TinkerLearn

I spoke to Parker Wightman from Mysterious Trousers about their new(ish) product TinkerLearn. TinkerLearn is a badass little service to help budding developers learn iOS development. iOS seems to give everyone hot pants these days, so anything that can help me learn the subtle strangeness of Objective C and the Foundation Framework is A-OK.

I like the way that TinkerLearn approaches learning. Most of us are self taught, so it’s designed around the way that we already learn new tech. Think about it. What do you do when you want to learn something new? If you are like me, you listen to a bunch of tutorials, you skim through a some books that we’re clearly written by developer, for developers. Finally, once you’ve been saturated with some knowledge, you crack open a project and start hacking. Thats when the rubber hits the road: the hacking. Once I’ve worked with a little code, i start to get a handle on things.

TinkerLearn is built around that idea. All of the lessons are fully functional iOS apps. The lesson are XCode projects that have been heavily commented with explanations of each line of code. In the comments are little exercises that let you see how changes to the code will affect the app. You are given challenges and step-by-step instructions on how to make edits for functionality.

Another really cool TinkerLearn feature is their feedback system. Each step in the lesson has a link that allows the user to report feedback on that part of the lesson. If you run into something that is confusing or too complicated, you can drop them a line about that specific detail and they will make updates to the lesson. Sometimes, the directly reply to the specific user. According to Parker, they take the feedback very seriously and make frequent updates to improve the lessons. If you buy a lesson, they will let you know when anything has changed.

I’ve gone through a couple of lessons and I really think this model works. I’ve learned as much in a couple TinkerLearn projects as in all the months I’ve spent reading and researching. If you are comfortable hacking on a bit of code, you should try TinkerLearn. The first lesson is free and the others are dirt cheap.

Go forth and learn stuff.

You can follow TinkerLearn on Twitter at @tinkerlearn.