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A while ago, I wrote about replacing Facebook with Duolingo and how doing that helped break the habit of doom-scrolling by replacing it with daily mini-lessons. There are mornings where the very last thing I want to do is practice my long dormant French language skills but I’m always motivated by the idea of keeping my streak alive. It seems to be working since today I hit a milestone of 100 days of French. My score so far is only 11/129 but I’m finding the vocabulary and grammar is starting to come back to me after all the repetition.
This new micro-learning habit has become part of my daily routine. If I’m unable to complete my lesson in the morning, I figure out when I can best fit it in and make it priority. Not only did Duolingo replace a bad habit, but it sparked my curiousity about other forms of micro-learning.
We don’t necessarily have space in our days for a multi-week course with hours of homework, but most of us have five minutes that we can dedicate to learning something new and feeding our curiousity. Once I realized how much I could absorb in 5 minute increments, I went looking for other micro-learning opportunities. My interests are pretty eclectic and change over time, but that is the great thing about micro-learning. It isn’t a life long commitment, rather just 5 minutes a day.
Relearning Chess: Low Stakes, Daily Fun
After a few weeks of enjoying my daily French lesson, I discovered that although Duolingo is mostly for learning languages, it also offers daily learning for Math, Chess and Music. As a child, I learned how chess pieces moved, but I’ve never really learned anything beyond the mechanics. I’ve seldom played a game of chess and never learned any strategies. So I decided that would be a good opportunity to add Chess to my morning learning routine.
Oscar, the chess tutor, is teaching me the basics of chess in small, easy lessons which bolster my confidence. I’ve even played a few games with him so far, and although I suspect he is holding back and letting me win, putting everything I’ve learned together to play a full game is pretty fun. I especially like to capture Oscar’s knights because he is very passionate about them, exclaiming, “You took my pony” or “Not my knight!”.
The daily practice and repetition is effective and not at all time-consuming, which makes it fun rather than just another chore. But even with the short lessons, I can see improvement over time which is very gratifying. It makes me hopeful that someday soon I might play a real game of chess with someone other than Oscar who won’t just let me win.
Entering the World of Kinnu: Structured Micro-Education
Bouyed with the success of my Duolingo journey, I wondered if there were other similar apps out there for micro-learning. Enter Kinnu. This app has it all, from psychology and life skills to science and tech to humanities and history. Like Duolingo, the app offers short lessons in a gamified experience that is engaging. The hardest part of Kinnu was deciding where to start. So many of the subjects sparked my curiousity.
The Macroeconomics deep dive
After browsing the courses for some time, I finally settled on Macroeconomics. I’ve been curious about the subject for quite some time and have often thought I would like to take an Intro to Macroeconomics course at the university level once I’m retired.
The Kinnu experience provides small micro-lessons, anywhere from two to five screens at a time. You can opt to read the material or you can have it read to you, an option I often choose. Once the lesson has been presented, you are asked a series of questions about what you learned, not just that day but also about material from yesterday or last week, re-enforcing what you learned earlier.
I completed the full course in about 30 days, sometimes doing multiple lessons a day since they were so interesting.
The Learning Strategies:
For my next course, I chose Learning Strategies, since I am obviously deeply interested in learning and wanted to understand more about how we learn and why some information stays with us for years while some information slips away in a few days.
As I came to the end of the very first lesson about learning, I was surprised to be asked a few quesetions about Macroeconomics as well. Now that I’m expecting this, I find that I’m enjoying the review of what I learned previously as well as being quized on what I’m learning now.
The Power of the Micro-Habit
So far, my experiments with Duolingo and Kinnu have taught me that you don’t need hours of free time to learn something new. I think having any more than three courses on the go at any one time might be too much, but so far, having a diverse selection of courses on the go has kept things interesting. Maintaining my streaks has been enough to motivate me on days when I’m dragging a bit and the benefit on those days is the learning lifts my mood and I’m always glad I completed the lessons.
I look forward to exploring more micro-learning in the days ahead.