When I was first learning electronics I bought a bunch of kits from Boldport. Including the "cordwood puzzle" and when it came I was so despondent. It's pair of PCBs and parts and YOU need to puzzle out how to put them together.
I remember thinking that I'd never be able to work it out. Just putting a kit together correctly and having it work was my limit.
I put the puzzle away, forgot about it.
I found it today ... guess what?
It's SO EASY.
Nice to be old and learn new tricks isn't it?
I used to think that this thing was so advanced and complicated and that only super experts would understand it at all.
I even thought it was sort of mean that Boldport made it so hard!
Now I'm like "this is baby stuff"
This has happened with mathematics for me many times. But only a few times with electronics. I'm totally self-taught in electronics. My knowledge is hard won, my students get to learn these things much faster with my help.
But, that's what I love about teaching.
What is something that once seemed advanced and impossible to you that later became easy?
Isn't that feeling the best high in the world?
If you want to try the puzzle there are still a few of them here:
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/cordwood-puzzle-too?variant=29443898310739
Unfortunately, I hardly know anything about electronics, but now, I'm sooo intrigued to try one of these out.
Needless to say, I love cute blinking stuff.
For a first kit something like this will be less upsetting:
https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256806563908696.html
Slowly you learn how to control the heat in the iron, the names of the parts, how to read the board and circuits etc.
I'm not an *absolute* beginner, I know the names (in German) of electronic parts and their functionality:
Last year, I have soldered the axolotl and the mini organ with my daughter (huge success), but they had very detailed assembly instructions:
https://shop.blinkyparts.com/en/navigation/d280f46375b44a53bfc4b18866bf62f9
What I lack, is deeper knowledge and practice.
I have already ordered the puzzle a minute ago. I like a challenge.
I will, dear!
Though I've had a burning fire to learn, I can't and won't claim to be self-taught in electronics and computers, as I had many good mentors. (I've also enjoyed teaching, especially those moments when a student pushes through and grasps something new!)
@mina if you are interested, I wrote a page about PCB fabrication technologies; the cordwood method dates back to the early 1950s. (This link includes a bookmark.)
https://syncopate.us/articles/2006/m04a#fab
@futurebird Almost everything I put off for months to years and then take 30 minutes to a few days to complete.
It's more a feeling of "you absolute dolt" than anything else.
Having a conversation for the first time in a new language felt like magic.
Sometimes things that made you feel frustrated and like you are in over your head, like you don't even belong working on something so advanced can later make you feel smart.
I think teaching young people this is the most important thing school can do.
But, with time, with more practice and exposure to simpler problems they can become something you master.
I worry that some people never find this confidence in their education.
And I think it's really important that it isn't about "talent" ... it's about persistence and time.
It is important to not just try the same thing over and over, but chipping away iteratively at a topic that *seems* opaque will make it yield. If you see that another person could do it? It's possible to do. And you can do it too if you want to.
I don't think it's really possible to learn without feeling like you don't get it at all for a time.
But, with enough positive experiences finding the way through that feeling the sense that a problem is "too much" becomes exciting rather than making you just want to give up.
It's also important to know that sometimes it might take years to get there. Which is why finding this puzzle easy was so exciting for me. I didn't really feel like I'd learned much ... but I have.
When teaching I encounter students in mathematics who give up very quickly. This isn't because they are terrible or lazy, they have simply learned that trying over and over to understand math isn't very productive and have had very few moment of success.
It's rational not to waste your energy if that's happened.
But, it's my task to start dissolving that sense of not belonging. "this isn't for people like me"
That's how I felt about the cordwood puzzle.
@futurebird @TheOtterDragon When I taught calculus recitations in grad school I would hand out a printed version of this story to all my sections on the first day. For me it was linear algebra and vector spaces. Then again when I took real analysis and tried to really wrap my head around how an infinite number of positive terms could sum to a finite number.
https://www.nctm.org/Publications/MT-Blog/Blog/Everyone-Has-a-Personal-Green_s-Theorem/
@futurebird @TheOtterDragon A real break through moment for me was watching a TV show, where a high school teacher put a couple of two variable equations on the board, and the students were supposed to solve them. I told my dad that it was clearly impossible, since there were two things they didn't know.
He sat down with me with a pencil and paper, and showed that by applying simple steps (now we subtract the same thing from both sides, so it will still be equal ...), he was able to transform the equations into the answer! It was like magic, but so clear. I've loved math ever since.
Now i need to go say thanks to my dad again.
The Book āAn Experiment with Timeā did that to me rececntly with its model of Serial Time.
Still donāt see how it is a proof for alternate time lime lines without evoking Everett Wheelerās PhD thesis.
But i am kinda jonesing to read its
Sequel The Serial Universe.
It came out the same year as Heideggerās Being And Time; which has over 400 pages discussing being in phenomenological detail and the Time discussion is 6-10 pages that hint at a sequel that was never written because Nazism .
Lots of things fit into that category, but I'm going to choose regular expressions. For maybe ten years, I felt guilty for not learning them and hamstrung by not knowing them. Then I just made the time, and I've had decades of productive use out of them. And they weren't nearly as difficult as I'd thought they'd be!
If I were learning them now, it'd be even easier, because now we have the Web as a guide.
@futurebird I remember being mystified by front-end parsing in my compiler design class. I was really not getting it, so I went and talked to my prof during office hours. And during that conversation it just āclickedā into focus for me.
So while I agree that persistence and effort pay off, donāt be afraid to reach out for help from experts when you are stuck.
I think that can happen for you. And someday I'll really understand capacitors and be able to predict what they do in a circuit rather than guessing and just building it to see what happens.
@futurebird Iā¦ I donāt think Iāve ever experienced this. A lot of things come to me very easily, so whenever something is at all hard or unpleasant Iām just like āfuck thisā
The end result is weird. Iām great at a lot of stuff but I never return to anything that isnāt immediately fun or doesnāt immediately click. There are just so many things that DO that iām like ālifeās too shortā
@futurebird My electronicsy butt and operational amplifiers.
They were triangular black boxes in circuits until I understood their parsimonious equation: Vout = Vin+ - Vin-
This came after watching a video that broke them down into a few simple properties. The equations that describe different op amp configurations are merely derivations of the original after a bit of analysis of the surrounding feedback loop(s).
It is now circuit analysis a la kirchhoff that eludes me a bit.
"But in the end: before tossing it in the bin, why not repair it? It's already broken, so no worries!"
This 100% - that's what gave me confidence to experiment with "fixing" - if I screwed it up, big whoosh. It was broken and going in the bin *anyway* - what's the worst I could do, break it more or put a bigger hole in it?
This then led me to have confidence in fixing things that were still viable, not yet in need of chucking in the bin, but could do with a smaller fix to restore them to "prime" condition (for me furniture that was "fine" but needed sanding and revarnishing - hoping soon to apply to mending clothes where the pocket lining has given out, for example)
@futurebird my favourite one is when I was little I'd do some scripting for a game (well, the multiplayer mod, SA-MP) and then one day I came across the source code of the mod itself and realized that it's using the same printf() to write things to the screen. It blew my mind that it's so simple (the rest wasn't but y'know). I thought regular programs were these impossibly hard to make things.
I've been working as a programmer for a few years now after all the hobby projects heh.
Topology needs time to seep into your soul. You can memorize the definitions and walk through the proofs but some of it just needs to ... sit with you for a time... or at least that's how it was for me.
I got an A in Topology in college but didn't understand it until three years later.
This is exactly how I felt when I missed a lecture in complex and came in and saw this:
"aw hell no. they've got a circle on it now?!?"
It turned out to be fine. But yeah. Math is just always like this from the playground to the very end.
Narrator voice: It did not turn out to be fine.
@futurebird ... for me it was understanding Godel's Theorem. (I'm ignorant on how to get the umlaut on the o in his name ...). But I found a book in the library (probably the university library), was curious, and started reading. And it was surprisingly easy for such a deep theorem.
[As an aside, I was once discussing the theorem with a colleague who was both a brilliant engineer and a devout christian. He stated that he couldn't believe the theorem because that would mean that God was either inconsistent or incomplete. And since I had understood the proof, I was able to quickly respond that the theorem only applied to systems with a finite set of postulates ... so it didn't cover God.]
@futurebird I had something similar happen to me, but it was a bittersweet moment: When I was a kid, teenager and even young adult, my dad was the one who can DIY: Fiddling with power outlets, reparing radios, casting plaster models, weathering faux antiques, applying wallpaper, woodworking, building RC U-boats - he could do it all.
Then, about 15ish years ago, he asked me to help out setting up an IKEA kitchen, including appliances because he couldn't make heads or tails of the manuals.
I was dang proud that I got there and could help, but boy it also hurt a bit that I lost him being the guy I could ask for help in case I get daunted by a DIY task.
@futurebird As you say, this is all about confidence.
Confidence to say āhey I can try thisā
Confidence to say āthis isnāt working out, I need a different tool from the toolbox, or some help, or some timeā
Confidence to come back later and persevere, and get a different view of your old problem.
And the confidence to say āturns out Iām pretty terrible at this, could you help me please?ā
@futurebird Three things that come to my mind are purely functional programming, continuations, and continued fractions.
As far as I know, continuations and continued fractions aren't related to each other in any particularly interesting way.
But I've also been toying with the two concepts for decades.
But I've also built my philosophy of math education based around my first "aha" moment with continued fractions.
I'd consider continuations considerably more niche, but it's a very popular niche.
@futurebird
Speedrunning is where I encountered it the most. Probably because, unlike my experience in schooling, speedrunning means revisiting earlier work over and over. School was almost always on to the next thing.
Being able to casually complete an extra difficulty challenge for fun, when beating it the first time at regular difficulty was a challenge. Itās closer to ābeing able to reproduce those motionsā than ābeing able to intellectually understandā, but imho itās a feeling akin.
@futurebird Playing guitar in a way that sounded good.
I started trying to play Beatles music, then years later, I tried other peopleās music with fewer unique chord changes and found it incredibly easy.
Trying the Beatles music again was still a challenge but seemed a lot less impossible.
myrmepropagandist
Mina
John Carlsen šŗšøš³š±šŖšŗ
David Penfold 
Phosphenes
Dragon Vertigo
Semitones
Hayduke
Dan Neuman šØš¦
Analog AI
Matt McIrvin
Medea Vanamondeš³ļøāā§ļø ā
Jen
Ben Aveling
C++ Wage Slave
Hal Pomeranz
CatSaladšš„ (D.Burch) 
sidereal
Nonya Bidniss 
Queen Calyo Delphi
Ian K Tindale
grob šŗš¦
NeonSnake
Martin Vermeer FCD
Susanna the Artist š»
Norbi Peti
Possumantha
phooky
OldCoder
Tattie
Steve Gisselbrecht
hazelnot 
JollyOrc
BashStKid
Fishercat
Janice in GA
andymandias
Cecelia