What is Runestone Interactive?

Hi, I'm Brad Miller Founder of Runestone Interactive and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Luther College. Runestone Interactive was created in 2011 during my 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, and let the teacher know where the students were struggling! Out of this writers block Runestone was born. Runestone is a platform for authoring interactive textbooks as well as a textbook hosting service. Teachers should not have to be devops experts!

After working on Runestone as a side project for seven years, I took advantage of an early retirement incentive to devote 100% of my time to Runestone.

How we Help Students and Teachers

Since 2011 Runestone has grown to support more than 18 books in at least six languages that I know of and helps students in over 170 countries around the world. In the 2019/2020 school year over 42,000 students registered on Runestone Academy! At an average of $150 for a textbook we have saved students $6.4 million dollars in textbook costs. Our business modell is essentially a share ware model. If you like Runestone please send us a little money.

How your Support will Help Runestone

Less than 1% of students choose to follow through and donate. Who can blame them? They have a lot of costs and very little money. Free is good. Thats where you can come in. I need to pay the server costs, and earn a bit of a money 😄! This last year two classes of students that were learning about open source chose Runestone as their project to support. It is awesome to see students who learned from one of our textbooks give back by making a PR! My dream is that I can get enough support to also hire a couple of student summer interns each year.

The support you give to Runestone will help us to continue to scale, add new content, and continue to improve the quality of the service. Scale is a big factor in the near term as I'm anticipating huge growth for the fall of 2020 as schools figure out how to be flexible about an online versus in-person curriculum. Runestone will work in either model but we are busy trying to add new features to make it more useful in a fully online mode.

This fall we will be adding several Math textbooks to Runestone as well as Texts on SQL and parallel computing.