My friend Alfredo builds bikes as a hobby. He started by replacing a broken chain on his own bike. Then he upgraded his brakes. After a few more repairs, he understood the whole bike system well enough that he could gather all the parts and build one from scratch.

Experienced programmers generally learn new languages in a similar way. We get assigned to a new project for which there is an existing codebase that needs to be maintained or extended. Everything is mostly working, but something needs to be tweaked or added. So we tweak it. After working on five or ten features, we know the new language well enough that we could start a new project ourselves.

In more traditional educational environments, however, we tend to learn things the other way around. We start with simple, contrived building blocks and slowly work our way up to the point where we can comfortably manipulate a more complex and realistic system.

For example, a course that teaches the principle of the “Time Value of Money” is likely to start with a question like “if someone offered you $90 today or $100 a year from now, which one would you take?” This is, to say the least, an unrealistic scenario. But it is an introduction into the concept. After working through a number of similar examples in order to allow the student to master the math, the course will hopefully move on to a more reasonable explanation of how this concept is used in practice.

Not that it was a bad course. I actually quite liked it. But this would be like if Alfredo had first worked on pedals, then wheels, then built himself a unicycle before moving on to gears and brakes. It would have been years before he had anything he could ride on. Knowing Alfredo, he would have had no hope of staying motivated for such a long time with no bike to show for it.

Given how useful the tinkering approach is for keeping learners motivated, how do we apply a similar approach to Finance? It turns out this is difficult to do because it often involves risking real money and waiting years to see any results. What a learner really needs is a safe environment to develop intuition around the long-term consequences of her decisions and to discover for herself the places where she needs to dig deeper.

At Pedago, developing alternative approaches to teaching tough topics is what we’re passionate about. Stay tuned over the coming months to see us tackle similar problems.

This post has been updated to include a clearer example. Thanks to Earthling for the feedback!