Runestone History and a Roadmap

Runestone Interactive was created in 2011 during Brad’s sabbatical. I should have been working on a new edition for two paper textbooks, but I had the worst kind of writers block. I just couldn’t stand the idea of a paper textbook for computer science in 2011. Textbooks should let you run the examples! Even better textbooks should encourage you to edit the examples and play around with them. When a google search for python in the browser turned up the skulpt project I knew I was onto something.

After spending a couple of months building a turtle graphics module, I realized that nobody would write a book if they had to do a ton of javascript programming for every example. So I started to look around and found Sphinx and docutils. Although markdown is probably more popular, Sphinx/docutils is so much more extensible. So I set out about writing some extensions to Sphinx, and the rest is history. Now adding an example to the textbook is just as easy as copy/pasting the code into the plain text document!

We first used Runestone in the classroom in 2012 for 60 students at Luther College. From 2012 to now Runestone has grown to serving 25,000 students a day around the world at something like 800 institutions. The real surprise came when I discovered that many of them were high schools. This made me very happy !

Our library now lists 18 books! But there are probably at least another 18 that I don’t know about. The number of translations of Runestone books that I have randomly discovered is amazing. That makes me very happy also.

The tagline “democratizing textbooks for the 21st century”, is really inspired by a class visit with Guy Kawasaki in a class I taught during January Term when I would take 12 students to Silicon Valley to visit with entrepreneurs, at all kinds of companies. It is, in Guy’s terms, a mantra. It means that textbooks should be free! You should not be excluded from learning about CS because you cannot afford $200 for a textbook! If Runestone can play a role in disrupting textbook publishing that would be awesome. I’m hoping that Runestone can serve 2 million students a day in my lifetime! It also means that textbooks should be interactive, intelligent, living documents.

In 2018, I decided to leave my dream job at Luther College to focus all of my energy on a new dream job, Runestone Interactive. I was growing increasingly frustrated that there were not enough hours in the day to teach classes, attend committee meetings, grade homework, prep lectures, and work on Runestone. This turned out to be a great leap of faith, as not long after I made the decision I was contacted by a some team members in Google’s EngEDU organization that wanted to use Runestone as part of their Applied Computing Series of courses. The goals of Runestone and the goals of the AC team could not be more aligned. Runestone is also used as a platform for teaching courses by LaunchCode. I get to work with a bunch of really smart Googlers, and have time to continue to develop Runestone.

A Roadmap for the Future

The sign of a good project is that the todo list never gets shorter. Every time I cross something off the list three new things replace it. There is no doubt that with focus, time and energy that Runestone can be way more awesome than it is today. The details and current development priorities are outlined here .

What I am most interested in is creating a sustainable community around Runestone so that it will continue after I am not caring for it every day. This means a concerted effort on funding, on growing the number of students, and building the number of authors and developers.

All of the above has been happening organically, but we need to accelerate on all fronts. This new home page, is one part of that. YOu will begin to see articles detailing development, as well as posts about how people are using Runestone in the classroom in real life. Please share this site with your friends, and colleagues, introduce influencers to Runestone and help us spread the word.