Knowing is not understanding

#personal #geekstuff - knowing is not understanding

When entering unchartered territory I always try to set myself an attainable objective as a first milestone. Just to keep myself motivated and go for the more complex things with a "it works!" and a successful first step in my mind.

Today it was switching a relay and opening a solenoid (with #python). Yay, nothing special for an engineer, right? But to frame this right, it helps to know that I never bridged the gap between creating software in a virtual world to creating impact in the physical world by coding it myself.

#Failure is part of the game and helps me understanding.

Which brings me to a very inspiring conversation I had with Guillermina Noel and Jorge Frascara in which we discussed the use of #AI by students or more general in learning situations.

I used #AI to be faster in learning, but nothing the #AI wrote for me worked. It gave me the hints and pointers to what to look for in the documentation though.

By using #AI as a companion I went through failures, had to look up things myself and try them out. For me, that's a path to understanding, which you will not take if you simply ask AI for an answer and then "know" the answer.

If you stand under something, you are in the middle of it - and that is fundamentally different from just "knowing" something, for which an outside, observing position is sufficient. That's what #AI will give you out of the box. But nothing hinders you to take it further, use the knowledge given by #AI to gain understanding :)

(I used Claude for this part of the project)