I was at a library coding workshop in Austin and the instructor did something weird with loops

She made us write a for loop to print numbers 1 to 10, but then she had us delete the whole thing and rewrite it as a while loop instead... it felt pointless at first, but it actually made me understand how the logic works behind the scenes. Has anyone else had a teacher use a method like that to explain a basic concept?

3 comments

3 Comments

derekhenderson1mo ago

Read a blog post once that called this "unrolling the abstraction." Makes you see the gears turning.

alice12121d ago

Abstracting away details is what lets engineers build on top of complex systems without reinventing the wheel every time. Not every step needs to be walked through manually.

flores.emma1mo ago

Had a physics teacher who made us solve the same problem with and without friction. It seemed like busywork until I saw how the "ideal" version hid all the real complexity. Breaking things down to a simpler, clunkier version forces you to actually build the model in your head instead of just copying a pattern. That coding workshop trick is totally the same idea.