HojinKim

The rule is simple. You hand your phone and your laptop to the staff on the first morning, and you don't see them again for six days. From nine in the morning until nine at night, you sit with one problem. You can't look up the answer. You can't ask the person next to you. If you get stuck, the only thing available to you is more thinking.

Molip (몰입) is the Korean word for this kind of total absorption. English usually renders it as flow. Flow describes a state you happen to fall into. Molip describes the practice of getting there on purpose, and the claim behind the camp is that it can be trained the way a sport can be trained. Professor Hwang Nongmun of Seoul National University has spent years building a method around that claim and running it as a camp. He is writing the English edition of his book now.

I went the first time as a participant. I have been back four times since, the last two as an assistant, which means I now spend most of my summer and winter holidays in a room where nobody is allowed to use a search engine.

Day one is bad

I want to be honest about this part, because the brochures aren't.

The first evening is when the withdrawal shows. People check the box where the phones went. Somebody usually calls home and asks to be picked up, and occasionally somebody actually leaves. The complaints are all the same complaint in different words: this is a waste of time, I could have solved it in ten minutes with the answer key, why am I being made to suffer.

They're not wrong that it's slower. That's the whole point, but on day one nobody believes you when you say so.

Day two is quiet, and the quiet is misleading. It isn't peace. People are just tired.

Something happens on day three. I've watched it five times now and I still can't predict which person it will happen to. Somebody who spent two days insisting the problem was impossible will look up and start explaining their reasoning to whoever is closest, unprompted, before they even have an answer. That's the tell. Not the solution. The sudden need to say the half-formed thought out loud to another human being.

What I actually took from it

I expected to get better at math. I did, a little. The larger change was in what I do when I don't know something.

Before the camp, a hard question sent me straight to a person or a page. A senior, a teacher, a video. I did that reflexively and I would not have described it as a problem, because it worked. It got me answers quickly and the answers were correct. What it didn't get me was the twenty hours of being wrong, which turns out to be where most of the thinking lives.

The first time I sat with a problem past the point where I wanted to quit, and then further past it, and then solved it with nothing but my own notebook, I understood why the phones go in the box.

Teaching it

Since then I've worked with around 650 students at the camp and 350 more through the club I started at school. The two settings need different things. At camp the structure does the work for you, since the phones are gone and there's nowhere else to be. At school, students walk out of my session and back into a hallway full of notifications.

So most of what I've built has been an attempt to make molip survive contact with an ordinary Tuesday.

The workbook came first. 250 UKMT-level problems, chosen because they're hard enough to require sitting with but not so hard that a fourteen-year-old gives up in five minutes. It's in print with an ISBN and has gone out to about 300 students in countries where good math materials are expensive or unavailable. I recorded 130 solution videos to go with it, which is a slight contradiction I'm aware of, and my rule for the students is that the video is for after you've been stuck for an hour, not instead of the hour.

Then the app, which now has around 300 users. It does less than people expect. It doesn't gamify anything and it doesn't send encouraging notifications, because notifications are the enemy here.

Molip on the App Store

What I'm sitting with now

The problem I'm currently unable to put down isn't a math problem.

Every tool I use is built to shorten the gap between a question and an answer. That's the explicit goal of the industry, and I'm part of it. I write software. I've used AI to build things that are on this website. I'm not interested in the argument that we should go back to something.

But the six days I keep returning to are six days built on the opposite premise, that the gap between question and answer is where the person gets made, and that closing it too efficiently costs something we haven't priced yet. Both of those things seem true to me at the same time and I don't know how to reconcile them.

That's the question I want to spend the next few years on. How do you design a technology that gives people back their attention instead of harvesting it. Whether that's even a coherent thing to ask of a product, or whether it has to be asked of the institutions around the product.

I don't have an answer. I've been stuck on it for a while now, which by the standards of the camp means I've barely started.

I am not very good at reading about something and leaving it there. If a thing interests me I want to build one, and building one is where I find out how much of the explanation I actually understood.

Rockets

There was no rocketry club at NLCS Jeju, so I started one, and about ten people joined. We design in CAD, simulate the flight in OpenRocket, then drive out to a field and find out how wrong the simulation was. Over two years we launched and recovered six times.

The gap between the simulation and the field is the whole education. A model rocket leaving the rail is a variable-mass problem with a boundary layer on it, and none of that is visible on a screen. It becomes visible when the thing tips.

That question about fins is where the research at the bottom of this page came from. I wanted to know why a particular fin shape wins, and the answer turned out to be a variational one rather than a rule of thumb, which is not what I expected when I started measuring apogees.

A national competition gave the club its first outside result, a gold in the National Youth Aerospace Engineering Competition. The more useful outcome was the workshop we ran with Young Astronauts Korea, where I brought in a professional lecturer and opened it past our own members to about twenty students from schools across the Global Education City.

Robots

The VEX team was the second thing that did not exist until we made it. Ten of us built an S-Bot for the Push Back season, and I drove it.

Driving is a strange skill to acquire. You spend months on a machine and then the whole thing comes down to about a hundred seconds in which your hands have to already know what to do. We took the KISAC tournament against more than twenty teams and finished third nationally, picking up the Judges and Think awards along the way, which are given for the reasoning behind the robot rather than its score.

I also run the Engineering Society as secretary, which mostly means arranging weekly sessions, teaching Arduino to people who have never wired anything, and dragging in whichever branch of engineering I have been reading about that month.