The LookListenLearn Blog
I generally learn things fairly quickly which is actually a liability in that coming out of high school I'd never really had to study that hard. So once in college things got a bit tough. Some classes were okay. One I actually passed with a C and never even read the book, just guessed at the questions on the test based on the patterns teachers generally use for invented answers (the wrong ones) as opposed to real answers (the correct ones). But one day my roommate organized a study session with several other people who had the same class, which I also happened to be in, so I participated. We basically grilled each other over the study questions. I made an A on the test. It was one of the easiest A's I ever got. The trick, it seemed was that we went through the questions and weeded out the ones we knew, then focused on the ones we didn't, slowly removing questions as we learned them.
I had been learning computer programming on my own (the classes bored me, and since this was the early 80's, the programming languages weren't all that hard). So I decided to try to duplicate the "grilling" session in a computer program. I wrote the initial one in Apple ][ Basic and it worked wonders, except that it took so long to enter in the questions, I didn't use it that much. I eventually converted the program to IBM basic, and later Pascal. Eventually I had a class, a telecourse, that also bored me, but I needed to take it for my degree. I procrastinated on watching the telecourse and finally just typed in the questions at the end of the chapter into my trusty program, spent about ten to fifteen minutes learning them and got a B on the test. The class had a test each Friday, so some time on Thursday or early Friday I'd type in the chapter questions, memorize the answers with the program, and pass the test. I never had to watch the telecourse.
I wanted to see if the program would work with other topics so I inputted the books of the Old Testament, using the name of the book as the question and the following books name as the answer. that way you could learn the books of the Bible simply by memorizing which book followed which. I got a few volunteers who didn't know the books of the Bible, and they were able to memorize the list in about twenty minutes.
Years later when I was married an we started homeschooling our kids, I knew I had to use this program with them. But by then computers use had shifted from running programs to interactive web sites. I had learned PERL and wrote an initial script in it, then later revised it to PHP. I gathered material to include in the scripts so there'd be plenty to learn.
In the mean time I found that another problem was having to take time to grade my kids' math papers. So I wrote a script that would generate a page of math problems and grade the answers. Then, using JavaScript, I made a page that would take a child step by step through the process of addition with carrying, then one for multiplication. As I wrote these for my kids, I also put them online for others to use.
And there it sits, http://LookListenLearn.org now being used by numerous other parents to help their kids learn a little more. I've always left it free for anyone to use because I felt it unfair to try to force people to pay for something that I enjoyed building. I also appreciate the free sites out there on the internet, too.
I've debated about creating a feature for people to make their own courses using the "grilling" method, but so far haven't had time. If enough people find the site useful, then maybe someday I will.
But, you know that feeling you get when you spend time cooking a nice meal, and you see people thoroughly enjoying it? That's the feeling I get when people tell me they're using the site. It means the work I did is doing good, and continuing to help people.
