I'm 48 and have gone through this process countless times, it feels like familiar rote:
1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn't matter as long as you don't get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.
2. At some point you get the ah-hah! moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don't know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
I'm home-schooling my daughter in math because Zoom and it not agreeing with her. She did great last semester and tests several years ahead and has a very intuitive sense of why things work the way they do, I'd like to keep her interest.
However, we're now on to pre-algebra and using this book [0], "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving". The first chapter is all about axioms, proofs of some sort, breaking down "obvious" conclusions back to their constituent proof-from-first-principles and it's not agreeing with her at all. Since this is the first week I'm struggling to find a way to have it all make sense, and I've concluded we need to kind of skip much of this first chapter (we'll look at the summary) and get to the later content which is more intuitive and applies "obvious" principles, and come back periodically to revisit the more mechanistic content in the first chapter. I think the parent post's description of exploring a topic matches how my daughter will come to understand the whole "algebra stack." (Wish me luck.)
I tutored algebra students and I reccommend the following approach with Khan academy/Openstax resources.
Order of Operations(No Variable)
Order of Operations(One Variable)
Advanced Order of Operations (One Variable)*optional
- Logs, Roots, Exponentials
- Polynomial multiplication/Factorization
Change the variable to random symbols
- Greek characters, shapes, animals
Order of Operations(Multiple Variables)
Introduce functions
- f(x) = mx + b
Connect Order of Operations with Functions
- Simplify an equation and plot as a function
Introduce units (basic physics equations)
- Simplify to formula and Plot
The goal in formal classes is to introduce order of operations with variables, the concept of functions, and how to manipulate those functions. If you are stem oriented, then this is the perfect time to introduce dimensional analysis(units) and physics-based functions. Instilling a sense of confidence and comfort with algebraic manipulation is critical. Prepping her for physics and working with functions is just smart.
Breaking things down to their basic axioms and rebuilding them with proofs is arguably quite an advanced approach. By Terry Tao's three stages of of rigour classification [0], this perspective isn't typical until undergraduate study.
It doesn't seem like a bad idea to give a taste of it significantly earlier, but I don't think it's surprising if someone without a more mature relationship with mathematics doesn't find much value in 'going back to basics.' If your daughter is doing well with a more intuitive approach it sounds like a good idea to stick with it for now.
Art of Problem Solving is great - I think they take credit for the US Math olympiad team's performance. I use books from the same organization at elementary school level and find them very good and fun to teach. I would recommend going a level lower among the books published by them [1] to see if that is a good starting point for your child. Their website also has some placement tests etc. to evaluate the right level for a student.
There's two hurdles for the pre-algebra student: numbers being generically represented as letters and the idea of axioms being generic rules for numbers. Check to see which issue or both is misunderstood. If it's numbers as letters, show them any interactive programming environment and demonstrate the idea of letters as generic numbers. From there, axioms are just more interactive demonstration.
I remember my mom struggling to teach me pre-algebra ahead of the school curriculum. My uncle (a math teacher) mailed us a bunch of "part-is-to-whole-as-part-is-to-whole" word problems of increasing complexity and various forms, and working through those made a lot of things click. The concreteness helped, and it also made me understand the equivalence between proportions, fractions, decimals, percents, and their real-world concepts, plus it has some simple solve-for-x attached to it. And it's learning-by-doing instead of learning-by-reading.
To expand on 1, I think it's been important for me to have some anchor points along the way. Some things I can "accomplish" however small they may be that, if nothing else, help me feel like I'm making progress I won't lose, even if full understanding takes much longer. Otherwise, backsliding in interest can mean the next time I get interested, I'm faced with the prospect of starting over from scratch, which can sometimes mean I just move on to something else.
Completely agree. I usually start with a trivial step and then build from it. Keeping notes on paper, in a markdown doc or jupyter notebook as appropriate is also useful. I have notes that I still look back at to remind me of details of areas I haven't used in a while.
The don't get bored part is really important. If it's not something you are required to learn, but instead you want to, then keep being interested and passionate is the best thing. There's no use in trying to optimize your learning at the very beginning if you drop it entirely in a month
It's fairly similar from what I've observed myself, but I'd say the ah-hah! moment for a given subject is not a singular event, but can be repeated if you look at the same subject from a different angle and get a different insight, deeper understanding of the solution or even of the problem. But maybe that's because learning in my case often is very much intertwined with trying to solve a problem.
And there's:
-1. Come across the solution by talking to people, reading books, articles, videos... long before actually needing it, sometimes not even being able to recall it in the next steps until the ah-hah! moment.
0. Have an actual need for that solution due to a problem you're trying to solve. And having that feeling of "there is a solution for this" but not being able to put your finger on it.
Talking to people helps a lot to speed up the process because everyone will have their own view on things which helps to shape your own understanding of the subject.
I agree with this. I would add that for me part of 1 is almost akin to pain. The frustration and annoyance I feel makes this part painful, but also when I get to 2 it's amazing. I hate feeling around in the dark but when the light comes on...
This resonates to my own experience! I'd only add that the step #2 (ah-hah! moments) are not singular, but milestones in a cycle. Being patient and pushing through #1 is definitely rewarding and expands to new fronts.
> But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
I completely agree with you. I remember feeling the dopamine rush when I saw the 3b1b's video lectures on linear algebra and Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Lecture.
Although I strongly feel that simply reading books and watching video lectures are not the best way to learn on your own. You have to re-read them, use them, do the exercises and talk with peers to really get the underlying ideas. Maybe some better explainations exist, but hoping that you randomly stumble upon them as you browse through online articles is not a good idea, IMHO.
I like this quote from Prof. Michael Jordan:
"the first time you barely understand, the second time you start to get it, and the third time it all seems obvious."
You have to work with the material and come back to it again and again to really understand.
I have created a conversational learning medium, Primer, that is designed for self-learners. Our goal, right now, is to create conversational undergraduate-level computer science courses for anyone to learn on their.
It's primary focus is to bring resumability in play which books and video lectures lack. What I mean by that is that when you learn something from a book and video lectures, you start forgetting about it the minute you stop. After a month or so, your memory of the topics are maybe less than 30%. And if you haven't created flashcards or notes, then you have to skim over the book or watch the lectures to recollect.
On Primer, flashcards are automatically generated and your responses stored in the platform along with inline completions help to retrace & recover what you have learned. You can do the course for a while and resume again after quitting for a couple of months or years. Your responses act as memory breadcrumbs to help you retrace what you have learned.
You can test our two free courses over at https://primerlabs.io. ( No signup required ).
I have also created two comics-post about conversational learning that some of you may find useful.
In the end, you have to treat everything as something you will eventually come back and update. That's why I like networked-thoughts tool like Roam and obsidian, a little too much maybe.
This looks cool. Your product overlaps somewhat with Oppia (an open source tool for creating interactive 'explorations'). If you haven't seen it, I recommend you check it out.
I have recently got myself back into studying mathematics as a hobby. The last time I studied mathematics for a considerable length of time was 18 years ago! I picked analytic number theory as the topic for this new hobby. I did a Tell HN [1] too about it 6 months ago. Thanks to that post and the awesome HN community, we now have a book club around it that has been going consistently since then. In fact, incidentally I published a new blog post about it discussing the learning experience about half an hour ago. [2]
I talk about this book club here on HN often, so at the risk of repeating myself, I do want to mention on this thread that as a result of these ongoing book club meetings, I realized something interesting. I realized that studying and learning in a social setting like this ensures constant progress. The risk of discontinuing the learning activity due to other priorities of life becomes lower. No matter what, barring exceptional circumstances, I know that I need to sit with our book club for 40 minutes everyday and work through a few pages of the book together. I think that kind of consistency is very important while learning an abstract topic like this that we are learning purely for the joy of learning! Further, the insights that the book club members share with each other during the group study is a nice bonus!
I'm doing the same thing with a different approach. I'm rubber duck debugging my learning by typing things out and going into lots of numerical examples with the help of Python.
It's a very verbose way of learning but i can say i now truly understand Euler's theorem and Fermat's little theorem. I'm continuing this right now. The end goal will be to go deep on everything about RSA including the state of the art factorization algorithms.
Can you do rubber duck learning with any topic? I always wanted to learn Fourier transformations and related topics, but I completely forgot all high school and uni math, so I have to start from scratch and it seems like a huge commitement.
I created /r/teamdo to enable something like this in general as I felt there is nothing existing. Perhaps there is but I am not aware. Unfortunately just creating a subreddit is not enough, there is hardly any traction.
I unlocked my learning through working on cars and programming.
Learning theory is useless for me, at some point I used to think that I may be dumb. It wasn't until I reached college and was top of class in all CS classes. Not bragging I honestly used to think I was not intelligent.
I learn through books and videos. However, the real learning happens to me when I am given a problem and need to come up with a solution.
As an example, I didn't know anything electrical about cars, I also had just an idea of how a fuel system works. Until, I installed an engine in my car and it would not start without any error codes. I went and studied the complete fuel system and how it works. Everything was just clicking as I had a faint idea of it.
Then, I did a bit of troubleshooting after reading, I figured out part of the puzzle, the fuel pump on the engine was not powering on. Therefore, it was power issue. I started reading about everything electrical, how to test if the fuel pump is getting power.....and discovered that it was lose ground.
Today, I am complete car nerd, I know how to use professional scanners and read data from different sensors. I no longer replace things in the dark.
Plus, this boosted my programming skills. Building business applications I never encountered a problem I could not solve.
I even studied negotiating techniques before car buying to practice. This allowed me to double my salary in 3 years as a software dev. I am ice cold during salary negotiations and can recognize tactics potential employers or recruiters can use to gain an advantage.
Long story short, when I was a kid I attended a school that was operated by Scientologists. L Ron Hubbard had some strong feelings on how to learn, and so the curriculum at my school followed suit.
I do think that a lot of what I did as a kid - clearing misunderstood words, using clay models or drawings or physical blocks to understand concepts - has been instrumental to my ability to learn new stuff.
Some of the ideas are useful, as long as you don't dogmatically insist that they apply to all problems.
People using words they don't understand, that is definitely a problem. Actually, two different problems: either they believe that the word means something else, or they just parrot words without thinking about their meaning at all. Both are problems, but require different approaches to fix.
Sometimes you understand each word in the sentence, but you still don't understand the entire sentence. Maybe the sentence is unnecessarily complex or abstract. Or maybe it is a statement of "what", but you don't understand "why"; like if you read Fermat's Last Theorem.
And sometimes (and this is the part Scientologists don't want to hear), the statement is just plainly false or nonsensical, and learning the meaning of every single word in a dictionary is not going to help with that. Though you can force people into submission by making them read the dictionary long enough that they give up and pretend that the statement now makes perfect sense to them.
Similarly, engaging multiple senses is helpful. Describe by words, make people repeat using their own words, make them write notes, show a picture or an animation, let them draw their own pictures, use Lego pieces or clay models, whatever. It is not the magic of clay (although the clay is quite flexible), but the magic of approaching the same concept from many angles.
I suspect that most low-level Scientologist teachings were created by taking some respected ideas (of given era) generated by someone else, and making them simple and dogmatic. (The high-level teaching about removing evil spirits from your body are unrelated to anything practical.)
Knowing nothing about Scientology, it seems to mix a lot of practicality with mysticism as a complete system. Coming from that sort of background, what would you say is the best single source of guidance for a ‘complete system’ of modern practicality?
Pick something controversial on the subject, explore alternate viewpoints and dig deep enough to form your own opinion. For example, when learning about nutrition, whether Keto works or not is a good controversy. One might start with Gary Taub's book, read its reviews and criticisms, read the source material that is cited by the proponents and detractors, read papers cited by those papers, until one is comfortable forming their own opinion.
Controversies are found at the cutting edge of most fields and analyzing arguments that take the "settled" knowledge in the field and still reach contradictory conclusions provides a lot of insight into the body of knowledge in the field and how much of it is really settled.
One thing I’ll add, regardless of the medium of information, I absolutely have to have a big picture real-world view of the context or it’s incredibly hard to learn. I may memorize things easily but it’s just data until I understand how all the parts fit together and see it working. No matter how it’s explained, until I see it for myself it won’t click or I’ll imagine something that makes sense but isn’t the same as the actual reality.
It’s a blessing and a curse, I have great big picture creating thinking abilities, seeing things that aren’t there but could be, however I also often have to “learn the hard way” in many areas of life because I don’t internalize things second-hand very well.
I set up a project, and assume that it will require whatever it is I want to learn, then, I figure it out as I go.
This is what I plan to do with SwiftUI. I have taken a number of courses, and read a bunch of stuff, but these have only a transitory home in my noggin.
I won't really know it, until I have done a few projects with it.
The project that I'm currently working on, is based on "classic" UIKit. I was not confident enough in SwiftUI to do it. It's fairly ambitious, and the fact that I don't know that much about SwiftUI, was the reason I chose not to use it. I have had projects, in the past, where I banked on an unknown, or partly-known, technology, only to have it hit a block, further in.
I already know what I'll be doing for the first couple of SwiftUI projects, but it will be a while, before I get there.
I learn by doing as well. It's the only way to learn for me really.
So I just dive in and do. Looking up stuff as I need it. There's usually a lot of crap info out there but I just need enough to get around a piece of bad docs here or unintuitive UI/commands/syntax there.
The thing is that I learn best like this when I'm not 'on the clock'. If I need to get a project done in a particular timeframe and use something new I'll fight against it. Don't want to do it. I don't know enough about it.
If you give me the time and leisure to work through it I'll get it done in the time it needs and I'll learn whatever needs to be learned to accomplish it.
I'm not deadline driven. Deadlines lock me up. I'm value driven. I know most people need a deadline to work against to not procrastinate and cram at the end. Doesn't work for me. I turned in my masters thesis weeks in advance.
Same here! I'd have done very well with an apprenticeship vs schooling, I feel, but it was never really an option for me. Although… I guess all that open-source software I helped with kind of was an apprenticeship in the end. Hm.
The way I author the mindmaps is to form trunks of major subjects which then distil down to the details. I'll add questions to myself into the subtrees.
When it comes to revision, I'll "contract" the entire map (there's a button in FreePlane to do this), then I'll take each branch in turn and try and answer (on a piece of paper) the questions I've left for myself. As you progress through the mindmap, you are expanding all the branches out.
This works for me for 2 reasons:
- reinforcement learning through the questions I've left myself
- remembering places / locations is something the human mind is very good at, and fits well with the current theory of the mind (reference frames, etc).
Readit News
1. Explore the subject almost randomly. Neither depth-first nor breadth-first; just follow threads that seem most useful or most interesting. Books, articles, videos, classes, whatever - it doesn't matter as long as you don't get bored. Dabble in all of them. If there are any practical skills involved (motion, writing code, etc) start doing those immediately.
2. At some point you get the ah-hah! moment. It is like the fog lifts and you can suddenly see the landscape. You don't know everything but now it seems like further knowledge is just a process of filling holes. You wield your knowledge to accomplish what you need by filling specific holes on-demand. Everything fits together like jigsaw puzzle pieces.
The time between #1 and #2 can be short or long depending on the complexity of the subject. But the experience of #2 is a massive dopamine rush. The main thing you need is patience; don't get frustrated and give up, you know that if you just keep poking around, eventually that dopamine rush will come.
However, we're now on to pre-algebra and using this book [0], "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving". The first chapter is all about axioms, proofs of some sort, breaking down "obvious" conclusions back to their constituent proof-from-first-principles and it's not agreeing with her at all. Since this is the first week I'm struggling to find a way to have it all make sense, and I've concluded we need to kind of skip much of this first chapter (we'll look at the summary) and get to the later content which is more intuitive and applies "obvious" principles, and come back periodically to revisit the more mechanistic content in the first chapter. I think the parent post's description of exploring a topic matches how my daughter will come to understand the whole "algebra stack." (Wish me luck.)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Prealgebra-Richard-Rusczyk/dp/1934124... , Amazon: "Prealgebra: The Art of Problem Solving"
Order of Operations(No Variable)
Order of Operations(One Variable)
Advanced Order of Operations (One Variable)*optional
- Logs, Roots, Exponentials
- Polynomial multiplication/Factorization
Change the variable to random symbols
- Greek characters, shapes, animals
Order of Operations(Multiple Variables)
Introduce functions
- f(x) = mx + b
Connect Order of Operations with Functions
- Simplify an equation and plot as a function
Introduce units (basic physics equations)
- Simplify to formula and Plot
The goal in formal classes is to introduce order of operations with variables, the concept of functions, and how to manipulate those functions. If you are stem oriented, then this is the perfect time to introduce dimensional analysis(units) and physics-based functions. Instilling a sense of confidence and comfort with algebraic manipulation is critical. Prepping her for physics and working with functions is just smart.
It doesn't seem like a bad idea to give a taste of it significantly earlier, but I don't think it's surprising if someone without a more mature relationship with mathematics doesn't find much value in 'going back to basics.' If your daughter is doing well with a more intuitive approach it sounds like a good idea to stick with it for now.
[0] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...
[1]https://artofproblemsolving.com/
Deleted Comment
And there's:
-1. Come across the solution by talking to people, reading books, articles, videos... long before actually needing it, sometimes not even being able to recall it in the next steps until the ah-hah! moment.
0. Have an actual need for that solution due to a problem you're trying to solve. And having that feeling of "there is a solution for this" but not being able to put your finger on it.
Talking to people helps a lot to speed up the process because everyone will have their own view on things which helps to shape your own understanding of the subject.
Mentoring/helping others helps solidify your own understanding.
I completely agree with you. I remember feeling the dopamine rush when I saw the 3b1b's video lectures on linear algebra and Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Lecture.
Although I strongly feel that simply reading books and watching video lectures are not the best way to learn on your own. You have to re-read them, use them, do the exercises and talk with peers to really get the underlying ideas. Maybe some better explainations exist, but hoping that you randomly stumble upon them as you browse through online articles is not a good idea, IMHO.
I like this quote from Prof. Michael Jordan:
"the first time you barely understand, the second time you start to get it, and the third time it all seems obvious."
You have to work with the material and come back to it again and again to really understand.
I have created a conversational learning medium, Primer, that is designed for self-learners. Our goal, right now, is to create conversational undergraduate-level computer science courses for anyone to learn on their.
It's primary focus is to bring resumability in play which books and video lectures lack. What I mean by that is that when you learn something from a book and video lectures, you start forgetting about it the minute you stop. After a month or so, your memory of the topics are maybe less than 30%. And if you haven't created flashcards or notes, then you have to skim over the book or watch the lectures to recollect.
On Primer, flashcards are automatically generated and your responses stored in the platform along with inline completions help to retrace & recover what you have learned. You can do the course for a while and resume again after quitting for a couple of months or years. Your responses act as memory breadcrumbs to help you retrace what you have learned.
You can test our two free courses over at https://primerlabs.io. ( No signup required ).
I have also created two comics-post about conversational learning that some of you may find useful.
1. Introducing Primer: https://primerlabs.io/comics/introducing-primer-comics/
2. Memory Breadcrumbs & Memory Trails: https://primerlabs.io/comics/memory-breadcrumbs-comics/
In the end, you have to treat everything as something you will eventually come back and update. That's why I like networked-thoughts tool like Roam and obsidian, a little too much maybe.
I talk about this book club here on HN often, so at the risk of repeating myself, I do want to mention on this thread that as a result of these ongoing book club meetings, I realized something interesting. I realized that studying and learning in a social setting like this ensures constant progress. The risk of discontinuing the learning activity due to other priorities of life becomes lower. No matter what, barring exceptional circumstances, I know that I need to sit with our book club for 40 minutes everyday and work through a few pages of the book together. I think that kind of consistency is very important while learning an abstract topic like this that we are learning purely for the joy of learning! Further, the insights that the book club members share with each other during the group study is a nice bonus!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26366464
[2] https://offbeat.cc/blog/our-trip-to-the-prime-number-theorem...
It's a very verbose way of learning but i can say i now truly understand Euler's theorem and Fermat's little theorem. I'm continuing this right now. The end goal will be to go deep on everything about RSA including the state of the art factorization algorithms.
Current start documented here:
https://rawcdn.githack.com/AReallyGoodName/RDM/5391c5a90fe39...
Edit: All my formatting was messed up. I'll fix it when i finish, i'm sure it's not a mystery that the powers are meant to be superscripted though.
Learning theory is useless for me, at some point I used to think that I may be dumb. It wasn't until I reached college and was top of class in all CS classes. Not bragging I honestly used to think I was not intelligent.
I learn through books and videos. However, the real learning happens to me when I am given a problem and need to come up with a solution.
As an example, I didn't know anything electrical about cars, I also had just an idea of how a fuel system works. Until, I installed an engine in my car and it would not start without any error codes. I went and studied the complete fuel system and how it works. Everything was just clicking as I had a faint idea of it.
Then, I did a bit of troubleshooting after reading, I figured out part of the puzzle, the fuel pump on the engine was not powering on. Therefore, it was power issue. I started reading about everything electrical, how to test if the fuel pump is getting power.....and discovered that it was lose ground.
Today, I am complete car nerd, I know how to use professional scanners and read data from different sensors. I no longer replace things in the dark.
Plus, this boosted my programming skills. Building business applications I never encountered a problem I could not solve.
I even studied negotiating techniques before car buying to practice. This allowed me to double my salary in 3 years as a software dev. I am ice cold during salary negotiations and can recognize tactics potential employers or recruiters can use to gain an advantage.
I do think that a lot of what I did as a kid - clearing misunderstood words, using clay models or drawings or physical blocks to understand concepts - has been instrumental to my ability to learn new stuff.
I do not endorse or support Scientology by any means, but a lot of this is true: http://www.studytechnology.org/sh1_1.html
People using words they don't understand, that is definitely a problem. Actually, two different problems: either they believe that the word means something else, or they just parrot words without thinking about their meaning at all. Both are problems, but require different approaches to fix.
Sometimes you understand each word in the sentence, but you still don't understand the entire sentence. Maybe the sentence is unnecessarily complex or abstract. Or maybe it is a statement of "what", but you don't understand "why"; like if you read Fermat's Last Theorem.
And sometimes (and this is the part Scientologists don't want to hear), the statement is just plainly false or nonsensical, and learning the meaning of every single word in a dictionary is not going to help with that. Though you can force people into submission by making them read the dictionary long enough that they give up and pretend that the statement now makes perfect sense to them.
Similarly, engaging multiple senses is helpful. Describe by words, make people repeat using their own words, make them write notes, show a picture or an animation, let them draw their own pictures, use Lego pieces or clay models, whatever. It is not the magic of clay (although the clay is quite flexible), but the magic of approaching the same concept from many angles.
I suspect that most low-level Scientologist teachings were created by taking some respected ideas (of given era) generated by someone else, and making them simple and dogmatic. (The high-level teaching about removing evil spirits from your body are unrelated to anything practical.)
Controversies are found at the cutting edge of most fields and analyzing arguments that take the "settled" knowledge in the field and still reach contradictory conclusions provides a lot of insight into the body of knowledge in the field and how much of it is really settled.
is it good? from the very little research i did, it sounds like it "depends on the person"?
It’s a blessing and a curse, I have great big picture creating thinking abilities, seeing things that aren’t there but could be, however I also often have to “learn the hard way” in many areas of life because I don’t internalize things second-hand very well.
I set up a project, and assume that it will require whatever it is I want to learn, then, I figure it out as I go.
This is what I plan to do with SwiftUI. I have taken a number of courses, and read a bunch of stuff, but these have only a transitory home in my noggin.
I won't really know it, until I have done a few projects with it.
The project that I'm currently working on, is based on "classic" UIKit. I was not confident enough in SwiftUI to do it. It's fairly ambitious, and the fact that I don't know that much about SwiftUI, was the reason I chose not to use it. I have had projects, in the past, where I banked on an unknown, or partly-known, technology, only to have it hit a block, further in.
I already know what I'll be doing for the first couple of SwiftUI projects, but it will be a while, before I get there.
So I just dive in and do. Looking up stuff as I need it. There's usually a lot of crap info out there but I just need enough to get around a piece of bad docs here or unintuitive UI/commands/syntax there.
The thing is that I learn best like this when I'm not 'on the clock'. If I need to get a project done in a particular timeframe and use something new I'll fight against it. Don't want to do it. I don't know enough about it.
If you give me the time and leisure to work through it I'll get it done in the time it needs and I'll learn whatever needs to be learned to accomplish it.
I'm not deadline driven. Deadlines lock me up. I'm value driven. I know most people need a deadline to work against to not procrastinate and cram at the end. Doesn't work for me. I turned in my masters thesis weeks in advance.
https://www.freeplane.org/wiki/index.php/Home
The way I author the mindmaps is to form trunks of major subjects which then distil down to the details. I'll add questions to myself into the subtrees.
When it comes to revision, I'll "contract" the entire map (there's a button in FreePlane to do this), then I'll take each branch in turn and try and answer (on a piece of paper) the questions I've left for myself. As you progress through the mindmap, you are expanding all the branches out.
This works for me for 2 reasons: - reinforcement learning through the questions I've left myself - remembering places / locations is something the human mind is very good at, and fits well with the current theory of the mind (reference frames, etc).
https://1drv.ms/u/s!AjzG1BVufekQgscNkc27rVB9QMApWQ
(This is a onedrive link - hope it works!)