Meta · Learning

The Learning
Pyramid.

How do skills actually form? What separates someone who can copy code from someone who can build something new? The pyramid below maps the journey from raw exposure to mastery — five levels, each built on the one below.

These principles apply to everything in this course — programming, design, mathematics. Knowing where you are on the pyramid tells you exactly what to do next. Most people get stuck at level 2 because they skip the uncomfortable work that happens at levels 3 and 4.

The Mastery Pyramid
Click any layer to explore that principle
Mastery Create & Teach Application Build Real Things Practice Deliberate Repetition Understanding Why, Not Just How Exposure Watch & Read L5 L4 L3 L2 L1
Click a layer
Explore the pyramid
Select any layer of the pyramid to learn about that stage of skill development — and how to move through it deliberately.

Seven principles for programmers & designers

Each principle maps to a layer of the pyramid and guides how you structure learning and creative work.

01 — EXPOSURE
👁️
Read a lot of code

Fluency in any language — natural or programming — begins with massive input. Read open-source projects, study examples, reverse-engineer effects you admire. You absorb patterns you couldn't yet produce yourself.

L1 Exposure
02 — UNDERSTANDING
🔍
Always ask why

Don't accept "it works" as understanding. Dig into the mechanism. Why does sin() create a wave? Why does normalising a vector matter? Explanations that satisfy a five-year-old reveal true comprehension.

L2 Understanding
03 — PRACTICE
🔁
Variation before repetition

Don't copy an example once and move on — vary it. Change a parameter, break it deliberately, add a feature. Each variation is a micro-experiment that crystallises the rule from the exception.

L3 Practice
04 — PRACTICE
💥
Embrace errors as data

An error message is the most honest feedback loop in programming. Read it carefully, form a hypothesis, test it. A debugger is a hypothesis-testing machine. Every crash teaches you something a tutorial cannot.

L3 Practice
05 — APPLICATION
🏗️
Build things nobody asked for

Assigned projects teach you to pass. Personal projects teach you to think. The gap between spec and vision is where real problem-solving happens. Constraints you invent are constraints you own.

L4 Application
06 — APPLICATION
🔗
Connect across domains

The dot product that computes lighting is the same operation that measures similarity in a recommendation engine. Vectors that describe 3D position also describe word meaning in language models. Pattern-matching across domains accelerates everything.

L4 Application
07 — MASTERY
📢
Teach it to learn it

The fastest path to mastery is explanation. When you explain a concept clearly to someone else — or write a tutorial, or build a visual demo — you expose every gap in your own understanding. The pyramid becomes a cycle: teaching creates new exposure.

L5 Mastery

The pyramid applied to this course

Each lesson in Studio C deliberately moves you through multiple levels.

LessonExposurePracticeApplication
Comp. Thinking Study the four CT pillars Play Rock Paper Scissors — see the algorithm live Design your own algorithm for a novel problem
Machine Learning Read how MNIST works Draw digits and watch the model predict them Modify the architecture, retrain, compare accuracy
Vectors & Algebra Study notation and formulas Manipulate vectors in the interactive demo Implement a physics simulation using vector addition
Shaders & GLSL Read the fragment shader code Tweak uniforms in the live demos Write a shader from scratch: distance field, noise, lighting