| What a bizarre article. While the whole "Learning Styles" stuff is largely debunked by scientific research, we do know that different things motivate different people. I would argue that motivation is the single most important aspect of learning - if you're not motivated to learn something, you're not going to do it. I tried to learn programming skills on and off all through my teenage years and early 20s, but it always petered out because I never had anything I really wanted to do in specific with them. I lacked the motivation to just learn the theory without having a project to work on. When I finally found a project that excited me and could be broken down into manageable pieces to learn, I made infinitely more progress. Recently I've been going back and learning actual computer science concepts. I've got enough programming knowledge that the computer science things actually interests me now, and I have the motivation to spend time on theory and exercise that I can't immediately apply to a project. But I never would have gotten to that point without project based learning to begin with, because I never would have been able to stick with it. I wouldn't have cared enough. Jimmy might be motivated enough by learning the theory that it works for him. But it doesn't work for everyone, and trying to act like there's any one single right way to educate people, when people are so massively different in so many different ways, seems to be fairly arrogant. |