I like these posts, because it is good to see the process of working through things in their territorial glory rather than being provided a pre-polished map.
I am ~80% confident that if you could achieve the playfulness objective your mastery would be deeper than through the efficient method. I further claim that the dominant factor is not because it is less painful to spend the necessary hours studying. Two factors are higher than wrench-time based on my experience: one is that playfulness yields broad exploration; two is that play helps with durable memory formation.
This is driven by my experience with an electromagnetism theory course, where the play method brought me to a very high percentage score where I had barely passed the previous level of course using the efficient method customary to engineering school. A few key differences worth mentioning:
The efficient method in engineering school is essentially a procedure where you identify what information you can ignore, and then build time-efficient algorithms for each kind of problem you normally encounter. This is useful for churning through very high workloads, but fails badly whenever you encounter novel problems or problems with a gotcha in them.
I set the level of playfulness above the textbook, at the subject level; I never focused specifically on the reading of the textbook as the objective.
The subject is notoriously difficult, and the course in particular had a grim reputation because it was much more mathematical that the others in the curriculum. My early experiences with problems of that type consisted mostly of bashing my face against them until they gave, which took many hours. By the middle of this course, I had achieved comfort with the following procedure:
Identify the topic, review the notes, engage in visualization of the topic (play).
Attempt the problems.
If stuck, withdraw from the problem and engage in play with the problem subject.
Reattempt the problems.
This allowed me to routinely complete whole homework assignments in an hour or so, which was awesome. I was also able to successfully reconstruct derivations based on the intuitions I had developed through play and review.
Frustratingly I found it was necessary to develop this more or less independently for each course; I simultaneously crashed and burned on other courses because I couldn’t get it to work. Damn you, microelectronics!
I like these posts, because it is good to see the process of working through things in their territorial glory rather than being provided a pre-polished map.
I am ~80% confident that if you could achieve the playfulness objective your mastery would be deeper than through the efficient method. I further claim that the dominant factor is not because it is less painful to spend the necessary hours studying. Two factors are higher than wrench-time based on my experience: one is that playfulness yields broad exploration; two is that play helps with durable memory formation.
This is driven by my experience with an electromagnetism theory course, where the play method brought me to a very high percentage score where I had barely passed the previous level of course using the efficient method customary to engineering school. A few key differences worth mentioning:
The efficient method in engineering school is essentially a procedure where you identify what information you can ignore, and then build time-efficient algorithms for each kind of problem you normally encounter. This is useful for churning through very high workloads, but fails badly whenever you encounter novel problems or problems with a gotcha in them.
I set the level of playfulness above the textbook, at the subject level; I never focused specifically on the reading of the textbook as the objective.
The subject is notoriously difficult, and the course in particular had a grim reputation because it was much more mathematical that the others in the curriculum. My early experiences with problems of that type consisted mostly of bashing my face against them until they gave, which took many hours. By the middle of this course, I had achieved comfort with the following procedure:
Identify the topic, review the notes, engage in visualization of the topic (play).
Attempt the problems.
If stuck, withdraw from the problem and engage in play with the problem subject.
Reattempt the problems.
This allowed me to routinely complete whole homework assignments in an hour or so, which was awesome. I was also able to successfully reconstruct derivations based on the intuitions I had developed through play and review.
Frustratingly I found it was necessary to develop this more or less independently for each course; I simultaneously crashed and burned on other courses because I couldn’t get it to work. Damn you, microelectronics!