Lifelong Student

Many times during the year my thoughts wander into reflection of the things that I’ve learned. The new understandings that I’ve gathered. At times, to the point that I even find myself explaining those concepts to kids. I think once you really understand something, the litmus test should be “can you explain it to a 3rd grader?”. You reach that point where it makes perfect sense and it is all so simple. But in the journey to that point it wasn’t really that simple. I found myself teaching binary counting with one hand to my eight year old grand daughter, recently. It took a few minutes but after about 10 minutes, she could count to 31 with one hand. Counting to 31 with one hand is not a small feat. That’s pretty amazing, considering that the average person never learns about any other number systems outside of the decimal number system. I, for example didn’t now anything about it, until I started my computer science degree 14 years ago. And the way it was explained to me back then was quite fuzzy. Read more...

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