CEP009 – Meta Learning Electronics with Mike Cheich and Phil FitzGerald

The Contextual Electronics Podcast

• About the guests/host
  • Mike Cheich runs Programming Electronics academy. He has also been on Chris’s other podcast in the past.
  • Phil FitzGerald is an educational coach via The Compelling Message
  • Chris teaches at Contextual Electronics
• Discussion topics
  • Teaching how to make a sandwich
  • Is the knowledge in reach and is it relevant?
  • Most people that are in Programming Electronics are hardware hobbyists who want to get into programming, usually through Arduino
  • It can be intimidating learning electronics because of the breadth of knowledge required
  • Phil-ism: Accreditation, certification, celebration.
  • Self evaluation matters at the beginning of education
  • SME = Subject Matter Expert
  • Analogy of creating a map within a city (mapping out London)
  • Selling people on the end point of a learning journey
  • Learners normally don’t care as much about the specifics of the journey
  • After the fact, learners will rose c0lor the specifics of how they got to the point they’re at
  • DITLO = Day in the life of
  • Chris struggles with how traditional education was teaching electronics
  • Mike likes finding the guiding principle within the electronics universe
  • Two tracks – thinking (theory) and doing (practice)
  • Designing your own 5 year map of curriculum
  • Phil-ism: You can’t show it if you don’t know it
  • Extending your knowledge of how maps work by being able to create a map in a new city
  • Creating lists of things to do, or not to do
  • Mike is learning how to 3D printing, which was a new learning journey
  • Facing failure and understanding what you should do when that happens
  • Drawing your map so you understand what you do and don’t know
  • Keeping notes is so you reinforce your own knowledge. In Phil’s example, this might take the form of a map. Phil explains in more detail in the video below:
  • The Dunning Kruger Effect
  • Make It Stick by Peter Brown
  • Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset
  • Removing barriers to learning when a learner experiences a problem (QR Code example)
  • Sleeping on a problem (or stepping away from a problem)
  • Accreditation is someone verifying you know what you claim to know
  • “What comes before that” is an important question when mapping out the steps required to learn something
  • Maps start as post-it notes
  • Creating analogies
  • Breaking down individual elements of the learning process and relating it back to that analogy
  • How do you quantify “show it to know it”?
  • Chris is a proponent of “Build Logs” (which is also a section on the CE Forum)
  • What do you notice in the thing you want to build?
  • Thinking about the steps that indicate you’re about to get to the next step? (ie. Which stop comes before the stop you’re going to get off at on the train)
  • Dewey Decimal System
  • Sometimes courses try to constrain the possible paths of research, as that can get overwhelming
  • The downside to learning in the modern day is how many sources of distraction there are (ie. phones)
  • Guided path examples
  • Implementation Patterns by Kent Beck
  • Learning something well enough to teach is holding yourself to a higher standard
  • Check out Phil’s site The Compelling Message and check out his book!
  • Mike teaches electronics on Programming Electronics Academy

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