Introduction

When educating a diverse population of students, the ability to break down complex concepts becomes quite important. After working closely with students and his son Elijah , Heriberto Roman, a former Technical Instructor, realized a consistent problem that existed with his adult students, elementary student Elijah, and once himself as a code newbie: the problem of being inundated with new, difficult technical concepts and not being able to process and retain them .

Heriberto wanted to build something that could help both people new to coding and everyday learners. .

The result is cThink, a multisensory tool designed to improve retention of technical coding concepts through the Draw ✏️, Act 🎭, Build 🔧 D.A.B pedagogy by helping learners retain them through personalized analogies, building them out, and saving their process.It is centered on the abstraction component of the computational thinking model, which allows users to create a simplified representation of a problem that accommodates visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning styles.

How It Works

Say a student is introduced to a programming method, through the cThink platform, they are prompted to draw their interpretation of that method, to act out or communicate an instance of that reference, and then to build the code they were introduced to. Because this process incorporates the three main styles of learning: Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic, cThink allows the learning to code process to be a creative and more personal experience, while which optimizing the retention of information into long term memory

The brain stores long-term memories in the hippocampus, which needs context to store information. The context, in this case, is not lines of code. It is the mnemonic and rehearsal that will cause the memory to move from working memory into long-term memory. A change that starts in the brain’s hippocampus.