Nabeel S. Qureshi’s article on understanding/learning concepts from the perspective of people perceived as unintelligent made me think of project-based learning.
| Project Based Learning |
|---|
| Learning through experimentation; getting your hands dirty trying to prove something |
In particular, Michael Faraday wasn’t really appreciated until Maxwell verified his experiments on electromagnetism. His practical curiosity is a far cry from the theoretical learning presented in modern education.
Analysis of our Existing Education
One example of project-based learning I haven’t seen much of is critical essays in English Language Arts (ELA). Vague requirements and fluid output expectations sound like a perfect place for experimentation.
At first glance, ELA critical analysis essays seem to fit our understanding of a “project.” However, in a critical analysis essay, you understand the universe as it is presented to you based on a specific topic. There’s no room for failure or discovery, as there is in chemistry, physics, and math labs.
Even then, high school labs don’t allow much exploration outside of the given constraints of the problem.
For example, we are not taught why hydrochloric acid burns through flesh when god forbid a chemistry teacher demonstrates how an acid molecule rapidly exchanges protons with the complex cellular structure of an animal, because they would know nothing about biology.
My analysis of our education system is that it prevents students from seeing how concepts relate to each other, and thus burns their curiosity in the subject.
The Promise of Experimentation
It is clear that my experience with project-based learning in most subjects has failed me. On paper, the curriculum designers checked all the boxes when it came to creating their “projects”.
- Make the students think about the potential result (hypothesis)
- Get the students to attempt the experiment (observations)
- Record results in comparison to the hypothesis (results)
But they completely missed the most important point: getting students to change something in the experiment. Don’t record it as part of the results, just have them write down what they observed for fun. Then have them turn it in and grade them on how wild their experiment was or how much they were willing to explore.
Of course, this is metaphorical, since the aforementioned “point” is to prove that a student knows something, not to spark curiosity in their brains. As always, the problem is more fundamental than superficial.
The Problem of Programming
I’ve spent enough time on other topics; let’s get back to good old-fashioned programming.
It’s been the case for a while that the spark for many developers to learn to code is the potential to build something cool. For me, it was websites, but for everyone else, it could have been mobile apps, smart home technology, networking, hacking/security, blockchain, or AI.
Ironically, most programming courses sound like “Learn HTML/CSS in X hours! Then they follow the tutorial and either become alienated or forget why they started in the first place. Sometimes they trudge through, connecting the dots along the way.
When learning, provisional programmers are in the position of “not knowing what they don’t know,” but instead of trying to find out what they don’t know and get a bigger picture, they dive right into “knowing” things.
For example, say I want to build the Instagram iOS app. There are lots of YouTube videos on how to build Instagram clones, and they count as project-based learning, except you still don’t discover the gaps in your knowledge. Instead, you get more confused and discouraged because the lack of knowledge becomes overwhelming.
What Learning Most Things Should Look Like
Instead of:
- Trying to build an Instagram clone right away
- Realising you know nothing
- Trying to start from scratch
- Getting demotivated (because building Instagram isn’t solving any problems)
You should:
- Define why you want to build an Instagram clone. Do you want to add/remove something to it?
- Say you want to remove those pesky ads. What does that take?
- Start a scratchpad to note all of your findings
- Search up how Instagram presents ads
- Search up an overview of how ad blockers work
- Why don’t such ad blockers exist on the iOS App Store for Instagram?
- Oh, they exist as IPAs for jailbroken devices only? Why is that? What is an IPA?
- Okay, how is the Instagram IPA different than the official app? What did the developer change? Maybe I can use their understanding, since they’ve already solved the problem I’m attempting to solve.
- How can I directly use Instagram’s data? It seems to be open, so long as a user has an account. Maybe I can just create a bot account and have it scrape public data? Or perhaps there’s something Instagram has opened to third-party app developers (called an API)?
Note: the learner hasn’t even done anything besides research. In the end, the learner might say, “So I’m going to build a native iOS app using Xcode, the Swift programming language, Instagram’s API, blacklisted uBlock Origin URLs, and the MacOS developer toolkit.”
Now we’re getting somewhere. The learner has gone from not knowing what they don’t know, to having a basic understanding of what they should learn.
The concept of “specialization by curiosity” that I’ve demonstrated with someone who is naturally inclined to be a mobile/iOS developer is applicable to education in general. If I’m not naturally curious about theater or Shakespeare, but I love screenwriting, then for obvious reasons I’ll pursue my curiosity in that area! It’s still language arts, just a different kind.
Competent Thinkers
Not everyone can follow the model, because not everyone wants to go deeper. For me, it is extraordinarily hard to “get” social activity, so I can assume it is hard for others to “get” the act of diving deeper.
However, the lack of encouragement for project-based learning in primarily theoretical subjects tends to kill the fun. Sure, get your students to make an animation about anything they want for that Communication Studies class. That’s easy. But how do you get your students to prove the effects of a difference in pressure? That’s pretty vague. Projects can range from a flushing toilet, to an airfoil in a jet stream, to buoyancy, to hot air rising and cold air falling, and so on.
I’m Angry
Honestly, the whole thing kind of pissed me off. I get really passionate about my past and always wish someone had told me that raw intellect and talent are nothing compared to the “will to think”. No one told anyone early on what true project-based learning is. Few of the future generations born into North America’s flawed education system will experience it.