Going Around the Spiral: Learning Andamio by Building With It

This spring I participated in the Andamio Pioneer Program. The capstone was straightforward enough: use the Andamio tooling — particularly the Andamio CLI and Andamio Coach — to build a course.

I did it. I made some rudimentary courses, fulfilled the requirement, and learned quite a bit along the way.

But I never quite got to the point where I felt like I could comfortably use the tools to build the kinds of courses I actually wanted to build.

So when another opportunity came along, I decided to go around again.

This time I've been working on a couple of small courses, including one around becoming a Cardano developer and another that evolved into a Digital Agency Primer — an introduction to ideas around cypherpunk values, digital identity, control of your data, verification, recovery, and participating in the open web.

The courses themselves are interesting to me, but there's another experiment happening at the same time: I'm learning Andamio by repeatedly building things with Andamio.

That sounds obvious. Maybe it is.

But I've noticed this pattern before.

Around the spiral again

During my master's program in instructional design, one of my professors once gave us a little exercise to fill some time: invent your own instructional design model.

I came up with a spiral.

The basic idea was that you encounter something once, learn enough to use it, and move on. Later you come around to the same idea again, except now you have more context. You see details you couldn't see the first time. Then you come around again.

I thought my spiral was pretty clever.

It turns out Jerome Bruner had already developed the idea of a spiral curriculum decades earlier.

Apparently Jerome and I are pretty smart.

The more I build things, though, the more natural this model feels to me.

I don't really want to learn everything about a tool before using it. I want to learn enough to make something. Then I want to make something else and encounter some of the same problems again.

Each pass adds another layer.

That's essentially how I've learned 11ty. I didn't sit down and "learn Eleventy." I built a blog. Then another thing. Then changed the blog. Then wrote Bash scripts to manage it. Then broke things. Then fixed them.

Each time around the spiral, I understood a little more of what was actually happening.

I'm finding that Andamio works the same way.

The Pioneer Program was the first trip around. These new courses are another. I'm using the same CLI, the same basic structures, and the same workflow, but I'm noticing things this time that I barely understood the first time.

AI makes the spiral faster

There's another ingredient that makes this way of learning particularly interesting right now: AI.

This post itself is an example.

I'm voice typing a pile of thoughts to ChatGPT, which is helping me turn them into a draft. That removes a lot of the friction between having the thought and getting something onto the page that I can work with.

The same thing is happening while I build.

I use Codex and GitHub Copilot when I'm working with the code. Instead of getting stuck for an hour on some small configuration problem, I can ask questions, try something, see what happens, fix it, and keep moving.

That's important.

The AI isn't eliminating the learning process. If anything, it lets me make more trips around the spiral.

Build something.

Get stuck.

Ask questions.

Fix it.

Understand a little more.

Build the next thing.

And around we go.

For me, at least, that is starting to feel like a pretty good way to learn.