A technique used in computer science can be more useful in everyday problems than it seems. Notice how it works.
It is immersed to the neck on Ikea’s assembly instructions. Furniture pieces spread across the floor. Your new purchase is ahead, half -mounted, enjoying your lost hours.
“I did everything correctly! Look:
- Connect A B with the m1 screws
- connect B to C with the m3 screw using the key
- Add BC to D with… Wait. ”
Suddenly you realize that I had not gathered BC to D. It all starts to make sense (literally), and Voilà, is over.
It is a universal experience: The moment we try to explain a problem aloud, it all starts to fit.
Software engineers call this rubber duck debugging (rubber duck clearance). But where does this term come from and why is it so effective?
Vanish
This known term of software engineering originates in a story told in The Pragmatic Programmera book by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas.
The idea is simple: arrange a rubber duck And use it when your code doesn’t work-and you don’t know why.
Explain to the duck what your code should do, And then “Enter Detail and explain line by line.”
Soon comes the time of revelation: realize, when talking aloud, that what he intended to do and what he really did are two quite different things.
Despite its roots in the programming, The ideas that support this approach apply to both programmers and non-programming.
Why is it?
Most of us learn to think loudly early as we read the first books aloud. There is something revealing in Aloud articulate that helps “hear” the problem that our brain, until then, could not detect.
And investigations by US academics Logan Fiorella and Richard Meyer analyzed how the act of teaching others can enhance the learning.
Their experiences showed that when students learn the content of a class as if they would teach it to others-and then they really teach-they develop “a deeper and more lasting understanding of matter.”
Teaching obliges us to divide matter into conceptual parts, integrating it with what we already know and organizing it logically.
Its investigation also identifies “self -explanation” as a proven learning strategy.
This is why our little yellow friend is so useful; theExplaining the problem aloud to your rubber duck is also teaching it.
The rubber duck and its cute and empty face
But why a rubber duck? Well, talking to a human being can have certain limitations.
Humans are contextualbring with them previous thoughts and experiences; They may not notice your mistakes because they assume something about your previous attempts. They may have prejudices that prevent them from seeing where you fail.
A rubber duck, however, has none of that. As ridiculous as it may seem, the rubber ducking It forces him to explain things in detail to this (cute) face that looks back.
Of course it doesn’t have to be a duck. Any object (or even someone disinterested, as it happens many times) serves in case of tightening. Some researchers even argue to replace the duck with a language model like ChatgPT.
Argue that AI can “act as a virtual partner, Hyperintelligent and always present for a software engineer ”, helping to review the line to line to find errors – and suggest corrections.
Others experienced with modified rubber ducks Which, when loading a button, nod or give small neutral answers to the user’s explanations. Researchers argue that this interactivity can make people feel more comfortable talking to the duck.
Next time you are blocked a problem at work, suffering from creative block or trying to understand an endless email chain, try using a yellow duckling.
See if explaining your problem aloud helps you get to the answer.
