How weekly exercises help the process of learning.

Never in a million years did I imagine myself get into educator mode. Much of it all culminated when I was in graduate school making teaching tools and loving it. As a freelancer, I had in the past researched and written for a children's video game. The idea of creating options along the path of the user came from there. I perfected my skills when I worked as lead designer for a global web redesign project in my past life.

Learning is cumulative. We all learn on the basis of something. As infants, we hear our parents speak and pick up from there. Mannerisms, habits and so are formed the same way. We base it on something. I find analogies to be a very useful tool in the classroom during lectures for the same reason.

A new concept can be communicated effectively if it is based on the reality of that particular student group. The reality of each batch of students changes because the environment they consume changes constantly. I needed to find a constant that can be changed yet maintained across classes, course levels and expertise. Being relevant is ever so important.

Weekly exercises first appeared in my classes when I wrote a graduate web design course for SCAD's Elearning program. I needed students to check in each week with peripheral concepts besides the main content being discussed. The success of these weekly exercises confirmed my belief — "a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down". Small doses of kind-of-relevant exploration brought students closer to their creative solutions.

In many of my classes, students are given a task each week. The tasks vary from watching a particular video and writing a summary of 500 words to going to a restaurant pretending to be your target audience and placing an order and writing about the experience. The weekly exercises change based on the project the class is working on or the concepts they need to have clarified before the end of the quarter. They then come into the classroom and share their weekly exercise with their peers.

Besides the learning that takes place while researching the exercise, there are other benefits. The journey they take together brings them closer in the classroom.Team dynamics improve. Ability to read a variety of sources increases. Open mindedness might occur in some. Sometimes, if the weekly isn't particularly exciting, the collective dissatisfaction of the exercise does wonders too. The teacher as a common enemy is a wondrous unifying force.

All in all, weekly exercises work. Most times, students don't realize it, but the light bulbs turn on during one of those moments when you think you cannot take on any more homework. And some of those light bulbs shine all the way through many successful careers.