The Secret of Learning with Boohbah

Boohbah is different from most educational TV.
It is intended to foster a style of active viewing in which the things that children learn from viewing are not determined primarily by the content of the program, but rather by the ways that young viewers (and the grown-ups who care about them) engage with the program.

An interesting Java application where you see what is the computer thinking when you play chess with it.

Why is the computer so [easy/hard] to beat?
The chess playing engine is designed to be at the same level as the average viewer of the piece. If you’re a tournament chess player, you would clobber most casual players—and you’ll clobber Thinking Machine 4 too. If you barely remember the rules of the game, the artwork may clobber you instead. The chess engine we built is simple and uses only basic algorithms from the 50s (alpha-beta pruning and quiescence search). The program’s unconventional initial moves may raise eyebrows among experts: we did not give it an “opening book” of standard lines since we wanted it to think through every position.

What do the images mean?
When it is your (White’s) turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. in the left image below, you can see waves over the squares around the king and (very lightly) over the squares where the pawns might capture. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board; see image at right. The curves show potential moves—often several turns in the future—considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.