Effective Education
Modern education practices are ineffective in engaging students to learn effectively. Imagine if you were told to first read an entire game manual before playing. The manual for the game, Super Mario Brothers, is roughly 15 pages long. It’s a dump of information, most of which you could have already learned from playing the first level, which is carefully designed to teach you anyways. Chances are that the information about the enemies will not be remembered due to reading a passage about it, but encountering them over and over. Last but not least, you have fun doing this self exploration and discovery without having to force yourself. In contrast to the standard long winded lecture, it’s much more engaging! I see it in the classes I take that people drone away on their ones and laptops at some point.
Something I have wasted time a lot on is thinking that oh, I’ll be a better programmer if I read all these books and take all these courses, and only then will I be “worthy”. I see this pitfall of thinking everywhere, and I can say it doesn’t work because you’ll get burnt out midway. It’s an overload of information that will be forgotten because of no continous application.
Here are some principles I developed and set for myself when it comes to effectively learning and teaching others.
- Don’t learn to play, play to learn
- Make the feedback loop as tight as possible. Avoid info dumping and get to play as soon as possible.
- Focus and challenge what you don’t know, instead of mindlessly repeating what you do know.
- Test Test Test! Use Anki and don’t be afraid to push yourself