Outlook

FATA Pedagogical Approach

One of the reasons we created FATA is the realization that we can create much more effective and engaging training programs in software development by putting into practice the key discoveries of learning sciences.

Some of those discoveries can be really impactful. For instance, this study from Washington University in St Louis, USA demonstrated that by having students take short quizzes instead of re-reading the classroom material, they could increase their average grade from C+ to A-. As a former teacher, I assure you, this is a huge difference!

Even though a lot of those discoveries are decades old, they are rarely put into practice because they’re not widely known, are sometimes counterintuitive and often require changing old habits and beliefs.

FATA.school has the benefit of being a brand new school. We can create new habits, which is much easier than trying to change old ones. And we can leverage technology to make the most effective learning techniques accessible to everyone at a very low cost.

How we learn

Before looking into FATA's pedagogical approach, let’s do a quick review of how humans acquire new knowledge and skills. Learning can be modeled as a four steps process:

1. Attention - to learn something our attention (our senses and conscious thoughts) needs to be directed toward it. This will create temporary mental structures in our short term working memory.
2. Association - in this step we are creating associations between thoughts (e.g words), sensations (e.g images) and pre-existing knowledge in order to further refine and expand the mental structures just created
3. Forgetting - this is often overlooked but essential: our short term working memory is very limited. As soon as possible, our brain will automatically transfer our mental structure into long term memory (this is what we call “forgetting” here)
4. Remembering - this is the act of retrieving mental structures from long term memory into short term working memory. This will further refine and expand the mental structures with additional associations making it easier to remember it again in the future.

This is a bit abstract. Let’s go through a concrete example to make it easier to understand. In order to learn to read we need to pay close Attention to the visual shape of letters & their sounds. We need to Associate them with similar shapes and sounds that we’ve seen before as well as pronunciation rules that we’ve been taught before (e.g “c” and “h” are pronounced as one sound when next to each other). Learning to read is very hard, we need to practice over many days. It takes a lot of Forgetting and then Remembering until we’ve fully learned the skill and can apply it without effort.

This is a simplified view. Scientists have much more refined models and learning theories. For one thing, the four steps we just described don’t really happen sequentially. For example Attention is involved as part of the Remembering process and during Association we are Remembering pre-existing knowledge.

But this simplified view is useful in that it can help us create more effective learning programs by focusing on pedagogical practices that increase the amount of Attention, Association, Forgetting and Remembering taking place.

Putting it into practice

Thankfully we don’t have to invent much as we can lean on pedagogical practices that are already proven to be effective. However we also need to recognize that the effectiveness of any given practice will depend on the type of skill being learned. For instance, even though quizzing is proven to be very effective to learn facts (e.g the names of CSS Flexbox properties), it is not the best way to learn creative problem solving skills (e.g how to debug a CSS Layout issue).

Our intention is not to duplicate what already exists and works well. We can be more impactful by complementing training programs like the ones offered by the Institut Supérieur de Technologie of Mamou and Africa Digital Academy.

Our future beneficiaries are already learning how to code, but not how to build apps. We also know from the results of the survey we conducted earlier this year that they have access to the internet through their smartphones but often don’t have an easy access to a computer. Our future learners are looking for short and very low cost training programs because they typically already have a full time occupation.

To become great app developers, our learners will need to master many skills and tools. We will use a combination of asynchronous learning through a mobile application and synchronous learning events of a few hours at a time.

The mobile application will enable our users to start learning for free every day from their smartphone via a micro-learning approach. It will use gamification techniques to maintain engagement (Attention), spaced repetition (Forgetting & Remembering) and leverage short video from expert programmers demonstrating how to put into practice what is being learned (Association).

Once they have demonstrated the prerequisite knowledge via the mobile app, our learners will have access to synchronous and interactive learning events. There, through a project based learning approach, they will work on real problems using the same tools that the best professional software developers are using today to ensure they can effectively put into practice what they’ve learned. Some learners will choose to attend remotely, others will come to the Mari Bra Dev School building to get access to computers or make pair programming easier.

Our mission is to create world-class training programs in software development that work for the specific needs of African youth. As we’re working hard on bringing our vision to life, feel free to share more about your thoughts, ideas and expectations on our Facebook and LinkedIn pages. And stay tuned for the first version of the mobile app!

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