Dev Ed 023: Succeeding Despite Learning Challenges

Panel

Joe Eames
Brooke Avery
Sam Julien
Luis Hernandez
Mike Dane

Joined by special guests: Bonnie Brennan, Samantha Brennan

Episode Summary

In this episode of the Dev Ed podcast, the panelists talk to the mother-daughter duo, Bonnie and Samantha Brennan, who have been working on teaching web development to people with learning difficulties and bringing about an awareness in the community. While talking about her background, Samantha explains that she has been programming since she was 8, and realized that she was dyslexic while learning Angular, as it is an abstract framework where a bunch of things happen at the backend. Keeping in mind the struggles faced by dyslexic learners, she, along with her mother Bonnie, decided to start the course — Angular for the Visual Learner, where they use visual methods such as pictures and 3D animation in order to overcome the learning challenges. Further in the show, they discuss how to detect if a person is dyslexic and also do an interesting demonstration of the “Cake test” on Joe, a test which helps in the identification of dyslexia.

The panelists discuss what it actually means to have dyslexia while dispelling some common myths associated with it. Samantha and Bonnie explain what a trigger word means and give details about ng-club, a fun initiative for kids to learn programming, and Blockly, a library for adding drag and drop block coding to an application. They also talk about using these visual tools from the perspective of non-dyslexic people, different learning techniques prevalent today, and the current education system. The panelists then mention some of their own learning challenges, how they overcame those and move on to weekly recommendations.

Links

Bonnie Brennan - Twitter
Angular for the Visual Learner
Claymation
The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read...and How They Can Learn
ng-club
Blockly

Picks

Bonnie Brennan:

ng-club
Blockly - YouTube

Mike Dane:

p5.js
The Coding Train - p5.js

Samantha Brennan:

Angular Denver Conference

Brooke Avery:

Kahoot!

Luis Hernandez:

Code Radio

Sam Julien:

Magic Move in Keynote

Joe Eames:

Yesterday - movie