Tonight I’m teaching the BAVC kids about Thinking Big and Thinking Small. I’ve decided that the ability to “Recipeize” the world around you is getting added to my list of webmaker skills.
This one took a while to get added to the mix because I wasn’t sure if it was essential or not, but after talking with enough smart folks, and actually watching people learn, I’ve decided that a lot of the “how do I?” questions that come up are the result of not understand how to break a problem down into its composite bits.
This may not be webmaker-specific (it’s almost more of a life skill) but I think that it hurts you more in webmaker land than it does in most other places. Just like how not putting your hand on firey-hot objects is a life skill, but I would still teach it in a cooking class where you’re more likely to need it.
First, we’re going to take an everyday task, like “Make a sandwich“. The conversation goes like this:
“How do I make a sandwich?”
“You take two pieces of bread and […]”
“Where do I get the bread?”
“Your fridge.”
“How do I get it from the fridge?”
“You open the door and get it.”
“Okay, so I open the door. Now how do I know where the bread is?”
“You look around and find it.”
“Okay, so I look around and the first object is mustard.”
“Keep looking.”
“Okay, so we have our first two steps now. First, we open the fridge. Second, we examine each object. If it’s the bread, we take it out. If not, we look at the next object. And we keep repeating until we find the bread. What next?”
I’ve done a similar exercise with the CSSI kids (though we used technical examples, like how does Google.com work?) and there’s an interesting turning point where they go from thinking I’m just being an annoying hyper-specific troublemaker, to understanding that some of these “simple” steps aren’t really so simple. That turning point is what I’m looking for.
We then break into groups, and I’ve got a bunch of other every day activities for them to break down, like how do you play blackjack? Groups are essential here because you really want them to ask each other “but how do you foo?” questions.
So that’s Thinking Small. Taking a problem and forcing yourself to get into the nitty gritty details of how it breaks down. What about Thinking Big?
We’re going to start with a giant, impossible-to-measure problem, like “How many chickens does San Francisco eat every year?”
“How many chickens does San Francisco eat every year?”
Stunned silence.
“Well, is the answer 1? 1 chicken?”
“No.”
“Is the answer one hundred thousand million billion?”
“No.”
“So you have some idea of where it should fall. Some guesses are better than others. Let’s see. How often did you eat chicken last week?”
“3 times?”
“Okay, so if that was an average week, you eat chicken 3 times a week. Was it a whole chicken?”
“Wait, I’m a vegetarian.”
“Okay, so what percentage of the people in San Francisco do we think are vegetarian?”
“A third?”
“Okay, so what if we say that a third of the people eat chicken never, and the rest eat it about 3 times per week. Does that sound about right? How many people live in the city?”
etc.
The mental hurdle to get over here is the incorrectly learned assumption that if your answer isn’t perfect, it’s not worth measuring. I remember asking these vague questions in software engineer interview questions to see if they could deconstruct these types of no-right-answer questions into realistic parts; it would tell you a lot about how candidates think.
Once we get to an answer on the chicken problem (and it doesn’t matter what that answer is), we break into groups again and they set to work on their own big questions, like “How often will you type the letter ‘q’ in your lifetime?”
Anyway, I’m curious to see how this goes over. The interesting thing is that while these skills may not feel like they have anything to do with learning how to make things on the web, this type of thinking is in fact the first step to tackling a big problem like how to make something new on the web.
Future idea (not enough time this session): it would be cool to hand them a technical challenge before and after the class and see if spending a while thinking about problem deconstruction helps them improve their methodology on the unrelated technical challenge.
rwxweb 
(By the way, the clever readers amongst you may have noticed that my Thinking Big and Thinking Small are actually doing the same thing. 🙂 )
Michelle,
You’re on fire with the blog posts today!
Your “thinking small” and “recipeizing” tasks are, for me, the essence of technical writing. I’ve often thought that if I were teaching tech writing, I’d start my students off with exercises like writing an instruction manual for a stapler, or (to swipe your example) a rule book for blackjack.
I’m not sure I get your “thinking big” part. Are you just talking about estimating skills and the intellectual freedom that comes from discovering that it is okay to make informed guesses in life?
“Are you just talking about estimating skills and the intellectual freedom that comes from discovering that it is okay to make informed guesses in life?”
=> I think that there is this part and I would push it further by saying that this exercise is about accepting to not knowing.
Currently in education, good grades are given to those who know, never to those who don’t know, accept it and will work towards improving. The one-time grade is also a strong sign that “you have to know at a given time and no one cares if you do know later”. The “thinking big” exercise seems to be an exercise of “fail and incrementally improve”.
What I find interesting is also that unlike the vast majority of what is presented at schools, the answer of the exercise is unknown… very much like the vast majority of life choices: “is this appartment the right one?”, “am I going to be happy with this person?”, “can I trust this candidate to hold this particular promise if s/he is elected?”
“The interesting thing is that while these skills may not feel like they have anything to do with learning how to make things on the web, this type of thinking is in fact the first step to tackling a big problem like how to make something new on the web.”
=> Can you elaborate on this part?
I think I agree, but I think that the part of the exercise that is a step forward in making is not answering to gradual questions, but rather finding the right questions to ask.