Visual Learning

In an earlier blog post (Now I SEE It), I mentioned that representing a problem visually was often key to unlocking its solution. If visualization is so helpful in problem-solving, might it also be similarly useful in learning? I find in teaching programmers that where I'm able to "show" what code is doing, students are quicker to grasp both the basis of the concept and its subtler ramifications.

Over the weekend, I began a new book, jQuery in Action. This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it just for the book itself. But the authors have added downloadable "labs" -- HTML pages that allow you to type in jQuery selectors, filters, etc. and see the results on a sample HTML markup page. There's nothing so valuable as being able to do little experiments to test our knowledge and these labs offer a wonderful way to do just that.

What a great way to do more than talk -- to allow learners to play, test, and experiment. You can get more information about the book at www.manning.com/bibeault/. From there, you can download a couple of sample chapters and all of the code for the book.