The Joy of Learning. Main Ideas, Scaffolding, and Thinking: building new concepts by modeling: HOWTO

Walking through life can be fun and interesting, dull and boring or simply frustrating. Our walk is based not on our talents but on our decisions. Our skill in making decisions that add a little spice to each day depends on our ability to bring together facts and concepts, develop a picture of the desired outcome and then make a decision that brings us closer to that outcome. In our experience, making decisions is simplified if one understands what we call “main ideas”. We emphasize main ideas because most of us have difficulty remembering unrelated facts. For us, our memory works best when there is a framework, or scaffolding, on which we can hang facts and concepts. The scaffolding provides the links between facts and concepts that help with recalling and manipulating some of the stuff in our memory. The simplest scaffolding is built from main ideas that often reflect an oversimplification of an area, but nevertheless, provides the essential framework for building an understanding of more complex systems. The Internet and efficient search engines allow us to focus our energy on understanding main ideas rather than memorizing all of the facts and concepts associated with a particular area of interest. In the 21st century we can justifiably question cluttering our memory with detailed knowledge when we can retrieve this knowledge from an Internet search and quickly reconstruct the details from our scaffolding built from main ideas. The concept of building our framework by concentrating on main ideas is simply a more efficient way of thinking. Moreover, it is an efficient way of educating oneself. Main ideas feeding the construction of scaffolding, mixed with a good dose of curiosity, provide the substrate for life-long learning and restore the fun of learning. Within this context, education is no longer arbitrary and something we are simply told to do. Instead it is fun because the process of discovering a new main idea, adding to our scaffolding, gaining a new insight and trashing irrelevant knowledge is refreshing. How do we identify what to learn and what we can safely disregard? We find problem-based learning to be the tool for separating the information we need to solve a particular problem from what we can safely ignore. Content-mastery requires we start at the beginning of a book and learn all the stuff between the first and last pages. We can be easily evaluated by testing what we remember. Success with problem-based learning requires we readily identify what we don’t know. We identify what we don’t know with mental images. If we can paint an unambiguous picture of what we are thinking about then we have no gaps in our understanding. If there are gaps in the picture, then new learning is necessary. If we easily recognize what we don’t know then when we start to solve a new problem, we quickly realize the gaps in our tools for solving this particular problem. Our approach here is to provide you with the main ideas or concepts upon which you can acquire enough new knowledge to solve a problem of interest. Our approach to main ideas is based on mastery of three concepts: problem-based learning, Internet-searching and Internet-memory. Here we present main ideas (or central concepts), acquired over the past 35 40 years, that have facilitated work in areas ranging from cardiac pharmacology to biostatistics to software engineering. In addition, we present some HOWTO segments that introduce you to tools we find generically useful: octave for modeling, xmgrace for displaying data, cvs for collaboratively developing a document or software. The underlying theme of “main ideas” is the fun of learning derived from the beauty and elegance of simple yet powerful concepts. Simple concepts usually arise from simple questions and simple questions more often arise from children than from adults. Perhaps one of the most challenging activities for us as adults is to rediscover the fun of learning through asking childishly simple questions. 1Here our educators have to solve the problem of how to test our problem solving skills instead of our skill in memorizing. This is a topic for another paper.