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Show HN: P-book – an interactive book for kids about recommendation algorithms (recsysbook-kids.vercel.app)

2 points by kordikp ↗ HN
Hi HN — I’ve been building p-book, an open-source interactive book format that personalizes how a reader explores one topic.

The first p-book is for kids and teaches how recommendation systems work — including suggestions, privacy, filter bubbles, and fairness.

What I’m trying here is not only to personalize what comes next, but also how the same topic can be explored: through Missions, Browse, Read, or Map.

It’s still early, and I’d especially love feedback on three things:

- whether the navigation modes feel genuinely different, - whether the topic is understandable for kids, - where the experience feels confusing or too complex.

3 comments

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kordikp
let me know if you like it ... or if you can even imagine turning your edu content into p-book format ...
kordikp
I'm Pavel, co-founder of Recombee and an associate professor at CTU Prague. I built p-book because I kept running into a problem: most explainability work on recommender systems is aimed at researchers or regulators, not at the people actually affected by these systems every day — including kids.

The technical experiment here is whether personalizing how you explore a topic actually improves comprehension. Recombee drives the recommendations inside the book itself, so the book is eating its own dog food.

The thing I'm most unsure about: the four navigation modes (Missions, Browse, Read, Map) feel genuinely different to me as the builder, but I don't know if they feel different to a kid or a parent sitting with a kid. That's the feedback I most need.

Happy to talk about the technical architecture if anyone's curious — the spaced repetition layer on top of a live recommendation API is an unusual combination.