prompt: Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use? Use the language you learned in this unit.
A learning challenge I overcame was learning the Assembly coding language in CSC 230. For context Assembly is a programming language, similar to Java or Python, that is extremely bare bones. Unlike the other languages I had learned up to that point there were very few tools at my disposal. As an example a loop in Python can be done by typing in one key word “for”, which tells the system that the following code segment is to be repeated a certain amount of times as specified by given parameters. In assembly however there is no simple keyword to create such a loop and on top of specifying parameters, and the code you want repeated, you must also create the logic that the system will use to check those parameters and repeat the code if necessary.
My main problem when learning Assembly (ASM) was that I wasn’t trying to understand it by using the knowledge I had gained thus far, I was simply trying to learn it as an isolated topic. Similar to the backwards bicycle example, my thinking had become too rigid and I was having trouble relating the new ideas to those that I already had embedded in my memory. It was a TA in a lab who really helped me connect the dots and understand where I was going wrong, and his style of teaching is what I can now recognize as a cognitive approach. As stated in the article Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism, cognitivism places an emphasis on connecting new and prior knowledge to “…identify and illustrate prerequisite relationships.” The TA explained ASM to me in a way that allowed me to see the more rudimentary ASM code in the same way that I had already learned to see code in Python. By showing me how to relate ASM to the mental structures I had already created in past classes my understanding of the topic increased greatly. Moving forward, as I was taught new techniques in ASM they were much easier to interpret and understand when I used the cognitive approach he showed me to connect them back to my prior knowledge.
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