Existing Knowledge, Meta Skills, Student Progress

Busy, monotonous day. I worked on my JavaScript course. I try to explain the concepts with a lot of everyday concepts. I think this is one of the best approaches to learning: learning the fundamental concepts by connecting new information with existing personal knowledge. Every person has existing knowledge so I want to use it.

This is also about meta skills, e.g. focusing, reading, logical thinking etc. When working with beginners, like 95% of the problems come from:

  • focusing: students don't work focused, so they make typos
  • reading: students don't read error messages or documentations
  • logical thinking: students throw syntax they already know at the problem, watching what sticks - instead of thinking in pseudo code

In the evening I hosted a workshop on JavaScript. We created a small shopping list from scratch. I did this with exactly the same students some months ago, this time we just needed 1h instead of ~10h. Seems they are making some progress.