Brilliant could be the key to learning software development – Engadget

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It takes a pretty brilliant mind to come up with some of the innovations that rock our world. Samuel Morse was debating electromagnetism with friends over dinner when he wondered why information couldn’t travel across a wire just like an electrical current. In that moment, the telegraph was born.

And if you’ve seen “The Social Network,” you know the world’s most powerful new communication platform since the telegraph sprang from a drunken night in a Harvard dorm room.

What Morse, Zuckerberg, and other geniuses have in common is an insatiable curiosity to know and understand. Those with a desire to know and understand tech can almost definitely relate. You may not create the next Facebook, but by knowing and learning how developers and engineers think and work, you might come up with a revolutionary idea of your own.

That’s where Brilliant comes in.

Brilliant offers a new way to learn about STEM subjects

Brilliant is an online learning platform that walks a fine line, offering engaging, hands-on, insightful explorations in math, science and other STEM-related fields, but without ever dumbing down the material. Brilliant is a learning platform for people who genuinely like to learn, but who usually get by rote classroom-style lectures.

Brilliant offers a full package of more than 60 courses directed at engaged learners, designed by teachers and professionals from MIT, Caltech, Microsoft, Google and others to help make complex ideas come to life through relatable examples and games.

Courses are crafted for learners of all ages, starting with fundamentals and gradually working up through more advanced skills. The key to a Brilliant course is that main takeaways are all reinforced through problem-solving, guiding learners to arrive at new information by connecting the dots of a concept so a student understands, rather than by simple memorization of facts and formulas without any context.

With concepts represented through strong visuals, ideas in a Brilliant course are anchored by fun storytelling, allowing a learner’s natural curiosity to drive the instruction. Brilliant learning always understands that a student’s desire to understand will also be a more positive, motivating factor than the threat of an imminent test.

Brilliant courses aren’t like the stodgy, old classroom learning

Using games and puzzles, topics that often seem dry and robotic take on a new energy. For example, Brilliant’s course in understanding the fundamentals of logic makes this foundation of mathematical reasoning into an engaging game of figuring out which characters in a story are werewolves and which aren’t.

Meanwhile, a finely calibrated collection of 15 interactive puzzles help reveal exactly how computer science principles guiding artificial intelligence, neural networks and computer vision actually work.

If you wish you had a better understanding of how the stock market operates, the Brilliant course in quantitative finance uses over 200 exercises that will almost immediately get you using concepts like matrices, Markov chains and more before you even realize you know them.

As students progress through various courses, the training will also help unlock process-based thinking that is applicable beyond the courses themselves. After a handful of Brilliant courses, learners will find they’re incorporating tricks for better ordering their thoughts, attacking problems and arriving at smarter, more complete solutions in both their professional …….

Source: https://www.engadget.com/brilliant-155510320.html

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