It is almost impossible not to get emotional when talking about collaborative learning and its roots. It is great to see how the educational processes get better and more effective when real interactions between students, teacher, and stakeholders are applied.
One of the first people who talked about this was Vygotsky. Lev Vygotsky was the founder of the social learning movement. He stated that teachers and educators’ responsibility was to assess students’ ability to solve problems, instead of encouraging knowledge acquisition.
When learning how to code, collaborative learning gets applied on a large, effective scale. Learning from each other and becoming teachers or students, depending on the needs of the situation, is something that the learning process of programming can provide its learners with.
How can we apply collaborative learning when learning how to code?
We’re not only talking about open source lines of code, but also about the permanent need to create something clean and bug-less. In order to do so, cooperation and collaboration between programmers or learners is needed.
Actually, Vygotsky’s theories prove themselves to be true when it comes to learning how to code. It is not only about the knowledge itself, but mostly about the ability to gain critical thinking skills in order to solve problems. Yes, even real-life problems!
Participation in teams of programmers, enables coding experts to become more prepared and even more aware of issues that might appear when mixing a certain piece of code with another one. That is why the courses TekkieUni offers shape the way students interact with each other from the very beginning; creating a unique and genuine bond between the learners, enabling them to permanently cooperate with one another. Somehow, applying the Vygotskian method to both life and education.
Why is collaborative learning the best way to learn?
This world is made up of human interaction. It is true, we are currently living the 4th industrial revolution, where digital tools, 3D printing, robotics, IoT and augmented reality will take up a larger space every day. Regardless of the previous sentence, human interaction was, is and always will be extremely important.
Since robots are going to replace most of us in our workplaces very soon, there are tons of “soft-skills” that we have to strengthen in order to succeed in the near future.
One of these soft-skills is collaboration, creativity, human interaction, and as we mentioned before, critical thinking. The collaborative learning approach can assure we don’t only teach the necessary knowledge, but also the skill of collaboration which is becoming crucial nowadays.
The best way of learning is to teach
We’re sure you’ve heard it more than once, but since we deeply believe in this, we have to mention it once again: the best way of learning is to teach.
When we work in pairs, to help our partner better understand whatever subject we are working on, at the same time we are learning it better, and without even noticing, becoming even more of an expert in that specific field.
Our coding classes are interactive. Students can ask each other questions, be in touch after class to solve problems, and can even join the open classes we have once a week to either ask something that wasn’t clear enough, or instead, to teach someone else from their group and become the experts, at least for a little while.
