Presentations about learning are generally taught by psychologists and educators with little insight into or personal experience with mastering difficult STEM subjects. Not this presentation. Professor of Engineering and IEEE Fellow Barbara Oakley, a New York Times best-selling author and instructor of Learning How to Learn (University of California-San Diego – Coursera), the world’s largest massive open online course, delves deep into the brain to give you practically useful information about how you—and your children—can become experts in your chosen subjects.

• Learn from a neuroscientific perspective why it’s perfectly normal to not understand something difficult the first time you encounter it.  You’ll see how to leverage your knowledge of how your brain works to do better on tests and to inoculate yourself (and the children in your life) against feelings of frustration and failure when something seems difficult to learn.
• See what the patterns of expertise look like in the brain, and learn how to build those patterns more quickly and with less frustration.
• Discover simple tools to tackle procrastination. (You might be surprised to learn that even just thinking about something you don’t like causes your brain to experience pain.)
• Learn the surprising advantages of having a bad memory and sometimes being a slower learner.