Our Thoughts on Learning

I grew up in an age where we were taught in school (even in song!) that knowledge is power. Now that I'm all grown up, I'm not sure that's exactly the case, but I do still agree that knowledge is powerful. Here at data detectives our mission is to help you learn to love data, and the way we empower you to do so is through our knowledge articles.

To help you the best way we know how, we've designed our knowledge articles with a few principles in mind, and we'll share a little bit about why we follow these principles.

We know there are already many fantastic online resources to learn how to work with data, so we're so glad that you've found us and hope we can be helpful as well!

However, we're also aware that not everyone learns the same way, so as a result, we are focused on bringing you quality content in bite-sized pieces that will let you guide your own journey. We aim to use a variety of teaching methods, including various explanations, visualizations, and analogies to help you understand concepts at multiple levels.

As a result, you may find that some of our articles teach similar things. We imagine that one style might help one student tremendously, and another style might help another. But also, we think that ...

It might be natural to think that if you've learned it once, why do you need to learn it again? Why learn multiplication over and over again? From this perspective, one might think that the amount you learn each time you re-learn something would look like this:

While we believe there is some truth to that, we actually believe that if you re-learn carefully, it actually deepens your expertise. If similar concepts are taught in a different way (correctly), it challenges you to not only think differently, but also to think critically about what information is different, and how both can be true.

Going back to multiplication, maybe you were taught that to multiply two numbers to get to 8, you multiply 4 and 2. And later you learn that you can also multiply 2 and 4! Or even 8 and 1! You go from a basic understanding of a mathematical truth (4x2 = 8), to a deeper understanding of multiplication and how it works.

As a result, we think that when you learn the same thing in different ways well, you actually learn something like this:

And therefore we challenge you, when you find articles on our site that look similar at the onset, to think critically about what they each teach you about the same topic. But also, we recommend that you take it slow, because ...

If you've ever had to cram for a test, you might notice that the information doesn't stick as well afterwards. We believe that we learn best when we have time to rest, sleep, and ponder about the things we learn in between learning. Maybe those shower thoughts or the aha moments that happen right before you fall asleep really help you digest the knowledge you've learned from our articles and put the pieces together!

To foster this learning paradigm, we try to keep our articles short and punchy. We hope that each article can be read in just a few minutes, but that the concepts and information will continue churning in the back of your brains for much longer.

In addition, we hope learning will be fun! The more fun we make it, and the more you feel like you can get out of each article, hopefully the more you'll want to come back for more, and the more you'll learn over time! So each article will come with a main takeaway that hopefully you can use in a variety of settings. It might be in the form of a question, an example, or a problem to take home; our hope is that it will challenge you to do some data detective work with the learnings from the article.

So! As you begin your journey to becoming a data detective, we hope these principles will quietly boost your desire to learn and your ability to do so. In conjunction with our mission to help you love data, we believe that if you're motivated enough, you should be able to do so with whatever background you're coming from, free of charge. Therefore, we're committing to a bold strategy: our knowledge articles will always be free. No paywall, not even a request for donations. We stand behind our mission, and are investing in you! We hope your love for data will bear fruit in awesome ways.

That being said, if you would like additional support on your journey to becoming a data detective, we do offer paid support, because we believe that our data detectives are the best, and we want to support them supporting you! We plan to hold live classes and have other avenues of practicing your data detective skills, so please stay tuned!