When learning anything, it’s one thing to learn, but another thing to retain what you’ve learnt. And learning to program is no exception – it’s so easy to soak up new coding skills and then proceed to forget them.
When you tackled your very first programming tutorial, how long did it take you to forget most of what you learnt in that tutorial? Probably not long! But you’ll find that with some simple strategies, you will be able to re-gain the skills you lost, as well as retain the many additional skills you add to your programming repertoire in the future.
So this article will discuss the programming retention strategies that can work for you, and which you’ll be able to easily apply.
Apply the Concepts You Learn in a Project
It’s no secret. Learning by doing, using your skills to build a coding project, really is the best way to consolidate what you’ve learnt. It doesn’t matter how small or trivial it is, or how inexperienced you are, as long as you’re using the skills you learn in a real situation.
As for what type of project you should create, the possibilities are endless. Some of the projects you create will be useful, some will be useless, but all will help to consolidate you skills. What’s more, you’ll also get a feel for what kind of techniques and concepts you’ll use the most.
Go Back and Revise
If starting a project is the best way to cement what you’ve learnt, then going back and revising is the second best.
As we touched on earlier, when you first introduce yourself to programming concepts, you’ll probably soon forget most of it. But you can always re-learn or revise the same programming concepts later. As soon as the next day, or as distant in the future as a year later.
Most likely, the second time around, the learning will stick and you won’t forget it again. So if there’s a tutorial you completed a while back and you’ve forgotten what you learnt, go back and revise it. You’re much more likely to get your learning to stick the second time around.
Take Notes
If you’re serious about learning to code, then it might be a good idea to take notes as you power through your tutorials.
Perhaps coding may not come naturally to you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. It just means that you might need to employ some strategies to help you learn, and taking notes is definitely one of them. The bonus is, it also makes it a lot easier to go back and revise.
You Don’t Have to Remember Everything
Programming is like an open book test. It’s not about how much you can memorize, it’s about how well you can understand and apply the concepts.
Analogies aside, it’s easy to get caught up in ways to make your learning stick and forget that you don’t have to memorize absolutely everything.
Is it worth putting in ridiculous amounts of effort to memorize every single HTML tag in existence, or everything about object oriented programming, when you can simply look these things up? Of course not! All you need to know off the top of your head are the fundamental concepts. Exact syntax and specific details, you can look up in documentation when you need them.
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