Memorization and learning to code

Memorization equals learning.

For many of us, it’s how our understanding was assessed. We were praised for memorizing the alphabet, numbers, the four nucleotides in DNA, and x is equal to negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac all over 2a. I imagine that somewhere out there my former math teacher is smiling.

Many of us have held on to that belief. I did when I was learning my programming basics. I spent so many hours attempting to memorize the syntax of a for loop. So many evenings where I’d try to recite the names, syntax, and return values of array methods. And many nights where I read and re-read the documentation on React, wishing I could just tattoo it to my brain.

I’ve spent the past few years helping people learn to code at The Odin Project and I’ve noticed a lot of people there are doing the same. At least a few times a week folks come in to our Discord server to ask about the best note-taking techniques or to express concern about moving to a new topic for fear of forgetting what they just committed to memory.

Here’s a hard truth: the concept that you spent hours trying to memorize that you feel has finally stuck- you’re going to forget it. Don’t freak out though. That’s ok. That’s normal.

The greatest concern I had once starting my job as a software engineer was whether I had enough in my brain. I was afraid of pairing with more experienced engineers at work because I didn’t want them to discover how little I knew. When we did pair I was embarrassed that I couldn’t recall a syntax for a some method or recall the return value of another. There was a pairing session I had with my colleague, John, where this all changed.

While pairing on a task, the idea of localStorage came up. I mentioned that I used it a few times in the past, hoping to impress my new co-worker. John invited me to tell him about it. There isn’t a way to dress this up: I FREAKED OUT. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. I apologized and said I forgot everything about it. But I gave myself a few seconds to think and finally told him there was a way to set and retrieve information but I had nothing beyond that. I was afraid of his response. I was expecting he’d say it’s crazy I hadn’t memorized everything about localStorage and go tell my boss that hiring me was a mistake. Instead, John shared something like this. His exact words are hazy but the spirit of it was:

“That’s ok. I haven’t used that in years myself. Let’s google it together and figure this out.”

The conversation continued and I remember little about the technical stuff. The fact that he didn’t flip out was shocking and that stuck with me. At the end of the pairing session, we discussed the need of revisiting documentation. John shared that he googles and reads documentation regularly. And shared that it is very normal to not have everything memorized. I always imagined that great engineers knew everything. I imagined they carried all their knowledge all the time and could recite any of what they held in their brain whenever they wanted. After all, I was under the impression that memorization equaled learning, which in turn led me to believe that I was only as good and skilled and useful as my memory. John taught me that this is far from the truth.

Now that I’ve been in the field for a few years, I find that I very much agree with the sentiment that John shared. I regularly forget how to use stuff. I forget syntax, return values, even names of methods. If I haven’t used Flexbox in a while, I’ll need remind myself on how to center a div. But rather than freak out, like I used to, I know that I can visit documentation to refresh myself on things when I need it.

When we are actively engaged with a topic, that topic is easy to carry in our working memory. And the hope is that our efforts in studying a thing will move that thing into our long-term memory. For many, falling short of putting everything we engage with into our long-term is failure. Moving things from our working memory to our long-term memory is hard. And to make matters worse, working memory is not unlimited. This means that as we become familiar with one thing, another thing will fall out of that working memory. This causes concern to a lot of people. We end up returning to things we feel we’ve forgotten every time we learn something new. Except in revisiting that thing we forgot, we now risk forgetting that thing we just learned. Then we’re in a cycle where we’re constantly trying to hold on to everything at once. And if we’re constantly trying to hold on to what we know, what room do we have for learning new things in peace?

In the real world, no one holds on to everything all the time. We’re more likely to hold on to the general idea of a thing and less likely to hold on to the details. And in the adventure of learning to code, there is little difference in the utility between perfect memorization and being vaguely aware.

Knowing that it’s possible to remove the last element of an array is just as good as having the syntax of JavaScript’s pop method memorized.

[Continue reading this article by Carlos Diaz published on our partner site Dev Community by clicking here.]

Dad Time Boosts Kids’ School Success

Summary: A new study reveals that fathers engaging in interactive activities with their children, such as reading and playing, significantly improve their kids’ primary school performance. Analysis of the Millennium Cohort Study showed children of involved dads performed better by ages five and seven.

The benefits were observed irrespective of the child’s gender, ethnicity, or household income. The study underscores the essential role fathers play in their child’s academic journey.

Key Facts:

1. Interactive activities between fathers and their three-year-olds improve children’s academic performance by age five.
2. Mothers primarily influence children’s emotional and social behaviors, whereas fathers have a significant impact on educational achievement.
3. The research recommends even just ten minutes of interaction per day between fathers and their children for educational benefits.

Source: University of Leeds

Fathers can give their children an educational advantage at primary school by reading, drawing and playing with them, according to a newly published report.

Research led by the University of Leeds has found that children do better at primary school if their fathers regularly spend time with them on interactive engagement activities like reading, playing, telling stories, drawing and singing. 

Analysing primary school test scores for five- and seven-year-olds, the researchers used a representative sample of nearly 5,000 mother-father households in England from the Millenium Cohort Study – which collected data on children born 2000-02 as they grew up.  

According to the research, dads who regularly drew, played and read with their three-year-olds helped their children do better at school by age five. Dads being involved at age five also helped improve scores in seven-year-olds’ Key Stage Assessments. 

Dr Helen Norman, Research Fellow at Leeds University Business School, who led the research, said: “Mothers still tend to assume the primary carer role and therefore tend to do the most childcare, but if fathers actively engage in childcare too, it significantly increases the likelihood of children getting better grades in primary school. This is why encouraging and supporting fathers to share childcare with the mother, from an early stage in the child’s life, is critical.” 

Dads’ involvement impacted positively on their children’s school achievement regardless of the child’s gender, ethnicity, age in the school year and household income, according to the report. 

There were different effects when mums and dads took part in the same activities – the data showed that mums had more of an impact on young children’s emotional and social behaviours than educational achievement. 

The researchers recommend that dads carve out as much time as they can to engage in interactive activities with their children each week. For busy, working dads, even just ten minutes a day could potentially have educational benefits.

[Finish reading this fascinating piece of reporting at our partner's Neuro Science Science's website by clicking here.]

Welcome to the Fall 2023 Semester

It is with joy, pleasure and anticipation that we want to welcome our new and returning students for our Fall 2023 semester.  This semester promises to be full of great experiences, fun classes and other activities, relaxed and enjoyable classes and above all, a dedicated pursuit of excellence and lots of coding.

As our principal said in his official welcome letter:

Embrace challenges with open arms, for they are the stepping stones to your growth. Seek knowledge relentlessly, as it is the key to unlocking your true potential. Collaborate with your peers, for the exchange of ideas is where brilliance often takes root.

This semester sees the launch of 2 new classes available to our continuing students: Time Management for Young Adults, taught by new teacher Felice Wilder and after the extreme success of the beginners portion of this class, we are launching Game Development using SCRATCH for Advanced Students.

We are deep in the trenches as we speak welcoming all our students - classes start today Monday, September 18th, 2023 - and making sure that each of them are registered to their proper classes and are ready to settle in for 8+ weeks of learning and discovery.

If you are interested in joining our classes, you have until Spetember 27 to fill out the registration/waiting list at https://kerryn.academy/home/waiting_list

Stay tuned for much more interesting news and tidbits coming from us as we leave you with another quote from the welcome letter from our principal, Mr. Kerryn Thomas:

As you navigate through the twists and turns of this digital voyage, always keep in mind that success is not solely defined by the destination but by the journey itself. Your journey will be filled with late-night coding sessions, moments of inspiration, and occasional frustrations, but it will also be filled with triumphs and the satisfaction of seeing your creations come to life.

Window Snyder helped secure the internet and billions of devices

Snyder has made Windows, Mac computers, iPhones and other technologies more secure for almost 25 years!

After the band played Miles Davis’ “Seven Steps to Heaven,” and an effusive introduction from the head of the school, Window Snyder stands in front of a hall filled with around 800 students at her old high school to receive an alumni award. Some of the students have a plastic spoon stuck to their noses, part of an end-of-the-year traditional school game — basically a game of tag — for seniors called “Assassin.” Most of them have their eyes set on the special guest.

Snyder is emotional. She hesitates, and has a hard time starting her speech. Once she does, she opens up about how much she struggled when she got here, to Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, after leaving her mom and her life in California back in 1989.

At one point, Snyder recalls, her advisor asked her: “Are you sure this is the right place for you? Maybe you will be happier back home, somewhere else.”

But Snyder was sure, and it paid off.

“I never worked so hard for anything in my life. And then after leaving Choate, nothing was ever hard again,” Snyder tells the students. “And it’s not because I didn’t do hard things. I knew how to get hard things done.”

That may be an understatement.

In her nearly 25-year career in cybersecurity, Snyder was part of a group of people who pushed Microsoft in the early days of the mainstream internet to finally take cybersecurity seriously by embracing the notion that security needed to be part of the software development cycle — not bolted on afterward — and played a significant role in developing the first versions of the Windows operating systems that implemented that idea. She also helped convince the company that outside researchers, who were keen on pointing out flaws in Microsoft’s products, were actually allies, not enemies.

Having helped secure Windows, the operating system used by hundreds of millions of people in the world — and after a stint at another security consultancy and leading Mozilla’s security team at a time when users considered Firefox the secure alternative to Internet Explorer — Snyder moved to Microsoft’s then-biggest competitor.

In Cupertino, she managed Apple’s privacy and security teams. There, as part of a project she called “Apple Doesn’t Have Your Data,” she successfully lobbied and worked on enabling encryption by default in all Apple-made computers, iPhones and iPads, and iMessage, helping lay the foundations for the company’s reputation as a cybersecurity giant.

At the cloud computing company Fastly, Snyder built the security team and helped secure what she says was around 10% of internet traffic, which passed through Fastly’s infrastructure at the time. She has also worked at Intel, the payment company Square and she got her start at the legendary and pioneering cybersecurity startup @stake.

“People don’t realize that Window is responsible for starting so many positive security improvements at major corporations that blazed a trail for other corporations to follow in their footsteps,” says Katie Moussouris, a veteran of the hacking scene and now CEO and founder of Luta Security.

“A lot of the big companies who are now doing things that seem obvious to them in retrospect, [it’s] because she went in and changed what they did,” says Dave Aitel, a well-known cybersecurity expert who worked with Snyder at @stake. “Her legacy is about changing big companies and moving big ships.”

Those who know her or have worked with her call Snyder “trailblazing,” “intelligent,” “impressive,” “technical,” “brilliant,” “driven,” “thoughtful,” “relentless,” “remarkable,” “wicked smart,” “professional,” a “leader,” “humble” and “like a swan — so graceful on the surface, but paddling like hell underneath.”

As she admitted in her speech at Choate, however, getting where she is wasn’t always easy.

Read the full article on the incredible work of Window Snyder by clicking on this link from our partner at Tech Crush.  It is worth the time.
Continue reading.

You are invited: Our students are presenting their final class projects

As it is our custom, the public is invited to attend the Final Project Presentation of all our students enrolled in coding and web development classes.  Come see their work, how much they've learned, how creative they are. Each student is encouraged to pick the subject of their presentation on their own and they are free to design, create, code and develop their projects as they see fit and one thing we can promise is that you will be amazed and completely blown away by the quality, the breadth, the creativity that they express through their work. One of the fundamental beliefs upon which this academy was founded is the deep conviction that coding must be part of every child's education from an early age simply because computers, AI and technology are all encroaching more and more of our lives and a basic understanding of all this technology helps all individuals in their overall understanding of the world around them and prepares them for a future that without a doubt be deeply shaped by software, coding and technology. Join us on Monday July 10th between 6:00PM and 7:30PM for the online presentation of our students by visiting the following link on the day and time indicated. https://meet.google.com/znu-fvnp-gar Looking forward to welcoming you all and prepare to be amazed!

It's already time for the Spring 2023 Final Project Presentation Day

In just a few weeks, we'll be hosting our popular and always entertaining semester final presentation event, where all students in coding, web development and gaming classes gather in front of their peers, teachers, principals, parents and the public at large to officially present their final semester project.

This Spring 2023 Presentation Day is scheduled for Monday July 10th from 6:00pm until 8:00pm.  EVERYONE interested in attending is welcome and can easily join at the reserved video link for this event: https://meet.google.com/znu-fvnp-gar

Invite your friends, your extended family, your principal or anybody you think might be interested to see these final projects.  If the presentation events of the past are any indication, this one promises to deliver in surprises, amazement and sheer shock at the quality and skill level of our students who range in age from 8 to 14 years old.

As it's always been our belief, it is never too early to expose young minds to coding and web development and the necessity to make coding a fundamental pillar of education curriculums around the world, specially in schools catering to minority students.

Mark your calendar, clear your schedule, pull up a comfortable chair and join us via remote video link on Monday July 10th at 6:00pm EST.