Not long after this was written, I started working on Flux Garden, "The GarageBand of Scientific Computing" [...]

Maybe the most valuable result of the project was coming to recognize that a commercial app was too narrow, in many ways, for what I wanted to accomplish. One way was that the computer screen was too confining.

I envisioned living in a world which explained itself through mathematical models, where mathematical modeling and exploration was something that people did together, casually and constantly, with ordinary materials in the real world. I wanted to "do math with my hands".