I find that the current method of learning, which in the first lessons case might be too difficult/insufficent to properly learn. The idea is to give you the tools to solve problems but most might not know how to use those tools. If tool use is sufficiently practiced, then one can be more confident moving forward. for example:
In math, you arenāt given a problem and are expected to solve it and then are told what method to solve it. In the first exercise for Jiki, you are given `move()`and turnLeft(), turnRight(). But one might wonder what are the parentheses? why is the r in right capitalized?. I feel if someone from absolute basics comes to use jiki, they might find it overwhelming. One might wonder if knowing what those are might help. While knowing why r was capitalized isnāt really important to solving the puzzle, I think its important that we maybe do lectures, practice(say smaller mazes) before tackling the main one straight away. The smaller maze solving will build confidence and ability before moving to the main challenge. once someone get the hang of it, then they can move on to the main challenge. This is analogous to learning about xyz topic in math, practicing it at home with homework or while at school and then finally doing the test to cement your learning. Sometimes this can all be done by simply solving the main puzzle, but everyone learns differently, one might get it immediately, the other might need more practice.
While for me personally this isnāt an issue, Iāve done the previous bootcamp before(to an extent). But I think this approach might lead to better results from more users. I know its way too late to change stuff around now, since most lectures have already been filmed but just my two cents. It might be important to tell people to maybe try and solve it on paper before writing code directly, as writing something out stimulates more parts of your brain and whatever your learning is more likely to stick. If they are extremely frustrated, and never even thought of trying to write it down(like me, trying to do everything in my head) then weāre less likely to see more and more people succeed.
I find the best way to learn is being doing and getting to play hands on with things. You donāt learn to build with Legos by learning about the shapes and how they fit together; you learn by taking the blocks and seeing how they work, trying out different things. You may not understand all the parts, but you have enough working pieces to see how they work and to get you started. You try things out and quickly see what does and does not work. The details and deeper understanding can wait until you got a bit of a feel for it.
In regards to the maze size, the mazeās complexity isnāt based on the size of the maze. Shrinking the maze down doesnāt make this exercise easier. The purpose of this exercise is to learn to repeat a few simple function calls to control the pacman. It should be large enough that you get used to adding function calls without being too large that it becomes boring and toilsome. Gradually adding more of the same calls doesnāt scale up the problem complexity.
I canāt disagree with you there Isaac. As for the maze by āsizeā I meant mazes that are easier to solve if they have just a few moves, a smaller maze with just down and right is easier than a bigger maze with many more moves(atleast I think, I could be wrong, I think Iām attributing maze complexity with size which isnāt correct but I think gets the point across)
Maybe Iām just the type of person that has to know the ins and outs to be truly comfortable with something and calling it ālearntā.
I absolutely understand your reasoning. However, we found through a few years of eductional-content that not explaining things that are not necessary to complete the task is less overwhelming than explaining everything.
But one might wonder what are the parentheses? why is the r in right capitalized?
IIRC, these are covered by the video that comes directly after the maze and maybe a couple of bits in ones that follow.
the first lessons case might be too difficult/insufficent to properly learn ā¦ But one might wonder what are the parentheses? why is the r in right capitalized?.
I donāt think this makes the lessons too difficult. Solving the maze by writing turnRight isnāt difficult, I donāt think. But what is maybe challenging for you (and many others) is being asked to write something without knowing why youāre writing it.
The fundamental challenge is that there are two types of learners:
Those who want to know everything before doing. They tend to listen and read in depth.
Those who want to get their hands messy and then ask questions as they go.
It is genuinely hard to find patterns that work for both. However, one thing Iāve learned for sure is that if you give too much information, the second group stop reading/listening. And that comes with the big problem that the very essential things they need to know then get missed.
Iāve made a few decisions in Jiki to balance this:
You HAVE to watch the videos. You canāt skip them or fast forward them. So the essentials are there and group 2 are forced to watch them.
To balance this, the explanations are very short (certainly in comparison with the bootcamp - 5 min videos rather than 2 hour videos!)
Then to help group 1, there will be deep dive videos after nearly every exercise that go into more depth for those who want it. Those arenāt there yet, but once Iāve got bugs fixed and final features added, Iām intending to just record a couple each day. But they should sate Group 1ās curiosity I hope.
āAsk Jikiā is there, where you can ask more questions etc. And for most people, they can easily reach for an LLM now to ask questions of too. That hopefully helps both groups (āI need to understand more before I can startā and āarms swinging - ask for help when neededā)
As always, we shall see if this works or if Iāve misjudged it. But I tried to learn from the bootcamp how people learned differently and design this to take those things into consideration! Thanks for your thoughts and for reading. Very grateful to hear everyoneās thoughts as they use the product
Thanks for writing Jeremy. This certainly makes me feel a bit more confident to try the problems as we go forward. Iāll be sure to post more feedback soon. As for mandatory watching of the videos, is this the reason why there isnāt a scrubber available? sometimes i like to go back and watch a particular part again to really understand it but I donāt want to have to watch the entire video again.
Yes, although the scrubber should be available on a second watch, Iāll check that if itās not! And Iām going to add it so itās also available on first watch but only up to the point youāve got to (so you can rewind during the initial watch).
I can confirm the scrubber is available to me on a second watch. However, itāll be helpful if all of the caption text was available after the first watch. That makes it easier to find the bit I was trying to remember if I donāt remember where in the video it was. If Iām bouncing through the video, Iām likely not paying attention to anything else besides the info Iām looking at it. If Iām skimming the subtitles, Iām reading the captions and passively digesting the material so thatās some extra benefit there.
Hey @BNAndras! You can visit the Concept page afterwards, and the full transcript is there along with the video. The relevant concepts should be linked from the exercises (and the concepts tab on the left). For various reasons this is one of the more tricky bits to get right, so please let me know if thatās not working for you.
Yeah, that would help reinforce that visiting the concepts library is a good thing for review in general. I saw that library section but I never thought to visit it and poke around.
I think this is a great idea, and as a hint on some exercises you can add a āreview relevant conceptsā part on every exercise or every somewhat difficult exercise. Thereās already a concepts library, maybe we can highlight some that would work better than others for a particular exercise
Those are actually at the bottom of the instructions. Maybe it wasnāt clear that theyāre there. I think Iāll mention all this in the first Deep Dive video.
I think you have to be careful not to include too much information when introducing new concepts, otherwise the material could become too confusing and overwhelming for beginners.
Thereās a pedagogical technique (which I think derives from the Socratic Method), whereby each new concept is introduced incrementally, step-by-step, akin to peeling the layers off an onion. So you start off at the highest, most simplistic notion of the concept, before you start to dig down into the nitty-gritty stuff. A consequence of this is that, yes, youāre going to have students asking questions like what are the parentheses for, or what is the strange capitalization in the function name. But this discourse is exactly why this form of teaching is popular and effective. Each question and answer peels off another layer. Of course outside of a live classroom, these questions might remain unanswered unless the material covers them later on, the student proactively seeks an answer (the Talk to Jiki AI coding assistant is really useful here), or the student just plays around with the code to see what happens (still my favourite method).
So itās not perfect, but a far better method than to completely swamp a student with unnecesary information, like this example:
