The challenge
Good learning material is either locked behind a paywall or delivered as static text and hour-long lectures. Neither suits a hard technical subject: students lose the thread partway through a derivation and have no way to slow it down, replay one step, or check whether they actually followed it.
What we did
- Nothing moves until the student presses play, and each press runs exactly one animation — so the thread is never lost.
- The written explanation sits beside the canvas and lights up line by line, matching whatever just animated.
- Short quizzes and interactive sliders let students test an idea rather than only watch it.
- Lessons follow actual lecture notes and slides, using the same notation and examples students already have in front of them.
- Any animation can be replayed or re-timed, and progress is saved in the browser so a lesson can be picked up where it stopped.
- A searchable glossary defines every term used and links back to the lesson that teaches it.
The outcome
Tutorials180 is live at tutorials180.com with its first subject, Deep Learning: 19 lessons across 2 lectures and 141 minutes of animation, covering what machine learning is through linear and logistic regression, gradient descent, overfitting and regularization — free to every student.