To All Future Makers

We’ve been teaching people at Makers Academy for almost a year now and have learned a lot. We’ve learned some teaching strategies that work and some that don’t. We’ve learned about various learning types and how to accommodate them. We’ve learned about ways we can support a Maker to increase the likelihood that they’ll succeed.

But the most important thing we’ve learned along the way is that the most critical elements of becoming a great coder have nothing to do with IQ or brainpower — it has to do with attitude and curiosity.

Attitude

In The Art of Learning, Josh Waitzkin discusses two different types of learners: entity learners and incremental learners.

An entity learner is someone who came home from school with an A+ in Math and their parents said,”Wow. You must be good at Math.” Then when they came home with a D in art they said,”You must not be very creative.”

This type of feedback continuously reinforces in their brains that they’re good at some things and bad at other things. They detach themselves from the equation because being implicitly “good” or “bad” at something is out of their control. (I’m using parental feedback here merely as an example — this reinforcement could come from any number of places.)

The incremental learner is someone who came home with the same report card and their parents said,”You must have studied hard in Math” and “Perhaps you should take a different approach to how you prepare for an art test.”

This seemingly small change in the way the outlook is changed plays a critical role in how someone views failure. The incremental learner will go through life with what’s called a higher locus of control. They feel like they have more control over the things around them and feel less like they’re being tossed around by purely external forces.

I tell this to every incoming class of Makers Academy, but sure enough, a few weeks in, we start to see some students throw their hands in the air and say,”I’m not getting this — I must not have what it takes to be a good coder.”

As time goes by, we recognize a clear distinction in the class between these two groups. The entity learners view an exam failure as they failed where the incremental learners view the specific event as a failure — just a dot in a long line of experiments.

People obviously have a range of talents. Some people are better at some things than others, but this has very little to do with any specific task. I urge you in your path to becoming a web developer to be aware of this difference and practice some introspection from time-to-time to make sure you’re in the incremental learning group. View yourself as a scientist and approach each problem as an experiment. Use the scientific method:

1. State the Problem — I want to print “Hello” on the screen
2. Make a hypothesis — Open the terminal and type “Hello”
3. Make a prediction — ”Hello” will show up on the screen
4. Test it — Open the terminal and type it in
5. Analyze it — Did it print “Hello” or not? If it did — move on to the next problem. If not, go back to step 2.

This will help you to not internalize the failure as you’re simply a scientist making incremental steps toward solving a specific problem as scientists have done for hundreds of years.

Curiosity

The second part of the Maker formula is curiosity. If you’re not curious, it becomes very difficult to understand how everything works. Leave your ego at the door and don’t be afraid to ask questions.

This seems like simple idea, but some people aren’t comfortable asking questions. They get shy about writing code and seem afraid that if they type the wrong thing their computer is going to blow up like an atomic bomb. When pair programming (which our students do 90% of the time) the non-curious will keep their hands off of the keyboard and let the other person write code.

In order to be a good coder, you have to write code!

Reading and talking about how to code is great, but it will never make up for actually coding. If I gave you the absolute best books and videos in the world on cooking, how do you think your first chocolate souffle is going to come out? It takes practice. Coding is no different.

The longer you can keep yourself motivated and curious about what’s happening, the more you’ll learn. Wonder what happens when you type something strange in the terminal? Do it! Wonder what happens if you try passing an object into a function? Do it!

Train yourself to be an experimenter and your career as a developer will flourish.

That’s It

I know it sounds too good to be true, but those two points are 99% of what makes a good coder — we’ll help with the other 1%.