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Learning Mentoring Technology

We learnt a few lessons – 22 project

6th February 2017

It has been a month since the last update. Life has thrown a few curveballs at our family, which pretty much back-burned  all our non-critical activities.

Hunter and I decided to cut this project short on the 15th of January. We were never going to hit our key deliverables. 

With retrospection, these are our lessons from this little experiment:

What didn’t go well

  • We had assumed at the start that Hunter would be able to spend a lot of time working on this project on his own; that assumption later turned out to be flawed. It was definitely an over-expectation on my behalf as a parent and guide.
  • We didn’t allow time for contingencies, as it was a holiday period. But it turned out that we still needed contingencies as an unforeseen family situation demanded more of our time and attention.

What went well

  • Hunter picked up on algorithms and the basic constructs of a programming language quite quickly.
  • Hunter learnt to focus for up to two hours to solve a logic problem and code his solution in a programming language.
  • Hunter learnt a number of techniques to qualify a game idea and define viable feature sets of the first version.

Key lessons learnt

  • With a young child being exposed to a number of new skills at the same time, it would have been more manageable if I had broken the project down into a number of mini-projects.
  • I would need to work together on Hunter on these types of projects for at least two more rounds before he is able and willing to work on them on his own; this means that I need to allow sufficient time for the projects to run their natural courses.

Against the criteria we had defined at the start of this project, this project has FAILED.

However, Hunter and I both felt that we had learnt so much from this exercise, despite the setback. We expect to resume the project over one of the upcoming school holidays.