An Introduction to Learning Learning Science

At the start of this year I began a “Master of Learning Sciences and Technology” degree at Sydney University but this wasn’t how my interest in education began. For the last year I’ve been excessively excited by my work developing educational maths apps at Shiny Things but this wasn’t how my interest in education began. I’ve tutored university subjects, taught at programming summer camps and taught teachers how to teach code but none of these was where my interest in education began.

When I was a kid, my younger cousin would incessantly annoy the adults. I was the only one who could handle the never-ending stream of why’s. We talked constantly, coming up with theories, questions and answers. Most of our ideas of how the world worked were complete junk, but it was really fun to explain and explore what we both didn’t know.

Learning Science

If you asked me “What is Learning Science?” in person I’d put on my best shit-eating grin and reply “It’s the Science of Learning”. You’d be right to do that combined eye-roll and groaning thing. Since I’m writing this as an introduction, I might need a better explanation.

Learning Science is an area of research which takes inspiration and contribution from psychology, education and computer science. In a typical piece of learning science research you might see a model taken from cognitive psychology and combined with resources and knowledge from education that is delivered through a custom technology developed using modern computer science.

A rather cool example is Geniverse a game which teaches high school students about heredity and genetics by letting them breed and study virtual dragons. I’ll go further in to the research behind Geniverse in a future post, but that doesn’t stop you from trying it out now.

Learning Learning Science

As a way to force myself to study and improve my writing I’ve started this publication on Medium. I’ll use it to explore the topics we cover at university from my own perspective, with a focus on summarising research in a way that doesn’t leave you grasping for a dictionary. If all of this goes well I’ll end up with a couple of high distinctions and you’ll all unfollow me on twitter after becoming sick of my constant self-promotion.

See you next post.