I’m always on the lookout for new and better methods of learning. Recently I’ve come across a few different studies showing that visual data is the fastest intake method on average for humans in regards to the five senses. Knowing this information there are many different ways we can attempt to leverage vision as a tool to extract more data out of the data stream that we’re continually receiving when learning a new subject. Is it somehow possible to take the processing power of our brain that’s in charge of our sense of touch and give it to vision? Maybe not right now, but there might be some ways we can intensionally rely on our vision more than our other senses when learning a new subject.
Take for example the idea of speed reading. One of the main broad concepts behind speed reading is trying to get better at processing a word or groups of words. You might not be the fastest reader if you have to individually process each individual letter and then string all the letters together when you come to the end of every word. In practicing speed reading you are training your brain to process image information more efficiently. The people that have trained enough at this are considered speed readers because they can take in information at a much higher rate of consumption and on top of that the data gets stored in memory more efficiently.
There are other little tips are tricks that you can use for learning like getting a good nights sleep, taking breaks to reflect on what you’ve learned, using references to other things to create a connection with what your learning and so on. This leads me to what I’ve been using lately to improve my coding mechanics. I’ve been using a video game called CodeCombat to more effectively utilize these different tips and tricks with the intent of learning more efficiently. What is it about CodeCombat, or any other education/learning video game for that matter, that helps us learn things easier? My guess is very simple, the medium of a video game utilizes a lot of the tactics I’ve gone over. When it comes down to it and video game is simply a method for taking in information and getting something from it which can be in the form of many things, drama, action, comedy, education. Sounds almost a little bit like a movie right? That’s because they both heavily stimulate your visual sense, among other senses, and allow you take in and process the information more easily than say listening to a radio (for most people). I find it interesting that you often find people quoting their favorite movie or TV show more than they quote their favorite line in a book. That being said there are people that talk about books and take quotes from books. I would bet that there is some form of correlation between them quoting their favorite book and their level of reading level. What I mean to say is that I don’t come across too many people that both enjoy reading books but are extremely slow readers. In my experience the people who enjoy reading books the most are also the faster readers I know, could it be because they are able to take in the information from the books better, visually, than other readers?
One thing I think that a video game might have over a movie when it comes to education or taking in information is the that fact that they’re more interactive. Typically in games there is some method for making the player feel rewarded and therefore makes someone more genuinely wanting to learn more from it to receive better rewards. Games are also jam packed with referential objects that your brain can link to when attempting to recall the information in the future. Take it all the way back to grade school, you might not remember that one lecture your teach gave the class that one time about that one thing, but you do remember that one time your teacher had everyone play Jeopardy on the board with vocabulary words. CodeCombat is a game in which your character goes on missions to collect gems and slay monsters to gain points and obtain armor so that you can take on harder monsters who have better armor and give you even more points. This game comes with a leader board and rankings, all of the things that you might expect find in an online video game to keep players engaged and wanting more. However the only way to defeat the monsters is by learning how to code better and executing the code better than the next player.
Other games have mechanics of clicking on the write part of the screen at the exact right time to win over another player or fitting the right shapes into other shapes better than another player. There are many different ways games creatively give you a way to show that you are more adept than the next person at whatever task the game developers throw in front of you. CodeCombat achieves this by giving you an interactive way to use your coding knowledge to be better than the next player and on top of that it teaches you how to code along the way.
I have only just started playing through CodeCombat but I plan to play through it much more, maybe even the entire game as I’m very much enjoying playing and learning a lot from it.