Learning: A better way to create cards?

[badlydrawnrob]

Reduce, Reduce, reduce!

• In which order do you learn programming concepts?
• At what age can you start teaching kids?
• How should you write the documentation tutorial snippets?
• Which language(s) should you learn?¹
• When do code notes become unreadable?

These concepts (among others) will need reducing at some stage. Mushing together themes on "generating an Anki card". This will include how best to structure a deck, while reducing dependency on cards in general, in favour of note-taking and quick-reference files.

1. What are Anki cards best at? What are they not?² 🦸 so-so
2. Do you really need to memorise new syntax in this way?³ 👶 easy
3. What in the seven hells do these variables mean?⁴⁵ 👩‍🎓hard
4. Oh look, I've introduced at least 5 or 6 brand new concepts here.⁶

Main drawbacks of card creation

1. For a long chapter, that's a lot of potential cards
2. Some things naturally group together to smush down (for fewer cards)
3. Some things just need a lot of explaining/reinforcing for memory
4. Learning can seem very slow going, even with "Lazy loading" of cards.
5. Trying to run through the examples (by coding) might be better for memory.
6. And by coding, it can mean splitting it into smaller chunks to better understand it's parts.

Some things to do

• A couple of Draw! examples (simple and difficult)
  • As well as the steps to thinking about a problem visually
• When to generate an Anki card and when not to?
  • Follow the steps as you're learning — lazy, or "just-in-time" thinking
• Smushing together "problem solvers" and ways to compose functions
  • Wishful thinking with SICP
  • Design recipes with HTDP
  • Elm's refactoring?

Some helpful articles, videos and examples from my repos.

Can you create cards for these ages?

It's like finger painting for adults!

Footnotes

1. Is Scratch better for young kids? Can bigger kids understand the basic teachpack? What do these programming languages leave out? (Stuff like Types, recursion, composition, conditionals, etc) ↩

2. Anki is good for rote memorisation, but it can be painstaking to create and review them if you build too big a deck. A quick reference file with lots of notes can also be a bit too much to take in at-a-glance, so perhaps the syntax on it's own with a link or expandable clicky thing that explains it. This way you can scan a file quickly for reference, and get more context when needed. ↩

3. When you're starting out, you know nothing and syntax could potentially be learned the way you teach kids ↩

4. Racket lang's documentation is a bit too academic sometimes, and this example isn't great. What the fuck is w and h (it's obvious its a rectangle but why not width and height to be explicit?); OK I can see m is Mode which has a clicky link to a different section; it's a Type that takes a range of strings; oh yes, I get it now — but I've had experience with these before. But ... what about beginners? They don't know what a Type is — maybe they can't even link the fact that m takes a "string", or that w is width — and so on. They'll definitely not understand that 'outline and "outline" are essentially the same types. Unless they've used css or Illustrator; they'll probably not understand about types of colours, like #hexcode, rgb and <named-color>. And why can't I use rgba or hexcode anyway? ↩

5. For beginners, this documentation is far superior. It requires no previous knowledge. It stumbles a little bit with 'quote it uses with 'outline so I'd probably rip that out and stick to plain old "string" types (and not explain what a (quote "string") is, nor for that matter what a Type is). That should all come later. ↩

6. Assume they know NOTHING. In (4) we're introducing a very simple shape function but unpacking this, it assumes so much. What's a rectangle? What is w and h? What's a variable? What's Mode? Oh cool, I know what a colour is. But I'm a kid! How do I represent that in abstract terms? Do I understand it through art, software, or code? A class.method and a module.function looks the same, but how are they different? And God knows what Ruby is up to! And on, and on, and on. ↩