what Marc said...
We were recently at a conference, and everyone had to describe their work in 3 words. I said "brain friendly learning". It turns out that if you read one of our books you're part of our experiments in "brain friendly learning". In the Head First books we have the opportunity to talk about what we think "brain friendly" means, and we get to try a bunch of different techniques. With the K&B book we're pretty restricted from a format perspective, so we use whatever techniques we can fit into that book format.
The key
word here is "experiment"! We think we might have taken a step or two, but the concept of "brain friendly learning" is huge, and we're just at the beginning.
We believe that it's possible to make learning easier, and one of our focii (?) is making a distinction between the mind and the brain. One of our theories is that while a learner's mind might be VERY interested in learning a topic like
Java, the same learner's brain and brain chemistry is actively trying NOT to learn Java. The brain doesn't think Java is life threatening. So we are working on ways to get brains engaged while learning technical topics (we assume most of our reader's minds are already interested
).
so...what Marc said (only for us it's about the brain, not the mind)
[ March 23, 2006: Message edited by: Bert Bates ]