Over this past weekend, I joined several other Qlik Luminaries in London to teach a set of hands-on workshops known as Sense Deep Dive. The event was a fantastic experience that I’ll write about in a follow up post. I did want to share one concept that I learned about from fellow instructor Konrad Mathias: “learning by accident”.
Konrad often teaches people how to combine technologies like Qlik Sense, TypeScript, and AngularJS to create customized analytics. One strategy he uses while teaching this complex combination is to purposefully lead his students into traps. Rather than explaining a concept and guiding them through a working solution, he works through partial solutions that have bugs or sub-par functionality. By doing so, he can then challenge the students to think about why their current solution isn’t working.
This challenge takes the students out of a place of rote learning and forces them to consider their mental models for their solution. This consideration forces them to refine their mental models in order to solve the problem. Konrad suggests this causes a deeper, more permanent form of learning.
I started to use the technique in my workshop and saw great results. I’m looking forward to leveraging it further at the next Sense Deep Dive.