Ted Patrick > { Events & Community } > Adobe Systems

Everyone is very different in how they learn new things. I am studying Turkish through CD software while my wife learns in a classroom setting. Somehow I am finding that the CD learning is much more productive for me. It has made me question how I learn and attempt to orient my work/learning to my advantage.

As a software developer I learn new things all the time. Syntax, patterns, concepts, languages, frameworks, tools and how to solve problems in a practical manner. I believe that I learn most effectively through struggling with a problem. It seems to me that in struggling with a problem you understand the true issues and are better prepared to address future problems that are slightly different. I have struggled with Flash since it was FutureSplash Animator and have watched the evolution of the Flash Player from a simple vector animation engine to a distributed software development platform. In struggling with Flash, I have gained a deep understanding of how the player works. This understanding has become invaluable in my consulting practice. It is not that I know everything about the player, I don't, but I can design problems that expose specific player behavior. This sort of knowledge would be extremely difficult to explain in a book as it involves the context of the problem at hand. You can take the brightest student and give them 100 of the best Flash books on the planet and without struggling with the Flash IDE, Flash Player, and real development problems, they would be useless in a consulting capacity.

I watched a MM Preso on Flex Builder (Nice work Lucian!) and found that watching someone else work with a tool is limiting for me. After the Preso, I fired up Flex and installed Flex Builder to attempt to struggle a bit with the software. I wrote down a simple design for a form based application and decided to struggle. In about 20 minutes, I had gone well beyond my original design and had learned far more than I anticipated. Better still, I had discovered some of the workflow patterns of how Flex Builder correlated to changes in the raw MXML. Not to say that a good manual isn't handy, but some aspects of learning software must be learned through trial and error.

I studied Civil & Environment Engineering in College and learned allot about subjects that I would never use in my chosen career. I learned about groundwater pollution, waste management, traffic analysis, organic chemistry and lots and lots of math and physics. It took some time to see it but engineering school had not intended to teach me the subject matter, but rather, had enhanced my ability to learn complex technical subjects without getting frustrated. Curently I could barely tell you about the first week of organic chemisty, but I can learn a new technology or language when given a problem and time to struggle to make things work.

Having worked in software since college, I keep finding software development is near constant problem solving. If you take any project or aspect of a project, it can be broken down into a large set of simpler problems. It is the programmers task to digest the problems and organize a solution that addresses each. The dilemma is that most problems and their hidden structure can only be understood through real world trial and error or stated positively, experience. Struggling with a real world problems generates the experience and understanding of the problem at hand.

My Turkish CD's are made by Rosetta Stone and they teach you a language without native language translation (There is no English in the Turkish disks). The design allows you to learn the way we all learned our very first language, seeing, doing, struggling to understand and comprehend. The disks show you pictures and phrases and allow you to discern context of verbs and nouns through audio visual techniques. The learning technique is brilliant and I have found myself digesting more than I every could in a classroom.

Next time you find yourself in a learning situation, create a real world problem and struggle to find a solution. You will learn more about the problem and the medium than you can from a book. Make sure you do not give up, for me the struggle is the most valuable aspect of the expierence. If you understand how things work, solving deeper problem becomes much easier.

I keep wondering how to translate "struggle learning" into a learning medium for technology. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

ted ;)