The Learning Process - Mental Models
This interest all started when I watched a TED talk by John Green about “paper towns.” To prevent illegal map copying, cartographers used to make up fictional cities and see if anyone copied these fictional city names. They caught someone doing this, supposedly, but the mapmaker they confronted countered with something interesting. They made up a city...I don’t remember what it was called. People bought their map and expected to find a city there. The city was made up, but so many people expected to find a city there that they set up actual shops, gas stations, and homes. It was called a paper town. The map made it exist.
It’s a true story, but John Green uses it as a metaphor for the learning process. He starts to talk about his own YouTube series, most notably CrashCourse, which he handles the humanities side of (Hank Green, his brother, was a godsend on the biology side when we were in college). He tries to get people interested in a subject. Vi Hart does the same thing with math. They try to employ certain “hooks,” like talking about how cats land on their feet.
Make it Stick goes at length in discussing mental models. Intuitively, it makes sense. The learning process can be thought of as forming and strengthening connections. If you can relate new information to information you already have, whether it’s through analogy or through a more realistic connection, you can fall back on that old knowledge and also make it easier for new connections to form. On a somewhat related tangent, when you get into a new field every memorable story and analogy helps. When you learn something completely new and relate it to something old, you form connections. Those connections can branch out to different connections. Learning can be exponential, and that’s the exciting thing about it.
I think that channels like Vi Hart are certainly a good way to light the spark, but continued learning is another question. For instance, how do we get new people interested in coding? MIT pushed Scratch. I’m personally a much bigger fan of a game where you have to code JavaScript to progress from one stage to the next, but that’s not nearly as fun as playing an FPS. Or Minecraft. Speaking of Minecraft, the solution might be in front of us all along...but personally, I think the problem with using Minecraft is that it’s way more tempting to try to brew potions or go ranching than it is to learn how to emulate circuits.
My brother got me an Arduino, back in high school, hoping that it would get me fascinated and interested in coding. I didn’t get into it, and he was really disappointed but decided that coding isn’t for everyone. Then I signed up for a class on coding. The class on coding got me interested in coding.
That was supposed to be a 10-minute freewrite, and it’s been 12. I guess that the main thing I wanted to establish was that real, comprehensive knowledge on a field takes time to develop. The initial spark is important, but then the fire needs to last. You need to keep discovering new territory. You need to be willing to develop in other areas, whenever you find that the fire burns low and you have to gather different fuel.
I was really, really happy when I discovered the Medium page called BaseCS. I mean, there it was, all these confusing and ridiculously boring and/or complex computer science topics, and it just pulled every trick in the book to make it readable. The tone is enthusiastic and non-condescending. It uses association without going off too much with useless facts. It discusses history, but not too much. It relates things back to old information. And it’s just so light-hearted and sweet. It has original graphics, unique metaphors, the kind of thing you’d expect a children’s book author to come up with if she woke up one day with a sudden knowledge of computer science. It’s really, really good.
https://medium.com/@vaidehijoshi