Explorable Research

An invitation to the curious

Turn a paper into something people can play with.

Pick a research paper that sparks your curiosity. Bring its ideas to life with interactive slides. Help someone understand it, question it, and build on it.

Make it your next project. Enter it in our explorable presentations competition. AI is welcome!

Start creating Prizes & how to enter

$500 in prizesConcepts due Nov 6

From paper to play

How can a small preference change a whole neighborhood?

Change the rules. Move the neighbors. See what happens.

Play the Schelling explorable Based on Parable of the Polygons by Vi Hart & Nicky Case. Slide adaptation by David T. Lee.

What you’re making

A presentation with
room to experiment.

An explorable presentation pairs a paper’s big ideas with little interactive tools that reveal how they work, one piece at a time. It builds on explorable explanations, bringing learning through play to research papers.

The slides tell the story. The widgets help readers understand the mechanisms and how they fit together. With that foundation, readers can investigate assumptions, challenge results, and explore ways to build on the research.

Curiosity can open doors

Want to get involved
in a faculty lab?

Making an explorable is a great way to show initiative: you’ve taken the time to understand the work, build something, and ask your own questions. It gives you something concrete to share when you reach out and a starting point for a much richer conversation.

You don’t have to start big

Make one idea click.

Start by understanding the paper deeply. Then make small interactions that help someone else understand it, too.

  1. Follow your curiosity.

    Choose a paper you want to understand—a topic from class, a surprising result, or work from a lab you’d love to join. Read for the problem, the central idea, and what changed because of it.

  2. Understand it deeply.

    Work through the paper’s central ideas and how its system or method works. Use AI to unpack unfamiliar concepts and break complex mechanisms into smaller parts. Trace those explanations back to the paper until you can explain them in your own words.

  3. Help someone else understand it.

    Turn that understanding into small interactive widgets, each revealing how one part works. Use concise slides to connect the pieces. Then ask a friend to try them: can they explain what’s happening and why?

  4. Then explore what could change.

    Once you understand the ideas, investigate further. What happens if an assumption changes? Where do the results stop holding? What could they build on top of the work? Demonstrate that to readers and invite them to do the same.

A starting prompt for your AI collaborator

Share the paper with your AI tool, then adapt this:

Help me understand this research paper deeply and turn that understanding into an explorable presentation. First, walk me through its problem, main contribution, and how its key mechanisms work, pointing to the relevant parts of the paper. Help me work through anything I cannot yet explain in my own words. If there is a system involved, recreate it. Then suggest a series of small widgets that each help a reader understand one mechanism at a time, with a clear action and takeaway. Once the core ideas are clear, suggest questions that help the reader change assumptions, challenge results, or build on the work. See https://explorables.tech4good.dev for examples.

Want further agent support? Try our explorables agent skill to give your agent some best practices, evaluation criteria, and examples.

A few things to help you along

WatchUsing AI to explore research papersThe talk recording to get you started. ReadThe talk’s resource docKeep the companion resources beside you as you work. PlayExplore a few examplesSee how the presentations turn research into interactions. BuildUse the shared slide templateA guide to the template, interactive demos, and local preview.

Using the template for the competition? Keep your name off the presentation and its visible credits or byline while it’s under anonymous review. Enter through the submission form below.

Explorable presentations for papers competition

Build something worth sharing.

Go deep on an idea, have fun making it understandable, and give other people a new way into research.

First place
$300
Second place
$150
Third place
$50

And a chance to get your work seen: we’ll showcase explorables and share them with faculty, the Santa Cruz community, and the world.

What to submit

Make a presentation that introduces the paper and invites readers to explore its ideas.

  1. A title slide. Introduce the paper, but leave your own name off the explorable for anonymous review.
  2. A concise story of the big ideas. Include at least one explorable, interactive widget in the slides.
  3. An appendix for going deeper. Use a series of widgets to help readers grasp the ideas and results.
For the concept round, start small. Your appendix can be undeveloped or absent. Focus on the core idea and your first interactive widget.

Your path to the showcase

  1. Nov 6

    Concept submission

    Your first step into the competition.

  2. Nov 27

    Full submission

    For invited concept submissions.

  3. Early
    Winter

    Finalist presentations

    For invited full submissions.
    Date to be announced.

Submit your concept

You don’t have to figure it out alone

A little stuck?
Let’s get you moving.

Questions about the competition, choosing an paper, or using AI tools to support you? Get in touch. We’re also setting up office hours for troubleshooting, email us to ask about joining.

explorables-support-group@ucsc.edu

Bring your questions, your rough draft, or the thing that almost works.