Skill in public
Sep 2022
The launch of repetition is a culmination of decade of trying. It is an amazing promise. Thought not an impressive reality. But we'll continue to build and iterate, leveraging the exceptional tools created at The Coder.
This is a live blog, where in the coming days, I will document the whole story behind repetition.
Since childhood I was obsessed with sciency pictures, sciency cartoons and science videos. They naturally pulled me towards them. I spent hours exploring articles on a pirated britannica CD my friend gave me. Watched the videos many times over. Was glued to the chair when the Discovery Channel was tuned in.
On an intuitive level it was always obvious to me that human mind is a learning machine, a more conscious realisation came after college, when after an year of travelling through India, meeting exceptional young people unable to invest in their talent, I proposed Code India to a friend.
This was the first "Aha" moment. It was the realisation that Cheap 4G + Cheap Smartphones could revolutionise learning.
In March 2015, I and an IIT Madras passout Surbhi started a pilot in Delhi, in March 2015. We collected some Mobiles and curated online videos to share with students of 8th standard at an informal school for those out of formal schooling.
Initially the project was supposed to be hands off We compiled list of resources that can be used, and ran a pilot with some students. The results were amazing! The students who participated in the pilot were able to learn the basics of coding and apply it to real-world scenarios.
Today, a decade later, the youngest member of students with whom we made the first attempt is leading this project, and was the one to inform me that repetition is Live, but reaching this point wasn't a straight line. After F2SO4 got acquired, I had to shift to Mumbai for Craftsvilla, and though I never officially shut down Code India, the weekly connects became quarterly then six-monthly. I knew it was a partial success, and I knew I wanted to go back to education, this time more fundamentally. So I quit craftsvilla, and travelled to the heartland to for some reality check of education status.
In July-August 2017, I spent about a month in Kukshi, a small district in MP, trying to evaluate the state of education there. What we saw saddened us.
Less than 5% of 10th class students could do 94*49 in their notebook. Though all of them follow instructions well, like take out your notebook, give your maths book, stand up, sit down. The mental intellectual model just does not exist. Real maths and english teachers are non-existent, though sanskrit, hindi, etc ones are aplenty. What jobs would these children find in the information-intellectual age? đ
Disheartened and scared by the scale of the problem. I ducked the attempt, drifting towards transportation. Though I became an official instructor in the interim, education wasn't in the picture till my second aha moment.
My second Aha moment was when I realised that learning via imitation comes much before understanding develops; and thus the understanding lead education model is doing opposite to what nature seems to be doing, here's the story.
In mid Nov 2019, I moved to Karnal to setup a Tech Studio with my friends. There I ended up spending a lot of time with kids and got this insight that kids learn via Imitation. And boy kids learn fast. This was in line with what we were seeing in our Tech Studio, if you put a fresher in a team where some other team members have a say 6 month head start, the fresher picks up work much faster. Thatâs why remote is hard for new joiners. All of this made me theorise that imitation is a big chunk of learning, probably bigger and faster than understanding.
Since then I have expanded my theory of learning to include repetitions, visualisations and accelerated-edge-cases. So I believe that most efficient learning can happen when you are introduced to Minimum-Viable-Imitations, where you imitate a small simple task, that introduces you to the vocabulary of that field, as well as achieve some sort of task. And then you move forward with repetitions and visualisations for internalising the constraints, and exposure to accelerated-edge-cases to polish your skills.
But all of this starts with imitations. Being in the information age, I dived into youtube and twitch to see what was out there. There wasnât much. There were introduction tutorials, and there were a lot of niche examples and discussions. Some rare live-streaming of problems some skilled person had already solved. But no one was actually live-streaming actual work, the actual struggle of getting stuck and getting out of them. And I was like this is a big hole in humanityâs existence, without we are all cursed like Sisyphus, all of us re-inventing some part of the wheel, which we could have catalysed via imitation.
To be continued...