever.

Which leads to the harder question this project surfaced: when is public student work appropriate, and when does it cross into territory I do not want to be in? Live URLs are powerful for motivation and for portfolio. But a public app explaining the neuroscience of fentanyl is a different artifact than a private folder of homework. I am still working out where the line is. I want students to feel the lift of authentic audience without sacrificing their privacy integrity. If you have figured this out, write back.

Digital vs Physical Companions

I added a feature to Spark Learning this week. Every time a teacher generates a cycle PDF, the system now also generates a digital companion, with a QR code on the front of the printout that opens the digital version on a phone or laptop. It is a small thing, but it has me rethinking how I want students to take notes.

My chemistry students have been working out of physical Spark notebooks all year. I cannot tell yet whether those notebooks are reducing cognitive load (everything in one place, everything chronological) or quietly overloading it (copy this, paste that, draw this diagram, transcribe this equation). Science is the tricky case. Students need to draw formulas. They need to sketch reactions. The physical notebook has a real role. But maybe not every part of the notebook needs to be physical.

What I am curious about is a hybrid. Everything digital by default, with a clean, well-curated paper notebook that students build themselves. A real table of contents. Things they choose to copy down because they decided those things mattered. Something they take pride in. Less transcription, more curation. The notebook becomes a museum of their own thinking rather than a photocopy of mine.

QR codes keep being the bridge. It is amazing how long QR codes have stood the test of time. Whatever future scanning technology arrives, the QR code is the duct tape that ties a paper page to a live web app, every single time.

Algorithmic vs Conceptual Chemistry

I am back on the question I floated last month about dimensional analysis. I do not have an answer yet, but I have a sharper version of the question. Is stoichiometry actually just fractions? Is dimensional analysis a beautiful inherited aesthetic that occasionally gets in the way of the underlying ratio reasoning? Is the mole map a clearer scaffold than the ICE table for some students, or am I just nostalgic for a tool I learned twenty years ago?

What I keep coming back to is the difference between algorithmic knowledge and conceptual knowledge. A student can run a mole-to-mole conversion correctly and not actually know what a mole is. A student can fill in an ICE table flawlessly and miss the equilibrium story. We have built a generation of routines that produce right answers without producing understanding. That is a problem the textbooks did not invent, but they did harden it.

I am drawn to the Building Thinking Classrooms approach for this reason. Vertical whiteboards. Visibly random groupings. Tasks that demand reasoning before procedure. I want this in chemistry, and I am not sure how to do it inside a class where demonstration is so prevalent. How do you build inquiry into a flame test? Into a redox demo? Into the moments where the instinct is to show, not ask? I am chewing on it.

The shift I want to make: Replace at least one algorithmic routine per unit with a thinking task on a vertical surface. The mole map is the worksheet. The conceptual question is the whiteboard.

And one related thread, mostly for the future-of-software pile: is making websites dead? Wix, Weebly, all of it. If a student can spin up a tailored app in twenty minutes, do they still need the dragged-and-dropped homepage? I am not sure. But it feels like the wind has shifted.

A Closing Reframe

One last thing. A podcast this week reframed dopamine for me in a way I have not stopped thinking about. We talk about cell phones as addictive, and we use the alcohol or cocaine model: dopamine, tolerance, withdrawal. But the podcast made the case that phone use is closer to OCD than to substance addiction. It is a hijacked compulsion loop. The reward is not what is driving the scroll. The relief from the urge to check is.

If that is right, the way we talk to students about phones needs to change. Not "this is addictive," but "this is eliciting an OCD-type response." That is a different conversation, a different set of strategies, and probably a different curriculum thread. I am going to try it next year and see if the language lands differently.

Which brings me back to where I started. The app I built on withdrawal taught my students about real neurochemistry. The conversation about their phones might benefit from a totally different model. The job of the teacher is to know which frame to reach for, and when. And maybe also to build the tool that helps the students see the difference for themselves.

Resources

Addiction & Withdrawal App

Addiction & Withdrawal Review Game

Building Thinking Classrooms

Maven (AI tips reference on Instagram)