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The philosophy behind every session, and how to run one well.
This page is why the method works. If you want how to use the site, which button does what and what to run first, that is the tutorial.
Prefer to see the method in action instead of reading about it? There’s a real session that runs an actual demonstration while explaining each step as it happens: Heads, Tails, and Why the Coin Doesn’t Remember.
The drawings in these sessions are bad, and I’m fine with that. I can’t draw, never could, not even a little. A session diagram just needs to get made in front of your kid while you’re talking. If you can draw a wobbly circle and something that looks like a straight line, that’s all you need. Mine haven’t gotten any better than that, and they’ve never once gotten in the way.
Marker Sessions are fully written guides to help you explain big ideas to your kid by talking, drawing, building, and acting them out together. There’s no worksheet and no grade at the end. Every session has four parts: a Setup that explains the concept to you before anything starts, a Walkthrough that gives the steps for running the session with your kid, a Narrative that shows how the session tends to play out, and a Pitfalls section covering the places where kids reliably get stuck and what to do about it.
The concepts range from Galilean relativity to supply chains to the family tree of languages. Some of them are things most adults were never taught. That’s fine, and it’s the point.
Setup is for you, not your kid. Read it before the session and keep reading until you could explain the concept to a friend who knows nothing about it and field a few follow-up questions. That’s the bar. Not “I followed what it said,” not “I remember the main point.” The bar is: could you hold a five-minute conversation about this idea with someone curious and skeptical?
If you can’t, read it again. These sessions cover a lot of ground, and some of that ground is hard. Setup is written for a parent with no background in the subject, and it gives you everything you need, in the order you need it, not the order you might be tempted to skim it in.
A parent who has internalized why entropy always increases, or what happens to prices when a government doubles the money supply, is sharing something they understand. Kids feel the difference immediately. Read Pitfalls before the session too, not after. Knowing where kids tend to go sideways means you recognize those moments when they arrive, instead of realizing what happened twenty minutes later.
Walkthrough gives the steps in order, from the opening hook through the reveal. Follow the sequence. Each step is designed to create a question the next step answers, so your kid is working toward the concept instead of being told it. Jump ahead or reveal the main idea early, and you lose the moment where they figure it out themselves, which is most of what a session is for.
You don’t need the exact language in the Walkthrough. The steps tell you what to do, not what to say. Speak however you naturally speak. Kids can tell when a parent is reading from a script, and it flattens the conversation.
Every session has a matching set of guiding principles: five specific moves, each tied to a specific way a kid gets stuck. Your job during a block is diagnosis, not rescue. Notice the specific way your kid is stuck, then hand back the matching principle as a question, so they do the actual work of getting themselves unstuck. The full set, with the exact sign and the exact words to use for each, lives on the guiding principles page.
Underneath all five is George Polya’s four-step method for solving problems: understand the problem (what’s the unknown here, what do you know), devise a plan (have you seen a problem like this before, could you solve a smaller version first), carry out the plan (one step at a time, checking each one), and look back (how would you check that answer, where else might this idea work). When a kid is fully stuck and none of the five principles have moved things, walk through these four out loud, as questions rather than instructions.
Most of what looks like a kid being stuck is a missing plan. They understand what’s being asked, they just don’t have a strategy for attacking it yet, and without one they freeze or guess. The step adults skip most, and kids need most, is looking back: checking the answer against what they already knew. That’s what turns a solved puzzle into an understood idea instead of a lucky guess.
Narrative shows how a session tends to play out: what kids typically say, where confusion usually lands, where the aha moment tends to arrive. Reading it beforehand gives you a feel for the shape of the thing. It’s not a guarantee your session goes the same way: some kids go straight through, others circle back, and some take the concept somewhere Narrative never anticipated. When that happens, go with it.
Every session produces moments where a kid says something the Walkthrough didn’t plan for. The right response is almost never to set that aside and return to the next step. Stop, engage with what they said, and find your way back to the concept from wherever they went.
Most detours are a kid trying to connect the new idea to something they already know. That’s what you want. A kid who says “is this like when…” and names something from their own life is building the right kind of understanding. Follow the thread from their analogy back to the concept, and the session lands harder than it would have if they’d stayed on track.
The detours worth redirecting are the ones that leave the concept behind: a side question that’s interesting but unrelated, or a tangent that would take the session somewhere your kid isn’t ready for yet. Pitfalls flags the common ones.
Marker Sessions can’t understand the concept for you. That part is yours. Every session has a Setup written in plain language, assuming no background. But reading it once and deciding you’ve got it isn’t the same as sitting with it until you genuinely do.
When you hit a question you can’t answer, the right call is to say so and look it up together. Kids handle that fine. What they notice is when you’re faking it. A parent who says “I don’t know, let’s find out” and then finds out is modeling something more valuable than any single concept.
Marker Sessions doesn’t target a specific age. That’s deliberate. You know your kid. The method works by breaking hard concepts into steps anyone can follow in sequence, and the right pace depends on the kid in front of you, not a number on a label. Sessions here have been run with five-year-olds on subjects that would fit in a college physics course. What changes with age is how far you go, how much your kid drives, and how long the session runs. What doesn’t change is whether the concept is worth understanding.
Sessions are organized into 17 categories, from Math and Logic to Biology and Nature to Economics and Business, each one introduced on the library page. Sessions that build on each other say so directly in their Setup. Most stand alone. You don’t need to go in order. Start wherever something catches you, or let Start here point you at the foundational session in each category.
Not every session here ends cleanly. Some of the concepts carry real weight, not just in the sense of requiring careful thought, but in the sense of covering events and decisions that mattered and had consequences. The sessions on World War I, the fall of Rome, nuclear fission, the prisoner’s dilemma, and the trolley problem each deal with territory that’s hard in the moral or historical sense. Marker Sessions treats those edges as part of what makes the world worth understanding.
Each one is handled at the level of a thoughtful documentary: accurate about what happened, honest about the stakes, and focused on the mechanism rather than the suffering. Pitfalls flags where a kid is likely to push toward graphic detail, and how to redirect back to the concept. A kid who understands how an arms race produces a war without anyone choosing it, or why authority structures fail, or what happens when personal incentives and collective good point in opposite directions, is being prepared for the world they’re going to live in.
Start with something you find interesting. That will come through.