Part 2: The Second Pass — From Familiarity to Fluency with LSBot

We’re on to part two of our “LSBot for the Stages” series! If you haven’t read part 1 or have no idea what “The Second Pass” means, go check it out now:

Part 1: The First Pass — Lighting the Path with LSBot

By most accounts, the second pass of a Launch School course tends to be more enjoyable. There’s still some struggle, but the ratio of feeling confused to feeling competent sits at a much happier place. Hopefully, during the second pass, you start to feel like you really understand the material. This sounds great, but there are still some issues to work out. Let’s discuss the most significant roadblock that happens during the second pass and how we might approach it.

The Roadblock

You feel confident in the topics you’re reading. Everything seems to click; you have a thorough set of Anki cards, a beautifully color-coded mind map, or a well-organized set of notes. Then, someone asks you to explain a concept, and you draw a blank. Polymorphism made so much sense when you were reading about it and even playing around with the code examples. However, everything falls apart when asked to put it into words without your notes. How can you bridge that gap between following along happily to being able to explain a concept on the spot? There are a few approaches:

Option A: Meet with study buddies and join SPOT or TA-led study sessions.

This is likely your best option. In fact, choose option A as often as you can! There aren’t many ways you can spend your time studying that are more beneficial than an engaging study session with peers. You put each other on the spot, and hopefully, you have enough trust built to call one another out when something doesn’t make sense. As a bonus, students are very good at gauging competence in one another, so this is a great way to identify gaps in your mental models and polish them up. What’s the catch? The downfall of option A is simply that it isn’t always available. If you’re lucky, you may be able to join one or two study sessions a week. If you aren’t lucky, your schedule doesn’t accommodate hour-long uninterrupted chunks, or you happen to be asleep during 90% of the scheduled sessions. Even for the lucky ones, there’s room for improvement.

Option B: Make a Third Pass

Some courses are more demanding than others, and taking a third pass through the material is totally acceptable. While this approach is thorough, it may not always be the most efficient way to address specific gaps in understanding. Instead of reviewing the entire course again, focusing on just a few unclear concepts with a more targeted approach could be a more effective use of your time.

As in Part 1, the real sticklers with options A and B are time and efficiency. Again, those of you who are trying to make a certain timeline or fit Launch School into a busy schedule need to maximize efficiency. As such, we present option C, to utilize LSBot.

Option C: Target your weak points with LSBot

Having LSBot is like having a study buddy available 24/7 and none of their own gaps — they only care about helping you with your weak points. When you have trouble verbalizing a concept, the best thing you can do is verbalize the concept. The answer is not to watch YouTube videos or read articles on the topic; you already understand the concept when it’s explained to you. It’s time to kick off the training wheels and fumble.

This brings us back to the “learning by teaching” idea we briefly mentioned in Part 1. When we look at a problem, it’s very easy to say, “Yes, I understand that!” It’s much harder to teach someone about that problem. Doing so adds depth to your study sessions and improves your comprehension and memory much more than a session where you’re strictly concerned with memorizing information for yourself.

Let’s go back to our “Variables as Pointers” topic from part 1. In theory, you now understand the concept. You can make sense of the code snippets presented in the material, even if it takes a bit of work. However, You can’t explain the concept yourself or help teach a peer confidently. Let’s use LSBot to fill in this gap.

Those follow-up questions are quite good! They especially help in calling out this final line of the explanation as ambiguous:

If two variables point to the same value, changing one of them will affect the other because they both refer to the same place in memory.

Let’s imagine we respond:

It’s okay if you don’t understand the details being discussed here. The thing to notice, and the real benefit of this approach, is that this opens us up for a sort of “LSBot study session.” After we sent this response, LSBot agreed that we’d improved on our initial answers but continued to ask questions that naturally branch into related concepts:

We’re now expanding into concepts like interning and mutability. LSBot is eager to keep things going. If the conversation is helpful, you can keep up the back and forth and see where it takes you, occasionally redirecting or correcting LSBot if necessary.

Even if your initial explanation to LSBot felt clunky and unclear, this exercise has at least broken the ice. You were able to say something, and LSBot’s follow-up questions helped you fit some of the missing pieces together. You even created your own simple example to demonstrate the concept. At this stage, it’s less about reading and studying than it is about doing.

We encourage you to use LSBot, whether you want to try this technique or explore it with your own use cases. We hope you’ll stick around for parts three and four, where we’ll discuss the assessment prep phase and LSBot “gotchas” to avoid.