Top Four Reasons why @TwoStraws is a Good Teacher

Good Questions

At various points in the 100 Days of SwiftUI course, you get asked sets of questions to check you’ve understood the preceding material. They’re usually presented as two different statements, one of which is true, and the other false. It’s actually a really good technique - the student feels like they’ve got a couple of opportunities to figure it out, plus they are forced to read both statements and think about them. Paul does a similar thing in the Unwrapped app - there, the questions are often presented as “Is this valid Swift code” and the user needs to scan through it all looking for mistakes. It’s checking your understanding, and making you a thoughtful debugger!

Zone of Proximal Development

You know how if something is too easy, it’s not engaging? It’s why you don’t choose Snap when you sit down to play cards. It’s so far below your skill level your brain is not interested in it. There’s a similar problem at the other end - if I ask you do try something that’s so hard for you that you’ll never be able to achieve it, you want want to do it again. For good learning to take place, it’s important to pitch the difficulty of activities just ever so slightly in advance of what the student can comfortably do. This is the zone where the most learning takes place in the shortest amount of time.

Learning in Context

Logically, you could teach iOS development with a semester of pure Swift teaching before you got to your first app. Probably there are courses that do that, but if you want to engage your learners do it with as much real life context and hands-on activity as possible. #100Days is all about this.

Beginner Mind

In the videos/lessons, Paul often anticipates how the learner might expect something to work, or how they might tackle a problem, before explaining the problem with that thinking or showing a better way of doing things. This is a great trait of a teacher. Often it’s difficult for experts (which Paul undoubtedly is) to recall how things looked to them as they were learning. Anticipating the state of mind of the learner, and moving them from that point is both comforting for the learner, and avoids confusion.

Currency

As soon as you start googling problems and reading blog posts or StackOverflow answers, it becomes apparent that the rapid development of Swift and SwiftUI has a downside - a lot of the helpful information put out there is out of date. Like everyone, I’m amazed at the work Paul puts in to producing his massive amount of content, and then keeping it up to date. If there’s a Hacking With Swift result in a search you’ve made, that’s the one to click on.