Engage in as many different ways as you can.

In order for me to deliver on the promises, we need to engage in much more than me talking and you listening and you writing computer code. You will learn acquire and access these skills in a number of different ways. Research shows that the more different ways you engage you with concepts, the more likely you are to be able to use that concept in the future. Sometimes I will actually just talk and ask you to listen (otherwise known as a lecture) but that’s not my favorite style of skill transference, mostly because it never worked very well for me when I was on the receiving end. There are some people who thrive on it, and so we will try to do some lecturing, some working things out together, sometimes you teaching, sometimes you learning things outside of class and coming to class to practice.

We need to be a team.

Each of you has something to contribute to the operation of this team. Thank goodness not all of you has the same thing to contribute to the operation of the team. That would be boring and it wouldn’t work very well. So first, please when you notice someone has something to contribute that isn’t currently in your skill/knowledge set please practice saying something to yourself like, ``This team is great! I’m glad we all have different skills.”

Be responsible for creating circumstances that help you learn.

I remember in college (Carleton) that when I would talk over a problem with a peer sometimes I would actually start to get mad, because I could tell they were thinking about it in a different way, and I wasn’t ready to stop thinking about it my way yet. I knew I almost had a solution, and if I thought about it their way, I was going to have to take down my own scaffolding. At the time I doubt I could’ve articulated the idea of scaffolding. In any case, I hope I was pretty good at not actually getting mad at my friend, and saying “Thank you, I need to go work on this by myself a little bit now,” and working by myself. Then when I had my scaffolding up - my way of understanding it, I could usually go back to that person and say, ``could you tell me again how you solved it?” And then comparing my solution to theirs was really helpful and deepened my understanding of the problem.

Notice how you learn best.

You each have different experiences solving problems and working with peers. Notice what ways of working deliver the largest gains in the promises of the course. I am asking nothing less than consciousness about the way you learn new things (starting with today’s paper, but also throughout the course). At the end of each lab you’ll jot down some thoughts what you noticed about your learning process. This is a really important moment in your learning to take a step back and think about how it went, and what produced your successes and failures.