Overwath Skill Curve: Learning To Learn! - Video 1
Transcript
Hello everyone! this is an important video for everyone trying to climb in overwatch, or any game really. I should have probably made his earlier actually, so today we will be talking about this learning curve in overwatch and how being aware of it can turn that seemingly endless ladder to nowhere into a series of concrete goals that you can easily visualize.
So anyway the learning curve. This is basically the rate that you get better at the game over time. Many players think that the learning is something like this: basically you gradually get better over time at relatively constant rate. What about you? Do you think that's right? Let's show you a few more, this is a pretty popular one: it takes a lot effort on get into the game initially, but after that, it’s pretty smooth sailing. This one doesn't seem so bad either a wall at the beginning like I said before, and also a wall at end to get into pro level play. All right but of course if we're talking about it like this, none of these are correct, here: This is the learning curve for overwatch; looks kind of crazy, right? This is the key to the frustration many players are facing. They will play, and play, and play and get very frustrated because it doesn't seem like they are going anywhere. Then, they will randomly spike up and think the M.M.R system is broken or luck-based before just getting frustrated again.
Overwatch is actually a pretty easy game to pick up, so at the start, we can see Timmy here: that’s our example, little Timmy, gets a lot better very rapidly. This is the period where he is learning all the basics like what each hero does, how the objectives work, how the physics and the movement sort of functions, all things that most of you already just know, naturally, but once that period is over, we see Timmy is skill curve flat lines. Throughout the entire graph we observe these flat points and these are all periods of experimentation, that’s what I’m gonna call “periods of experimentation”. Overwatch is not simple like memorizing biology terms or something, with that you can say all right today I'm going to learn three words, tomorrow I'm going to learn three words and then so on and so on. It is very gradual skill curve in that regard. That is basically how school works in general. No, this a game of personal skill and ability. This is rarely an issue of one right answer and when you consider all the practically unlimited different situations you will find yourself in, in this game, with all the heroes, and all the maps, and all the positions. Nobody can tell you the one secret to getting good. So, it comes down to experimentation. You try this, you try that, maybe our hero, Timmy, is a dirty widowmaker player and he wants to aim better. As he learns to aim, every game he slightly adjusts tries something a bit different, takes a different mentally hopefully it’s a conscious effort, but a lot of stuff will happen unconsciously anyway even if you aren't aware. Remember, we are just trying stuff. We don't know if it’s right. We don't know if it’s wrong. We aren't good at this game yet oftentimes. It will take a long time of failed experimentation before Timmy has one of those you know, “aha” Epiphany moments, I have learned the method that works for him and greatly improves his aim. Maybe he's playing Genji instead, and experiments with I don't know 20 different flank routines, but before he finds the one method that actually really works. This is how it works with anything really in this game. Don't get me wrong now. Having a coach helps a lot, watching my videos will help you learn much faster, but you can never escape this skill curve. You can compress it, but maybe you watch a video and it gives you a great idea a good place to start. That might cut out days or weeks of your own experimentation because at last you will start out in the right spot to begin with but you still have to put in the time to really internalize it, and find the version of the concept that really works for you. Okay so, why is this important? The key to improving is to stay in the game, stay in the game, that’s I say that so much these flat lines is where a lot of players think they are doing something wrong and they just change everything, you know, change it all shut everything down you see this even in your own ranked matches. Maybe it’s the middle of the match, your team settles out for minute or two. Then, everyone panics and starts swapping heroes, tells you to switch, tells him to switch, tells poor little Timmy, “Aww, you are doing badly, we have to switch, everyone changes the rolls up, and you just get absolutely crushed in the second half. That is how it works for a lot of players in general, Timmy here might hit one of these flatlines and thinks he is doing something wrong, as a result maybe he decides he needs to just stop playing Widowmaker or maybe just not playing DPS heroes, play support instead worse yet, he will say he is in Elo Hell, and start blaming his teams, abandoning all hope really of self-improvement.
So, really this is the absolute most important number one concept that you must internalize to improve, and more importantly, be happy with your learning experience. A lot of you, I'm sure are in this flat period where you feel like you're not climbing even though you’re putting an effort. What you're doing is good you just need to wait through the storm and stick it through. As long as you're focused on improvement these skill spikes will be right on the Horizon. Winning a game is a just a short-term victory, it doesn't mean anything. Losing a game it's just a short-term loss, same thing, when you live game to game hoping that each one will be a win looking at one game at a time through your matchmaking you are just setting yourself up for big-time frustration and disappointment.
Alright, one more time just stick it through, stay focused on one thing at time, don't go changing everything around just because you lost one day worth of matches it is, it is just a couple matches in the Grand Scheme of things. It’s nothing focus on this big picture, and you will improve in the time, just until then, don’t get discouraged. So, for all you holding on and one of those flat points keep at it, let me know what your experiences have been learning this game in the comments what do you think about it? But, no matter what as always, never forget to stay positive. Have a great day everyone, peace out guys!
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vDLt38qGmk
Learning Curves - Video 2
Transcript
Hello my name is Laith and I would like to tell you briefly about learning curve effect. In 1885, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first person to describe the learning curve through memorizing series of nonsense syllables, and recording the sexes over a number of the trials.
Ok, let’s go more deeply. Learning curves measures the relation between increasing per worker productivity, leading to the increase in per unit labour cost at fixed price associated with an improvement and labor skills from the on job experience.
Briefly, learning curve is a graphical representation measures the labor productivity considering the average time which is very cost per unit. In other words, learning effects leads to fall in the coast of a production per unit because with the increased involvement in the production process laborers and managers become more and more familiar with the production process.
The idea behind all of this is to improve laborers efficiency, and efficiency here means great amount of output generated per unit over the same amount of input of laborers hours and the process of production.
Applying the learning effect curve requires two important factors: workers who are engaged in the production or manufacturing process become familiar with the process of a production with the passage time. Managers who are evolved the management and scheduling of the production process also get familiar with the process.
Let’s have an example about the learning effect. John and Sam are good friends, but John is not familiar the computer. However his friend Sam is very experienced computer operator. Thus, the time taken by John to type 500 document word is one hour, while the time taken by Sam to type the same document is only a minute. The factor that has resulted in higher efficiency of Sam is the learning effect. So, if John starts using personal computers on more regular basis than the time required by him to type such 500 word document will also reduce an account of the learning curve effect. Thank you very much for watching and I hope you have enjoyed the video.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsey8k4O5jM
Understanding the Developer Learning Curve - Video 3
Transcript
When it comes to becoming a developer, one of the questions I get asked the most is, why does it take so long to learn how to code? I have discovered the answer to this can be found in research related to learning curves. So, what is a learning curve? The concept of learning curves has been around since 1885. Typically the research has been performed in the psychological and cognitive sciences. However, the concept can be clearly utilized when it comes to learning development. In this image is a standard learning curve. This was generated by big data analysis algorithm that analyzed learning patterns of individuals in a number of industries. The curve is smooth because it takes the average learning processes and it leverages as each one of the data points. Later in this guide we will take a look at what a learning curve looks like for a single person and it is similar, but there are some very important differences.
Over the years, I have had the privilege of teaching students how to become developers. I witnessed this learning curve play itself out over and over again. In this guide I want to examine the three stages that all developers go through. Additionally, I will discuss about how long it takes to traverse from one stage to another. The three stages that I'm going to discuss are liftoff, the Twilight Zone, and V zone.
Let’s start off by taking a look at the liftoff stage. This is an exciting time for new students. During this time students are immersed in learning skills that they have never learned before because of all the topics the students learn during this stage arburian knew their expertise skyrockets. I like to call this “the liftoff stage” because it is easy to visualize a new students expertise like a rocket ship soaring into the sky places is never been before. During this time a student will learn how to configure a development machine, learn a new programming language, work with various frameworks, build functional applications, and the list goes on and on. This stage usually lasts for the first 250 to 300 hours that a developer is learning how to code. This estimate is based on what I have seen with the dev camp bootcamp students and equals to about 6 to 8 weeks of intensive learning. As fun as this stage is, it has drawbacks. One of the key problems is that it can give students of false confidence. When they see themselves building applications that actually work, it is natural to believe that they can dive right into building production apps for clients. However, the issue is that they don’t realize that they are about to enter the twilight zone of learning how to code.
After the exciting liftoff stage of the developer learning curve aspiring developers will enter the twilight zone. This is a challenging time for students and many students decide to quit programming entirely during the stage unfortunately. So, why is this time so challenging? After seeing countless students go through it, I have discovered that there are a number of contributing factors. Well in this stage many of the core concepts in commands have it yet cemented themselves in a student’s long term memory. This results in them having to constantly look up documentation, query stack overflow, and things like that. During this time the novelty of simply having an application that works has worn off, and now students are asked to perform advance tasks such as: working with legacy applications, debugging defects, improving performance, and building features that they don’t have step-by-step tutorial for. Additionally, while working through the twilight zone students are expected to start implementing best practices.
In the launch stage your primary goal was to get applications functional. During this next phase students start learning how to build application that can be used in real world scenarios. This means that a student may spend fives time longer to build out an application with the identical feature of something that they created during the launch stage. This can be frustrating, however the increased time spent implementing best practices allow the applications to be scalable and flexible enough to be used in production. This is in stark contrast to the apps created during the launch phase that don’t really adhere to industry standards and there's absolutely nothing the matter with having that process, you want to be able to through that phase and focus simply on getting things working, seeing what the components and capabilities of the language are, and after you have that good foundation then you can move on to the important things that you need to have in order to build production applications that other people are going to use. There is good news though. If a student persists through twilight zone of learning they will enter the zone of the developer learning curve.
This zone is entered usually after about a thousand hours of study and work. During this stage developers have a wide range of features they can build without even having to look up the documentation for. In this stage, when you visit Stack Overflow you will actually be answering as many questions as you ask and thankfully learning new concepts will come easier. The reason why this is, is because at this stage you will developed mental models for development, for example; I recently started working with the Scala programing language I have been able to pick up on how to build applications in Scala dramatically faster than when I started learning C or PHP a decade ago. This is because I have a decade of knowledge in the development space that allows me to frame the new concepts. When I read the documentation and see what it says about data types, I don’t have to wonder what a data type is. Instead, I can skip ad and learn about the syntax. As you will notice in the developer learning curve the growth pattern in this phase is less than the other two stages. As you have heard me say countless time before “learning never ends for developers, however learning does change”. During this phase a developer focuses on learning topics such as: incremental performance improvements, building helper code libraries, refining how application code flows, and overall best practices.
At the beginning of this guide you may have noticed that the developer learning curve was smooth, however that is not reality. The reason why the curve was because it averages doubt the learning path of a large number of individuals. When it comes to a single student the learning curve looks like this image. There are ups and downs throughout the learning lifecycle. As a student you may decide to switch programing languages after a few years like I did when I switch from PHP into Ruby, even though you don’t have to start from scratch, it still takes time to learn a new language or framework. So, don’t get discouraged if you aren't satisfied with their skill level because I have a secret to tell you: Good developers never feel like they have arrived and are never done learning.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba5xvpzm4zA
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