

Meerkat manifesto suggests mentor-learner pairs speed up learning of tech stacks - urlwolf
http://datascienceretreat.com/meerkat-method.html

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urlwolf
Author here, happy to follow up. We wrote the Meerkat manifesto after our
experience Hacker Retreat batch 01. The meerkat method should be more
effective than the (few) alternatives we tried. If you hear from people having
success doing something similar systematically (pair up; mentor picks a
project, gives it to learner, only simplifies if learner is really stuck)...
let me know. General lore says that people who pair up more improve faster.
The twist here is to pair up with a person who is far more advanced and is
invested in getting you up to speed.

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redmaverick
Great idea! I think bloc.io, AirPair follow a similar concept. Now I have some
questions.

1\. Are you planning to offer this online? Not everyone can afford to take
time off to attend a hacker retreat.

2\. How much does this cost?

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inetsee
My first thought on reading this is that it's counter to what's recommended
with Deliberate Practice. This system seems to start with failure and then
backs off on the difficulty until the learner succeeds. Deliberate Practice
starts within the learner's capability, and pushes outward, trying to stay
right at the edge of the learner's capability. I don't see how starting out
with failure is going to be very encouraging to the learner.

~~~
urlwolf
It's failure in a controlled manner. They know the task is a scorpion, ie,
demanding enough for the mentor to not be bored. It could even come out of the
Mentor's own daily practice.

Did you read about a 10-year-old who was complaining that calculus (integrals)
was hard, but did them anyway thanks to Kahn academy? I think it's mentioned
in one of his TED talks. If you don't know that something is too difficult,
you may do it anyway.

My experience with say universities is that you get stuck in exercises for far
too long. At universities you rarely get to the point of 'project' (unknown
solution, creative work needed). At that point they call it research.

I think the weak spot of the Meerkat method is to find a way to keep mentors
motivated. For data science retreat, mentors are paid, but they do it because
they think it's the right thing to do too. In the wild, one would have to
think about why the mentor will want to sit with the learner. One possible way
is to let them own the results of the learner's work, and let them work on
projects that the mentor had to do anyway. For example, chunks of a freelance
job that the mentor had to deliver and could partially unload to the learners.
For this, learners must be competent enough to ship production code; which
puts even more pressure on both sides, but I think it's the right kind of
pressure :)

This is how it worked in middle-age and Renaissance guilds. The master
outsourced say 'painting of hands'. The learner did nothing but hands, and the
master owned the final work.

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AdrianRossouw
i'm actually doing the mentor role atm for a couple of people, but in one or
two of the situations I can't really send them work home to do on their own.

So i'm taking the active role in the pair programming, and showing rather than
having them doing. At least they will have the reference afterward.

gitbook looks like a pretty nice way to collect all that knowledge though.

[http://www.gitbook.io](http://www.gitbook.io)

