Three F's to Upping Your Learning Game
I’ve never met a person who wished they were more ignorant. Almost everyone wants to know more about something. That’s what inspired us to publish this newsletter, addressing why people aren’t learning as much as they would like and how to change the game.
What’s on your list of things you want to learn? What are your top five?
Hey, I didn’t come to this newsletter for homework!
Just humor me. I’ll share mine, in no particular order.
I’m serious about you writing your list. It will take 30 seconds.
What stops people from crossing off their list?
Focus
There’s a reason schools require teachers to state the standard a lesson is supposed to address - focus. If I’m teaching students to convert fractions into decimals, I shouldn’t be teaching them what is a fraction at the same time.? Seems obvious, right? Yet, I jump from learning Vue.js to R to how to publish a newsletter on LinkedIn.?
I borrowed this idea from The 12-week year, in learning, think of your life in quarters, like you were back in school. Pick five things you want to learn over the next three months and focus on those. That doesn’t mean you won’t learn Calculus or SEO marketing or optimal AI prompts, it just means you’re not ‘taking it’ this quarter. Or maybe you want to outsource your learning. Even entrepreneurs don’t need to be knowledgeable about every aspect of their business. The great thing about 7 Generation Games having three co-founders is that we can each take up some of the learning load.
Format
Ways I want to learn about your product, in order
#647 spray-painted on the side of a cow
领英推荐
#648 watch a video
Someone posted this on Threads and I have never felt more seen.
Find the format that works best for you or your students.
I have a subscription to O’Reilly Safari, library cards for three public libraries and one university library. Our CTO, on the other hand, has videos playing on his third monitor all day long, on everything from building games with Unity to bread recipes.
Blame the Internet for reducing our attention span, but I find it hard to consume any kind of media - books, videos, podcasts, games - for more than 45 minutes before I’m ready to take a break. Years ago, I began recording the lectures for the graduate courses I teach. More and more, I see my students not showing up to lectures and just watching the recording.
As we have already established that I hate videos, I really appreciate that the LinkedIn Learning courses at least break topics into 3 to 10-minute segments because that works for me. I started pausing in my two-hour lecture (hey, that was the university’s idea, not mine!) and breaking each into 30-minute segments.
Fun
For many of us, learning new things is what happens after our day job. I spent today fixing bugs in preparation for a release of an update of the Making Camp Navajo game. As much as I like my job, I tend to read novels, walk the dog or do other non-coding activities after work.?
Since I make games for a living, I decided to check out games to learn flex box, which is the part of CSS where I’m weakest. Even though I play World of Warcraft or Thaumistry a little bit, I spend far more time with casual games like Solitaire or Scrabble, So, I found this awesome post that had 10 games to learn CSS.?
Whatever it is that you want to learn, there’s probably a game for that, and if not, you can create your own.
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