What is Blitz?
Blitz is a short-form educational platform that blends the familiarity of scrollable feeds with spaced repetition so students can build momentum before tackling longer study sessions.
Development milestones
- Phase one: publish short-form explainers on existing platforms (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts).
- Phase two: migrate to the Blitz app with accounts, streaks, and topic playlists.
- Phase three: integrate spaced repetition signals and lightweight assessments into the recommendation engine.
- Phase four: open creator tooling so teachers can author lessons without touching code.
Progress log
The recommendation system is the biggest challenge. I prototyped a hybrid approach that combines metadata signals with vector similarity so new users still see relevant clips. The current obstacle is generating rich embeddings for videos with minimal manual tagging. Modeling parts of algorithm off paper here
Update after watching a recent video by Cal Newport on Duolingo he highlighted a point which I hadn't considered before which could render one of my initial goals for starting the platform futile. The gap between educational entertainment and short form education is simply too high. He used the example of a heroin addict saying referencing that it doesn't matter how much you dress Tiktok up like heroin that they will always choose heroin. One might say that short form content is not nearly the same as chemical addiction however increasingly I believe that there are significant parallels I will continue working to make the recommendation system as good as possible but will now be focusing more on the knowledge attainment side of it. I will also be looking at encoding concepts and differences between how humans encode concepts and machines and looking to bridge the gap as much as possible.
Side note: Blitz is meant as a gateway—it helps learners regain focus but shouldn’t replace deep work. A future update will add puzzle sets so users can immediately apply what they watch.
Read this paper for a nuanced look at attention spans and education in short-form media.
