Study Advice#
Hello APCS coders!
I would like to offer some advice about how to use your time effectively to master the concepts we cover this year.
Mistakes#
Niels Bohr, a physicist, gave a definition of an expert:
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field.
Of course, we can do better - not every person is a man, and no person can make all the mistakes there are to make:
An expert is someone who has made more mistakes in a particular subject than anyone else.
You can interpret this in two ways:
In order to become an expert, you must make more mistakes than anyone else.
The only difference between you and an expert is that they have made more mistakes than you have. (So you shouldn’t be intimidated by an expert.)
Learning through play#
Babies (human or other animal) use play as a way of learning about the world. For example, when a baby first encounters a new object, what does she do? She pokes at it, prods it, turns it upside down, all to explore the properties of the new object.
This is a great way to explore a new coding concept. What happens if you change the value of this variable? What happens if you change the order of these statements? What happens if you omit a particular keyword? A lot of learning how your code relates to the behavior of your program is playing around, poking and prodding and changing things and observing the results.
Coding#
Coding is a skill. How fast your skills improve depends on how much time and effort you put into your practice. You won’t get better if you don’t practice. And here, practice means “writing and testing and debugging code”.
Learning to read and write code is like learning a foreign language. You must immerse yourself if possible. A little practice every day will give you better results than a long practice one day a week.
Give yourself space to make mistakes (and time to learn from them). Remember: in order to become an expert, you must make all the mistakes that everyone else has made, and more.
Dr. Kessner