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π€ Your inner expert is asking for the mic
Hello ReaderThere's a particular kind of tab you keep open for three days. A long article, a dense docs page, a Hacker News thread with four hundred comments you fully intend to get to. Most of what we learn arrives as text we don't quite have the energy for. That's roughly what this month of building has been about. Explain picked up a pile of new features, and the thread running through all of them is the same: take the thing you were going to skim, and make it watchable. So, how long has your oldest tab been open? π§π» TL;DRβ New in Explain: two new ways to make an explainerβ β Explain in ChatGPT: now a pluginβ β Scrimba Docs: 15 more ways to explore Explainβ β Latest innovation: hn.watchβ β Instructors wanted: Especially AI teachers! β Student Spotlight: Fabianβ β Poll of the week: Coding language lexicon + last week's results! New in Explain
βTwo things shipped this week, both for people using Explain to teach others. You can now drop your own images into an explainer. Attach a screenshot, a diagram, a photo of a whiteboard, and it lands on the slide instead of a generated illustration. Explainers also play in a vertical layout now, so watching one on your phone stops feeling like a compromise. Shoutout to our team members to helped bring this to life, Ali Akhtarzada and Kevin Simons. π Explain, inside ChatGPT
Explain lives in ChatGPT and Codex as a plugin called @Explain Video Generator. Install it once and it works in both. The best moment to use it is at the end of a conversation, right after the model has worked something out with you. Instead of scrolling back through a transcript, ask for a video you can rewatch and send to someone else. βVisual walkthrough hereβ The Explain docs got a lot bigger
βFifteen new pages went live this week. Two to start with: Transcripts, if you'd rather read the lesson than watch it, and Regenerating narration, for when the explanation is right but the delivery isn't. The other thirteen are in there waiting. There's more under the hood than most people realize. hn.watch
This one's fun. hn.watch is the Hacker News front page, mirrored every five minutes, with a short explainer video for every story. Open a story and you get a video built from the article and its discussion. If the thread has more than ten comments, the explainer ends with a section on what Hacker News is saying: where people agree, where they split, and the strongest objection anyone raised. No commenters are named. The first person to open a story generates the explainer. Everyone after that gets it instantly, so you're doing the rest of the internet a small favor by being early. βYou can read/watch more about it, here. *Not affiliated with Y Combinator. We're looking for instructors
The search for new Scrimba teachers is still open, and we're especially interested in people who can teach AI. You don't need a teaching background. If you can explain something clearly to someone one step behind you, that's the skill. If that sounds like you, DM Head of Education Thomas Chant with a bit about yourself and a link to you teaching something. An old YouTube video works, or you can record something on Scrimba! Know someone who'd be great at this? Send it their way. Scrimba Explain Chrome extension
The Explain Chrome extension turns whatever page you're reading into a narrated explainer, played in an overlay right on top of it. You never leave the page. βInstall it hereβ And if you've already been using it, a review on the Chrome Web Store genuinely helps other people find it. We'd love to hear your feedback! Student Spotlight
Fabian finished high school at the end of 2024, taught himself to code through freeCodeCamp, a bootcamp, and Scrimba, and got hired as a Python developer exactly one year later. The best part is that he wasn't job hunting. He applied to see if he'd get accepted, and he did. βRead his story here. Congratulations Fabian. π Poll of the Week
Last week we asked about your relationship with SEO, and it came back a perfect four way tie. 25% each, straight down the line. Which makes it an even playing field to level up on. This week:
Wrap UpItβs time for your weekly dose of cuteness from #scrimba-pets!πΆπ±ππ
Pumpkin spice and mildly unimpressed. Thank you for reading, everyone! Have a lovely week, keep calm and Scrimba on.
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Drop your email below for exciting news about the latest Scrimba courses, special offers, career tips, student success stories, tech resources, animal pics, and more!
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Hello Reader, Did you know that you can reach Explain from inside ChatGPT? Ask GPT to make a video to explain something; a concept, a piece of code, an article you're reading, or anything else, and it'll whip an Explainer up for you. It's the same teaching engine you've been using on Scrimba, just a prompt away from where you're already chatting. TRY EXPLAIN IN CHATGPT I hope you enjoy Explain in ChatGPT. I'm very keen to hear your thoughts on Explain in GPT! If you're happy to share, just...