Teaching What You Know
Transform your own hard-won skills into clear, engaging lessons. Learn to structure curricula, craft sticky explanations, design effective practice, and coach learners through confusion.
Like Duolingo, but for Teaching What You Know. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 12 levels across 2 sections, about 24 minutes end to end, roughly 5 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Designing the Blueprint and Coaching the Practice. It starts from scratch.
Free forever · No credit card · iPhone & Android
Key ideas in Teaching What You Know
- Backward design starts by defining what task or real output the student must produce by the end
- Starting with lecture topics or slides leads to passive knowledge rather than actual capability
- Assessments and activities should be drafted before choosing what content to explain
- Experts bundle dozens of automated sub-steps into a single action without realizing it
- Beginners stall on invisible prerequisites like opening the terminal, navigating directories, or installing dependencies
- Effective pedagogy requires decomposing expert reflexes into explicit mini-steps
- Front-loading weeks of abstract theory before students make or do anything drains motivation
- A small, early milestone—like playing a two-chord song immediately—builds confidence and makes later theory relevant
- Textbook logical order often differs sharply from motivational learning order
- Vague goals like 'understand' or 'appreciate' cannot be directly observed or verified
- Piling multiple skills into one lesson overwhelms working memory and obscures where a learner failed
- A single measurable objective focuses on one concrete action the learner can demonstrate before leaving
- Instruction begins with the teacher modeling the target behavior clearly
- Scaffolding fades gradually through structured, supported practice before full independence
- Dumping learners straight into solo problem-solving without gradual release leads to frustration
- A good analogy relies on everyday physical sensations the learner already has bodily intuition for
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Teaching What You Know the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
What happens if a lesson starts with talking through slides instead of hands-on doing?
Get it right to open this lesson and 11 more in the app.
Where Teaching What You Know takes you
- 1
Designing the Blueprint
- Structuring Lessons Around Real Capability
- Explaining Concepts That Actually Stick
- 2
Coaching the Practice
- Designing Practice and Preempting Mistakes
- Checking Understanding and Adapting on the Fly
2 sections · 4 units · 12 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
Tomo is in ChatGPT
Tomo is also a ChatGPT plugin: the same playable courses, built and played inside your chat.
Add Tomo to ChatGPT- What to ask
- “Make me a Tomo course on black holes.” “Turn this chat into a Tomo course.”
- What you get
- Quick questions with instant feedback, hearts and stars, ready to play in about a minute.
- Where it goes
- No sign-up to start. Connect your Tomo account and your streak carries on in the app.
You pick the voice
Teaching What You Know is taught in the Explain Like I'm 5 style: no big words. promise.. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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Start Teaching What You Know today.
Download Tomo, search Teaching What You Know, and play your first lesson in under a minute.