How Today’s Students Learn Best And The Value Of Breaking Stuff | A Conversation With Elevate The Future’s Ellen Xu, Nicole Pi, Sanvi Pal, And Special Guest Ted Harrington

Teaching and learning is an ongoing experiment. As society, cultures, and technology change, so do the way the new generations learn best and, therefore, the methodologies we should adopt to teach them.

In this episode of The Academy with team members from the student-run Elevate the Future, we invited a special guest, Ted Harrington, to help us explore how today's students want to learn—and learn in a meaningful way. Today's students are looking for activities, engagements, and experiences that best match their everyday environments and where they will want to grow their passions and their future careers.

Ultimately, it's about making learning fun and interesting, questioning everything, looking at things from different perspectives, and considering that sometimes we have to break things—or concepts—to understand how they work, or how they could be better. 

If it sounds like a hacker mindset, well, that's because it is.

By now, we should know that learning is not about arriving at the correct answer as most of the time a right or wrong outcome may simply not exist. We likely also know that teaching is not about presenting information and expecting the memorization of it; rather, it's about stimulating curiosity, encouraging problem solving, sharing knowledge and experience, and ultimately teaching students how to learn for the rest of their lives.

A good teacher will stimulate more questions than answers.

We hope you have many questions of your own once you finish listening to this podcast.

"Thinking about a problem in different ways, it also helps you understand it better and you're able to apply your knowledge later on; kids just have a deeper understanding of it." —Nicole Pi

"We also have activities in the breakout rooms which helped [students] reinforce the concepts that they just learned." —Sanvi Pal

"You mentioned this idea of students are motivated to build things and I completely agree with that. In my field, which has a tremendous shortage of talent, what we do is we break things that others have built. One of the things that is the bottleneck that prevents computer scientists from going on to becoming ethical hackers is because of that exact motivation." —Ted Harrington

"What we're really trying to do here at Elevate the Future San Diego is to make it less like a class or a lecture, but more like a workshop or a hands-on experience where [students] get to try something new." —Ellen Xu

Guest(s)
Ellen Xu | Nicole Pi | Sanvi Pal

Special Guest: Ted Harrington

This Episode’s Sponsors:

Bugcrowd: https://itspm.ag/itspbgcweb

Devo: https://itspm.ag/itspdvweb

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