Summary

So what does all of this mean in the context of your learning?

  • Developing into an expert programmer is going to take hard work
  • It will require a lot of writing and reading code
  • There is no shortcut in this learning process, because you must create disequilibrium in your brain in order for the necessary cognitive structures to form through the process of accommodation
  • This process can be very frustrating
  • You can do this, just as many students before you have

What can you do to improve your learning process?

  • Get enough sleep, both in quantity and regularity
  • Exercise regularly
  • Engage with the readings and activities.
  • Take notes, annotate your text, draw concept diagrams
  • Don’t try to multitask while working on your classwork
  • Turn off autocompletion in your development environment
  • Don’t copy/paste code directly into your program. Instead, type it - it will take longer, but it will also give you the time to study each line and develop and understanding of what it is doing and how it interacts with the rest of the program.
  • Read programs written by other people, and try to understand what they are doing - GitHub is a great source of examples, and you can filter it by programming language