Fun educational websites (you'll learn something by accident)

The trick of the best fun educational websites is that nobody tells you they are educational. You start poking, you get curious, and ten minutes later you understand something you had been avoiding for years.

The Evolution of Trust uses simple games to show how cooperation emerges, and then collapses. The Deep Sea teaches ocean zones by making you scroll down through them. Size of Life lets you scroll from an amoeba to a blue whale. The True Size Of ... fixes your intuition about map projections by letting you drag countries around. NandGame builds a computer from a single logic gate, one puzzle at a time.

These sites share one habit: they put a question in front of you and let you answer it with your hands. That is a different feeling from reading the answer. Some are quick, like Antipodes Map. Others, like Bartosz Ciechanowski's Interactive Explainers, are long, rewarding reads.

You will find a few coding games here, Flexbox Froggy and Grid Garden, and a few that are more thoughtful, like Adventures With Anxiety!, which is a personal take rather than a lesson, so we flag it as such.

Use "Surprise me from this list" to pick a topic at random. Every link is checked daily, so you won't spend your curiosity on a dead page.