In the summer of 2011, Sal shared a “Big Idea” at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The idea was to combine the power of Khan Academy with the network of the Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies organization, to bring the ideas and perspectives of some of the most respected authorities on various subjects to learners anywhere, for free.

Over the past several months, Khan Academy and the Aspen Institute have been working in partnership to develop a new and exciting series on the American Revolution. Just last week, we launched that series which includes tutorials on the founding documents, founding fathers, and founding mothers of the United States of America. This initial offering of videos lives up to the idea of bringing together respected authorities on the subject, and the videos feature conversations between Sir Walter Isaacson and a variety of phenomenal contributors including Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joe Ellis, award-winning journalist Cokie Roberts, and our very own Sal Khan. 

Rather than offering simplified answers or shying away from unanswered questions, this first series of videos introduces learners to the complexities of the revolutionary era. They use the stories of the prominent individuals and revolutionary documents of the day to draw learners deeper into the history. Beyond the dates, names, and battles, the story of the founding comes alive and beckons the curious to investigate further.

These tutorials on the American Revolution are a great starting point and we look forward to exploring other areas with the Aspen Institute in the future. More to come soon! Check out this and other partner content available today on Khan Academy.

Start here

Post from Rishi Desai, MD, MPH, Khan Academy Medical Partnerships Lead

About two months ago we launched two competitions to find talented individuals that could help us by making videos, creating questions, or writing articles for the 2015 Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). The 2015 MCAT is different from the previous MCAT exam because it will include new content in areas like psychology and sociology. To help students get ready for this new exam, Khan Academy has partnered up with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Association of American Medical Colleges, and so far we have put together a collection of 500 videos and 600 practice MCAT questions.

The competitions were a tremendous success and we found 12 video competition winners and 20 question and article writing competition winners. We asked all of them why they decided to participate in the competition. Meet our winners and see what they had to say:

MCAT Video competition winners:

Efrat Bruck

Columbia University Medical Center

Khan Academy has always been an invaluable resource for me. It enriched my undergraduate experience, aided me in preparing for the MCAT, and helped me tremendously in my educational work as a high school teacher.

Florence Doo

Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine

Between kindergarten and med school, I’ve always gravitated towards teachers who really engaged me. I hope to share my love of learning & teaching to future pre-meds and medical students.

James Howick

Georgetown University

I am honored to be contributing to the education of students around the world with Khan Academy.

Jubin Matloubieh

Match Corps: Chicago/University of Rochester

Education is key to humanity’s progress and prosperity, and teaching is my passion. I am privileged to champion Khan Academy’s mission to provide open-access education to all who seek it.

Brooke Miller

University of Texas, Austin

Khan Academy has always struck me as a better, more modern way to educate people of all ages and backgrounds. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to it myself.

Jeff Otjen

Seattle Children’s Hospital and University of Washington

Online education can be a great equalizer. I have always been an educator and am excited to help change the world in a new way.

Vishal Punwani

Melbourne Medical School

I was very well-supported by Khan Academy’s content on my journey to medical school, so I’m excited to now contribute in any way that I can.

Theodore Roth

University of California, San Francisco

I’m excited to get the chance to give back through the MCAT video competition!

Arshya Vahabzadeh

Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School

I thrive on pushing the limits. Education is a great equalizer and Khan Academy has leveled the playing field. I am very excited about the possibilities ahead.

Jordan Weil

University of Minnesota

I’m really excited to help my fellow aspiring physicians (and dentists, nurses, pharmacists, physician assistants, etc.) by sharing the skills that I picked up as an undergraduate and beyond.

MCAT Question/article competition winners:

Jason Batten

Stanford University School of Medicine

For the past six years, I have taught chemistry and physics to low-income students in South Central Los Angeles. I’m writing free MCAT resources so that students like these can have an equal chance at medical school.

David Bridge

College of the Redwoods

This competition is my chance to give back to such a diverse and wonderful learning community.

Jeff Collins

Westminster College

I want to give back to collaborative efforts like Khan Academy that make information and learning resources freely available to everyone, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Aleksandra Degtyar

UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine

I applied for this competition because I’ve always loved medicine and education, and I wanted to help Khan Academy integrate the two.

Humberto Dutra

Life University

I am firm believer that high quality education should be available to everyone. This is a great opportunity to provide resources to anyone that wants to go medical school.

Bijaya Ghosh

NSHM College of Pharmaceutical Technology

I wanted to join this initiative because I believe that by offering equal education to an unequal world, we can help to remove barriers to success.

Rabee Haq

University of Maryland, College Park

I applied to this competition because I want everyone to be able to pursue their dream of being a physician, and that begins with making high quality MCAT content available for free.

Bradley Kolb

University of Michigan

This competition was an opportunity to use my expertise to contribute to the Khan Academy mission.

Clement Lin

DePaul University

I applied because I have always been interested in the sociology of health issues, and I’m interested in optimizing online education.

Kelly MacKenzie

American University

I have always loved learning and am excited for the opportunity to share what I know. I hope to make psychology topics relevant and interesting for those who may enjoy learning as much as I do, but may not have access to the same resources or materials.

Sruti Nadimpalli

Columbia University Medical Center

Having had the privilege of a quality education and excellent teachers throughout my medical career, I believe that any person driven to learn should have unfettered access to expert instruction.

Lucas Philipp

Emory University School of Medicine

Khan Academy has saved my (academic) life more times than I can count. The opportunity to return the favor in some modest way, is one that I simply could not miss.

Edward Sanchez

Orlando Regional Medical Center

I have always been interested in academics, and I wanted to help to provide free high quality education to those who desire to learn.

Chris Su

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

We learn in college and medical school that the best notes are written by students for fellow students. It’s time to give back.

Garrick Trapp

Columbia University Medical Center

Barriers to education can often stall dreams, so that’s why I revere the idea of free basic science education and test prep. I am humbled to join this community of learners and educators.

Anna Tsimelzon

Self-employed

I decided to take part in the competition because I am interested in education; particularly non-traditional and non-standard approaches. The MCAT competition was a chance for me to try myself at this new approach.

Sze Yan

University of Chicago

I am always seeking new and more impactful ways to contribute back to underrepresented and underserved communities. This competition was the perfect way to give back as I am truly passionate about by using my experience to promote equalizing access to resources..

Allen Zheng

Edboost Education Corporation

The opportunity to level the playing field for students, especially low-income high school students interested in pursuing medical education is what motivates me.

---

Winners of both MCAT competitions:

John Luckoski

University of Toledo College of Medicine

I have developed a deep passion for education since becoming a tutor at my school, where we have actually started our own initiative of online videos to supplement our lecture material.  I am eager to contribute to something larger than myself.

Matthew McPheeters

University of Minnesota School of Medicine

I am fortunate to have had access to great teachers throughout my career as an undergraduate and medical student. I hope to extend the influence teachers have had on me to others around the world.

Post by: Beth Harris and Steven Zucker,
KA Deans for Art and History

Walking through the British Museum is to walk through the history of the great civilizations of the world. The Rosetta Stone. Aztec mosaic masks. Buddhist manuscripts that had been hidden for years in a cave. Some of the most extraordinary historical objects in the world live there, and we’re so excited today to announce that we’ve partnered with the world’s oldest national public museum. Both institutions, Khan Academy and the British Museum, share a wish to provide access to the world’s treasures to everyone, wherever they live. It’s hard not to be awed by this venerable institution—the breadth of its collection (geographically and chronologically) is virtually unparalleled, and it’s not surprising that it is one of the most visited museums in the world.

Khan Academy has created tutorials selected from the museum’s more than 3 million objects that serve to educate people about the history and culture of the world’s great civilizations—objects from nearly every corner of the world. The British Museum’s collection includes objects from sacred caves, tombs, palaces, homes, and temples: both objects people used every day (pots, tools, jewellery, and coins), and objects they held sacred—and now you can learn their context and background—from wherever you are in the world.

On a personal level, we have a long history with the British Museum ourselves!

Steven first visited when he was 11 years old, and he remembers the ancient Egyptian mummies best, but he also remembers being amazed by how differently each culture portrayed what was important to them. Beth spent months on end in the circular, domed reading room of the British Library which was then in the center of the Museum, while writing her Masters thesis, taking her breaks in the galleries to get inspired. We’re so happy that many more people around the world can imagine themselves here, and perhaps one day visit themselves.

Our mission at Khan Academy is to enable everyone, everywhere to achieve a world-class education, and the Internet has played a pivotal role in fulfilling that mission. Recognizing that the majority of the world still does not have access to the Internet, we told you back in December of 2012 about the KA Lite project, started by a former KA intern, aiming to make Khan Academy available to communities that don’t have the prerequisite Internet access.

At the time KA Lite was launched, 65% of the world did not have Internet access. In the intervening 18 months, Internet penetration has increased a mere few percent, while KA Lite usage around the world has blossomed, supported by the KA Lite team that banded together to form the non-profit organization Learning Equality. KA Lite has now been installed in over 120 countries, in contexts as varied as low-income schools in India, orphanages in Cameroon, prisons across the United States, and First Nations community centers in northern Canada. Learning Equality has just announced a map of the world showing where thousands of these KA Lite installations are located, including a number of featured deployments with stories and photos.

You can stay in the loop about Learning Equality’s work by following them on Facebook or Twitter, and subscribing to their newsletter. If you’d like to get involved in developing the open-source KA Lite project, or in helping with implementations, you can drop the Learning Equality team a line at info@learningequality.org.

By: Salman Khan

Join the #YouCanLearnAnything movement

My 5-year-­old son has just started reading. Every night, we lie on his bed and he reads a short book to me. Inevitably, he’ll hit a word that he has trouble with: last night the word was “gratefully.” He eventually got it after a fairly painful minute. He then said, “Dad, aren’t you glad how I struggled with that word? I think I could feel my brain growing.” I smiled: my son was now verbalizing the tell­-tale signs of a “growth­ mindset.” But this wasn’t by accident. Recently, I put into practice research I had been reading about for the past few years: I decided to praise my son not when he succeeded at things he was already good at, but when he persevered with things that he found difficult. I stressed to him that by struggling, your brain grows. Between the deep body of research on the field of learning mindsets and this personal experience with my son, I am more convinced than ever that mindsets toward learning could matter more than anything else we teach.

Researchers have known for some time that the brain is like a muscle; that the more you use it, the more it grows. They’ve found that neural connections form and deepen most when we make mistakes doing difficult tasks rather than repeatedly having success with easy ones.

What this means is that our intelligence is not fixed, and the best way that we can grow our intelligence is to embrace tasks where we might struggle and fail.

However, not everyone realizes this. Dr. Carol Dweck of Stanford University has been studying people’s mindsets towards learning for decades. She has found that most people adhere to one of two mindsets: fixed or growth. Fixed mindsets mistakenly believe that people are either smart or not, that intelligence is fixed by genes. People with growth mindsets correctly believe that capability and intelligence can be grown through effort, struggle and failure. Dweck found that those with a fixed mindset tended to focus their effort on tasks where they had a high likelihood of success and avoided tasks where they may have had to struggle, which limited their learning. People with a growth mindset, however, embraced challenges, and understood that tenacity and effort could change their learning outcomes. As you can imagine, this correlated with the latter group more actively pushing themselves and growing intellectually.

The good news is that mindsets can be taught; they’re malleable. What’s really fascinating is that Dweck and others have developed techniques that they call “growth mindset interventions,” which have shown that even small changes in communication or seemingly innocuous comments can have fairly long­-lasting implications for a person’s mindset. For instance, praising someone’s process (“I really like how you struggled with that problem”) versus praising an innate trait or talent (“You’re so clever!”) is one way to reinforce a growth ­mindset with someone. Process­ praise acknowledges the effort; talent­ praise reinforces the notion that one only succeeds (or doesn’t) based on a fixed trait. And we’ve seen this on Khan Academy as well: students are spending more time learning on Khan Academy after being exposed to messages that praise their tenacity and grit and that underscore that the brain is like a muscle.

The Internet is a dream for someone with a growth mindset. Between Khan Academy, MOOCs, and others, there is unprecedented access to endless content to help you grow your mind. However, society isn’t going to fully take advantage of this without growth mindsets being more prevalent. So what if we actively tried to change that? What if we began using whatever means are at our disposal to start performing growth mindset interventions on everyone we cared about? This is much bigger than Khan Academy or algebra — it applies to how you communicate with your children, how you manage your team at work, how you learn a new language or instrument. If society as a whole begins to embrace the struggle of learning, there is no end to what that could mean for global human potential.

And now here’s a surprise for you. By reading this article itself, you’ve just undergone the first half of a growth­-mindset intervention. The research shows that just being exposed to the research itself (­­for example, knowing that the brain grows most by getting questions wrong, not right­­) can begin to change a person’s mindset. The second half of the intervention is for you to communicate the research with others. We’ve made a video (above) that celebrates the struggle of learning that will help you do this. After all, when my son, or for that matter, anyone else asks me about learning, I only want them to know one thing. As long as they embrace struggle and mistakes, they can learn anything.

— You can view the original op-ed in Huffington Post here.

Where do 200 of the world’s leading scientists work to advance our knowledge of anthropology, astrophysics, comparative genomics, computational sciences, evolutionary biology, herpetology, ichthyology, invertebrate zoology, microbiology, ornithology, and paleontology? The American Museum of Natural History in New York is not only a museum filled with towering dinosaurs, meteorites you can touch, and delighted, curious children; it is also a leading research institution with 32 million specimens and artifacts and an incredibly active field program that sends researchers on more than one hundred expeditions every year.

The American Museum of Natural History is a first-rate educational institution that inspires learners of all ages and was the first Ph.D. degree-granting museum in the Western Hemisphere. Naturally, we are absolutely delighted to announce a new partnership between this venerable institution and Khan Academy today.

Where to begin? Maybe with an essay by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Museum’s Hayden Planetarium on “The Pluto Controversy” or a video about dark energy? Or if dinosaurs captivate you, discover how scientists have linked them to modern birds or perhaps take a tour of the Museum’s “big bone room” with paleontology collection manager Carl Mehling.

Wherever your curiosity takes you, be sure to check back later this fall for even more great content from our newest partner, the American Museum of Natural History!

Today we’re happy to announce that Khan Academy is live en Français. You can access our content all in French whether you’re from Paris or Port-au-Prince.  Just visit fr.khanacademy.org to start learning in French.

We thought it would be fun to show you some of the team of dedicated translators who helped make this possible. Merci to one and all and thanks for your hard work and enthusiasm in making this happen!

Mathieu Bardeau

After a Master’s degree in management at Edhec Business School, I put into practice what I had been taught, and joined the media industry. Working with the Khan Academy is great because it combines my skills in addition, subtraction, and even multiplication, with my passion for telling stories.

Thomas Blasselle

I am a math addict! I taught math after college, and eventually became a school book editor specializing in various sciences subjects. Khan Academy’s math look more like what I believe maths should be: a living matter made of reflection and research.

Pierre Bondareff

I am a physics and chemistry teacher and recently also got my PhD in physics. When I heard about Khan Academy, I was immediately very enthusiastic to participate in this modern adventure. I like teaching to others and Khan Academy allows me to do it in a very direct way. Wherever you are, with a well-working education system or not, an internet connection will be enough to connect yourself on the website and to learn at your pace.

Bastien Bruneau

I specialized in renewable energy at Ecole Polytechnique, where I am still working for my PhD on plasmas and photovoltaic research. I strongly believe that the Khan Academy brings something new and innovative to the way knowledge is passed on.

Romain Cariou

I am at the beginning of the end of my thesis on material science and photovoltaic cells, at the Ecole Polytechnique. When I was a student, YouTube was more full of videos of cats and babies, rather than Newton’s Laws, Matrix or Stereochemistry. The democratic way of sharing knowledge with Khan Academy’s approach of is a great initiative; all you need is internet and a little curiosity to benefit from it.

Eloa Chosson

I’ve always been captivated by mathematics. After I graduated from the Toulouse School of Economics, I went to Australia and ended up training horses on remote stations where most children are taught by their parents through a homeschooling system. I thus got a grasp of the importance of distance education and this is why I decided to get involved in the Khan Academy project. I now enjoy translating Sal’s videos because of his innovative approach and his way of making maths concepts easy to understand and remember.

Isabelle Dautriche

I am a PhD student at Ecole Normale Supérieure, working on language acquisition (how do infants acquire their native language?) Making some videos for Khan Academy is a great combination with my PhD because when my research gets stuck, I can do a 10min video which will be useful for kids, teenagers and adults. Perhaps this is actually the most useful job that I’ll ever have!

Yassine El Ouarzazi

I grew up in Casablanca, Morocco, and moved to France when I was 17 to go to engineering school.  I have a passion for science and education, and I immediately fell in love with Khan Academy after watching Salman Khan’s TED talk. I hope this project will help my two kids and millions of other ones in my continent of origin, Africa, to have access to “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere”.

Ramïn Farhangi

After getting an Engineering degree from Cornell University and Ecole Centrale Paris, I now live my passion as a Math/Physics teacher in Madrid. I joined the Khan Academy team in France because it’s fun to make videos, it improves my teaching skills, and because I help providing the world (and notably developing countries) with high quality lessons.Working for Khan Academy has indeed given my life more meaning!

Lydie Morel

I graduated from a PhD of Neuroscience and spent four years in Boston where I learned English and discovered Salman Khan and his work with the Khan Academy. When I got the lucky opportunity to join the Bibliothèque sans Frontières’ team of translators, I grabbed it! As a kid, I used to play with math exercises in my free time: I always tried to help my schoolmates see the elegant, logic and fun aspects of mathematics. 

Muy-Cheng Peich

I am currently almost at the end of a PhD in social cognition which focuses on social interaction deficits in neurodegenerative diseases. I have always loved helping others understand things that fascinated me or things that I had found challenging to learn. I strongly believe in the use of technologies to reduce social inequality in education- that’s one the reasons why I joined BSF as the head of the education department.

Sophie Pelloux

After a PhD in biology, I finally became a general practitioner. I have always been interested in education, in medicine and beyond, and I strongly believe that each student should learn at his/her own pace. I discovered Khan Academy several years ago, while I was trying to help my cousins understand math. One of their issues at that time was that the content was available in English but not in French… I am glad to see that the mathematical part is now ready to run in French, and to have the opportunity to translate the health content videos!

Nicolas Roux

I am currently involved in a PhD where I study water resource in arctic areas, where permafrost (frozen ground) makes access difficult. Teaching is for me as important as research, so I naturally saw in Khan Academy a unique opportunity to reach a larger audience than the one classic teaching could ever possibly allow me to reach.

Also a special thanks to the translation team at Bibliothèques Sans Frontière!

The research shows that when you realize that you can build up your abilities through effort you actually learn more.

So we wanted to share a few of our favorite videos that inspire this attitude and carry the message that we can all grow.

Here are our current top 3:

3. Michael Jordan

2. Yoda

1. Kid who just learned how to ride a bike

Know a cool video like these?  We’d love to see the videos that most inspire you so please share them with us here on our Facebook page .

Can’t wait to be inspired by what you share!

Khan Academy is now introducing video tasks on the learning dashboard. Prior to this release, the mission dashboard consisted exclusively of practice and mastery tasks—problems to practice and interact with the skills. If a student didn’t know how to do a particular exercise, they would have to rely on the video in the specific skill or manually look up the video, and there was no way to know ahead of time which videos are particularly useful and which aren’t. With this in mind, we decided to research which videos on our site are most effective in helping people learn. We then wanted to explore how we could make sure students see these videos when trying to learn related skills.

Many of our exercises are tagged with “curated related videos”—videos that are hand-selected as related to the exercise. Using this as a starting point, we looked at all the videos that were already tagged as related to any exercise. For each of these videos, we compared the accuracy on its associated exercise both before watching the video and after watching it. From there, we selected the top fifty most effective videos, each improving the accuracy on its associated exercise by at least twenty percent, and are now highlighting them on the mission dashboard. When the system recommends an exercise with an associated video on the list of our top fifty related videos, it will automatically recommend the related video as well. Similarly, when an exercise with an associated video task is manually added to a student’s list of exercises as a personal task, the video task will also be added automatically.

A student might watch the video before attempting the exercise, which is why we place the video tasks immediately above its associated exercise. Alternatively, a student may want to attempt the exercise first, and if they struggle with the exercise then they can close it out temporarily and watch the video before trying again.

If a student doesn’t need to watch the video, the video task can disappear in three ways. If the student watches the video, the video task will never reappear for that student. The student can also remove the video task without watching it and it will never again be shown to them. Finally, if the student completes the associated exercise and renavigates to the mission dashboard (refreshing the page, e.g.), the video task will also go away. However, in this last scenario, if the exercise ever reappears on the mission dashboard of this student, the video task will also return.

We sincerely hope you find this update as exciting and useful as we do!

As part of the White House Expanding College Access Initiative, we’ve created an in-depth college admissions resource for high school students and college counselors across the country.

Our college admissions content covers the high school journey, providing college guidance whether you’re a senior or a freshman. It takes a holistic approach: from overcoming cultural barriers to step-by-step walkthroughs for the Common App and FAFSA forms. The site includes sections on considering college as an option, understanding how your high school record counts towards college, navigating different college options, writing college applications, and applying for financial aid. We’ve designed this site for students who’d like to access the site on their own, but it can be equally integrated into counsellor-student guidance sessions.

This site is a collective effort from over nine months of research: it contains 100+ informational videos covering the college admissions process from start to finish, broken down into simple, understandable pieces. We’ve drawn on the expertise of admissions and financial aid officers from top public and private colleges, high school guidance counselors, and current college students from around the country.

We hope you find the college admissions resources useful as you embark on your college journey!

The Big History Project is now available on Khan Academy. Whether you’re a solo learner or a classroom teacher, get ready to take a self-paced journey through nearly 14 billion years of history in just 10 tutorials!

Big History asks the big questions about our universe, our planet, life and humanity. From the Big Bang to our still-expanding universe, this course, created and maintained by the Big History Project, will lead students on a journey of astounding connections and exciting discoveries. 

The lessons also draw upon the insights of history, chemistry, biology, anthropology, physics, and a variety of other disciplines. Teacher-created lessons include downloadable activities, engaging videos, animations, and articles that bring the voices of leading scholars from around the world to you…and bring history to life.

Today, there’s more information available to us on our phones than was available in all the great libraries of Alexandria, so how do we decide what claims we can trust? Big History guides learners through examining their intuition, looking at the authority, evidence, and logic of claims.

Big History also looks beyond the timeline of human history to explore the connections between distant events billions of years ago and our lives today.

From the massive expanse of the universe to the smallest of atoms, Big History guides you to think across temporal and physical scales.

Both in articles and at the end of each tutorial, students and teachers can access downloadable and printable classroom resources such as lesson transcripts, video transcripts, worksheets and answer keys. Quizzes and glossary challenges allow teachers to assess student comprehension.

Start your journey now!

Back in June we told you that we’d be experimenting with a learning lab, and today marks the opening of the Khan Lab School, which will be composed of a small cohort of around 30 students.

Khan Academy has a history of summer camps and working with classrooms, which have both really helped us better understand opportunities to help teachers and students.

In order to take an even more hands-on and sustained approach, the Khan Lab School will research blended learning and education innovation by creating a working model of Khan Academy’s philosophy of learning in a physical school environment and sharing the learnings garnered with schools and networks around the world.

Our goal is to develop new, personalized practices that center around the student. As this model is developed, we will be sharing and testing the practices in diverse settings to offer new ways of thinking about Khan Academy and the classroom.

The lab school will focus on developing practices that empower students to realize that they can shape the systems and solve problems of the world through their own character, intellect, and passion.

There are already thousands of classrooms across the world that are using Khan Academy. We learn so much from these classrooms and try to share those learnings with other schools and educators. A small-scale lab school helps us further explore how physical environments can be reimagined and blended with online tools to empower teachers and students.

The intent is not just to develop practices, but also to share them in ways most likely to effect broad change. We intend to further share with the world through in-house research fellowships, teacher workshops, videos, publications, and the broader Khan Academy platform.

As this is a research lab school, it is not open for general enrollment at this time. But if you’d like to be on an email list to hear more about the lab school in the coming months, you can sign up here.

- Jason Pittman, Head Teacher, on behalf of the Khan Lab School team

What is an algorithm? It’s a sequence of steps that you follow to solve a problem. In everyday life, you might have an algorithm for hanging up your laundry, efficiently going through a shopping list, or finding an empty parking space in a lot. In computer science, an algorithm is a sequence of instructions that a computer program follows. Algorithms form the basis of the most interesting and important programs we use, such as the algorithm that Google uses to calculate driving directions, or the algorithm that Facebook uses to automatically tag you in a photo.

Because algorithms are so important to computer science, they are a core part of a computer science curriculum. The AP CS A class teaches object-oriented programming with algorithms,  every college CS student will have at least one algorithms class and encounter algorithms everywhere, and every software engineer interviewing for a job will review algorithms while they’re prepping for an interview.

Given how important algorithms are, we were elated when Dartmouth professors Thomas Cormen and Devin Balkcom suggested writing an online course on Algorithms, available to anyone for free, forever, on Khan Academy. If you’re a college CS student, you might recognize the name “Cormen” - he’s the “C” in the “CLRS”-authored Algorithms textbook, the most popular algorithms textbook used by college classes. Balkcom is a fellow professor at Dartmouth, and he’s actually rewritten their introductory CS class, so he’s an expert in teaching algorithms to new computer science students.

 We worked over the summer to create an introductory Algorithms class that’s highly interactive. Algorithms can be hard to wrap your head around, so we have both step-by-step diagrams and interactive visualizations to explain each algorithm:

We also want to give you a chance to try coding the algorithms yourself, so we’ve used our JavaScript coding challenge framework to write 19 challenges with unit tests (and you’ll have to write unit tests yourself!):

We’ve also sprinkled in a few quizzes, to make sure you understand concepts like asymptotic and graph notation:

This curriculum covers everything you’d find in an intro course - asymptotic notation, binary search, selection/insertion sort, recursion, merge/quick sort, graph representation, and breadth first search. There’s much more to cover, of course, including going more into how you can design your own algorithms, but we’re so excited about what we have now and how much it could help software engineers in all stages of life that we want to get it in your hands now.

Please dive into the course and let us know what you think - you can leave comments beneath the articles, or email us more detailed feedback at compsci-feedback@khanacademy.org.

Thank you again to Thomas Cormen, Devin Balkcom, and their supporting staff at Dartmouth for making this Algorithms class a possibility.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Khan Academy.

I often get asked how I got into programming. Well, it all started with me forgetting to buy a gift for my mum. I was in 6th grade, and it was Mother’s Day. We lived a few hours walk from the shops in town, and I had to walk by a high-security penitentiary to get to those shops - given the recent surge in prison escapes, I didn’t feel like taking the risk.

I’d been browsing the web a lot recently, checking out the fan websites for my favorite boy bands and hanging out in pet-themed chat rooms. I always liked the idea of making gifts instead of buying gifts, so I thought “hey, I’ll make my mum a webpage!”

I searched on Yahoo! for instructions (this was even before the days of Google’ing), and made a webpage for my mum with a big cheesy “Happy Mother’s Day” GIF at the top (thanks, Microsoft Word Art!). My mum was happy that I’d taken the effort to learn something new; I was happy that I’d discovered how to get away with never buying gifts and I was left with a newfound curiosity for making things on the web.

And that’s how I got into programming. I started off in HTML and then got into Perl, Java, JavaScript, PHP—anything I could get my hands that would enable me to share creations on the web.

Now, nearly 2 decades later, the web is ubiquitous and there are more than 1 billion websites on the internet. Every single one of those websites is built with HTML, and probably many of them include CSS for styling and JavaScript for interactivity.

That’s why I’m thrilled that we can now teach HTML and CSS on Khan Academy. HTML/CSS is the first step on the path to being a web developer, plus it’s also a skill that non-developers can hugely benefit from - like bloggers, marketers, and librarians - because HTML shows up in so many of their jobs, too.

You can try out our HTML/CSS environment here. It’s interactive and real-time, just like our ProcessingJS environment, plus includes a color picker, image picker, and number scrubbers.

To help you learn how to make webpages, we’ve put together an Intro to HTML/CSS course. It’s around 8 hours of talk-throughs, coding challenges, projects, and quizzes, and will give you a great basis in the most common HTML tags and a wide range of CSS selectors and properties.

For something more bite-sized, you can start with the Hour of Webpages, which is one of our Hour of Code offerings this year.

Thank you to the team for all their hard work in making this possible - John Resig, Brian Bondy, and Alex Rodrigues. Let’s get more people hooked on HTML!

Our friends in Brazil, the Lemann Foundation, recently asked some twenty celebrities about their favorite way to learn math, and they shared some really touching thoughts about Khan Academy and why they love using it. We thought it would be fun to share them with you, too.

Bill Gates, for instance, stressed the fact that Khan Academy is a great tool for one`s learning adventure, saying that the “breath of stuff is incredible and the explanations are clear”. He also pointed out that he uses Khan Academy to remind himself about certain concepts and with his kids “when things are complicated for them” - which makes us feel better about forgetting things, too!

This year, over two million Brazilians used Khan Academy to study and learn - we’re so excited that they’re enjoying the Portuguese site.

Em diante!

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O que Bill Gates, Anitta e Anderson Silva têm em comum?

A equipe responsável pela Khan Academy no Brasil recentemente perguntou para mais de 20 celebridades do mundo da música, das artes e do entretenimento sobre sua maneira favorita de estudar matemática e eles compartilharam os benefícios de estudar com a Khan Academy de forma gratuita e empolgante. O grupo inclui ídolos nacionais e internacionais, como Bill Gates, a cantora Anitta e o campeão de MMA Anderson Silva. Aqui você pode ver alguns desses vídeos.

O Bill Gates, por exemplo, falou que o site é uma excelente ferramenta na aventura do conhecimento - “a quantidade de conteúdo é incrível, as explicações são simples”. Ele apontou que tem acessado a Khan para se lembrar de alguns conceitos e que seus filhos também usam “quando têm alguma dificuldade” – o que nos faz sentir melhor quanto esquecemos as coisas também!

Esse ano já são mais de dois milhões de brasileiros estudando e aprendendo com a Khan Academy! Estamos super entusiasmados com o sucesso do site no Brasil!

Photo: Steven Zucker

In little more than a year, we’ve been very fortunate to collaborate with numerous institutions of incredible caliber and expertise, such as The British Museum, Tate, MoMA and The Getty. Their content on Khan Academy has gotten hundreds of thousands of views and we’re constantly hearing from our learners, whether they’re studying for a class or just nerding out on art and its history, how valuable the tutorials are; last year, there were 7 million visits to our art history content alone!

Today we’re very excited to welcome The Metropolitan Museum of Art to Khan Academy. As life-long New Yorkers, we visit the Met at every chance we get. You could say without exaggerating that we learned how to look at art in the Met’s glorious galleries (and in fact we both wrote our very first respective museum papers on works in the Greek and Roman collection!).

Today, the Met launches over 100 videos on Khan Academy featuring areas such as Extravagant Inventions, Books, Music and Literature and Devotion. In addition, The Met will also feature a game focused on the permanent collection, Beyond Battle: Arms and Armor at the Met.

You’ll also notice today that we’re grouping all museums on Khan Academy on their own landing page: now you can find our museum partners (including the Asian Art Museum, the American Museum of  Natural History, Exploratorium, and the California Academy of Sciences) all in one location. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

-Posted by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker

We celebrated with cake pops in the shape of a big 3, making the day all the sweeter…

Today’s an exciting day for us — together we’ve just hit the 3 billionth problem answered on Khan Academy!

We asked Sal what he thought of this, and he said, "Personally, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I’m waiting for us to hit 3 141 592 653 problems solved before I get really excited.” Can you help us get to pi billion?!

The rate at which everyone is learning on Khan Academy is astounding: it took less than a year to grow from 2 billion to 3 billion problems answered! Way to go!

And just how big is 3 billion, exactly? We did some digging …

• If you had a measuring tape that was 3 billion inches long, it would wrap around the world twice.
• If you traveled a mile for every problem that’s been answered, you’d almost be at Pluto.
• If you went back in time 3 billion minutes, it’d be the 37th century B.C.E., a thousand years before the Egyptian pyramids were built.

Whoa, that’s a lot of learning.

So… how quickly can we get to 4 billion? Let’s go!

From time to time we like to let you know about any changes we’re making to keep our site up to date. We encourage you to check out our Terms of Service here but here’s a simple overview of the main changes:

• We wanted to clarify which content is available under a creative commons license (e.g. videos made by Khan Academy) and which is not (e.g. videos from some partners) so we updated the terms to make it clear how that information will be flagged

• We wanted to make what we mean by ‘non-commercial use’ clearer so we added more explanation and examples

• We wanted to clarify how child accounts can gain parent approval before becoming operational

If you have any questions about these updates, you can email us at feedback@khanacademy.org.

Thanks for using Khan Academy!

The Khan Academy Team

It’s a big day for Khan Academy - we’re officially opening registration for our first ever LearnStorm! If you’re a 3rd-12th grade student in the Bay Area, you can sign up now at   www.learnstorm2015.com.

So what’s LearnStorm?  It’s a math challenge designed to grow your ability to learn anything. Until April 30, you’ll be able to earn points by mastering math skills and demonstrating your hustle. You’ll be able to track your progress on your own leaderboard and work with your friends to accumulate points for your school or city. There will also be weekly challenges to help you build a growth mindset.

LearnStorm officially begins on February 9 and will wrap up with an in-person celebration complete with fun prizes.

LearnStorm is for everyone, whether you’re working on counting or calculus. Best of all, it’s completely free, and you can participate from anywhere - your home, your library, your school, or wherever you like to use Khan Academy.

We’re launching LearnStorm in ten Bay Area counties - Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano and Sonoma - but we hope to expand to more areas in years to come. We hope you’ll join us on this adventure!

For more details, or to sign up, visit www.learnstorm2015.com.

If you know a student, parent, teacher, administrator, librarian or anyone in the Bay Area who might be interested please forward some of these resources to them today.

Back in 2008, Khan Academy started as a simple library of YouTube videos, but has grown to become so much more. Over 15 millions students per month are learning across the platform, and they’re learning through video lessons, tutorials and and practicing through interactive exercises.

In our mission to build a free, world-class education, we’ve heard from students they want to learn and practice on tablets: it’s easier to access whether you’re at school, or on the couch or doing homework with friends. For the past few years we’ve offered a great video viewing experience on iPads - today, we’re excited to introduce the next step in Khan Academy’s mobile story: bringing interactive, personalized learning to the iPad with math exercises, handwriting recognition and more.

So what’s the story? This is the first time that the entire library of Khan Academy has been made available on iPads!

Our app has been built for speed - it’s the easiest and most personal way to access all of our content. We also wanted to build features uniquely suited for the platform, like our beautiful scratchpad that you can use to jot down your thoughts and work through problems in the app.

Our new app has brand new ways to help you learn math and more on the iPad:

• Sharpen your skills: over 150,000 interactive, common core aligned exercises with instant feedback and step-by-step hints for each question. Follow along with what you’re learning in school or practice on your own, at your own pace.

• Flex your muscles: the app adjusts to give you interactive exercise recommendations that are tailored just for you through the world of math.

• Show your work: the app harnesses the power of showing and stepping through your work with a beautiful, expansive scratchpad. Once you have your answer, just write it in, and we’ll recognize your answer!

• Track back: your learning auto-magically syncs between your iPad and khanacademy.org, so your progress and recommendations are always up-to-date, anywhere, anytime.

We’re excited that this can help you learn almost anything: we’ve put together thousands of videos on science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and the humanities with tutorials on art history, civics, and finance, too. Our new app has a new, expansive design that highlights our content and makes it more efficient for students to access content at the right level and puts you a few touches away from our full library of videos, articles, and exercises.

This app would not have been possible without the generous support of our donors. It’s available now - download it here and be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below!