The Best Students Often Make the Most Mistakes.
Few of us enjoy making mistakes, but mistakes are inevitable when you try something new or difficult, and failure is how we get better . Coder Christina Cacioppo writes about how to teach programming to students and how the most successful newbies make the most mistakes.
By the end of the summer, the stronger learners were those who made more mistakes: they tried more things, compiled more bad code, caught more runtime errors, and more reliably obfuscated the REPL. Their knocking created better mental models, so they could anticipate what the code would do when it started. (If environments such asXcode Playgrounds and LightTable are successful, keeping track of complete programs in your head can be a party gimmick, but it is needed today.) As students experimented in logical ways, they gained confidence in solving problems with code.
However, these weren’t just random errors without some basic knowledge of how the code works:
An undirected knock (aka “pick random things, and maybe it will work over time?”) Worse than useless; it is demoralizing. Without any idea of how the pieces of programming are linked together, computers are incomprehensible. Letting a motivated person go to modern programming tools without guidance is probably the quickest way to piss them off.
While her blog post is about this particular summer programming course, I think it can be applied to most subject areas. Experimenting and observing how things can go wrong is critical to understanding how things can go right – if, of course, we learn from our mistakes .
Read Christina’s blog post to learn more about the interesting takeaways and lessons from this programming course.
Online training | Christina Cacioppo