Intended lesson of exercises should be clear up-front

[shebang]

I’ve noticed with each of the language tracks I’ve tried thus far, that once a solution is published for certain exercises it will subsequently display a popup dialogue stating what the exercise was intended to teach.

For example on the Elixir track, when initially submitting a solution for the “Word Search” exercise, it says that you just learned about List Comprehensions. That’s all well and good provided the student used List Comprehensions to solve the problem. In reality there’s often more than one way to do it, and that may not have been the approach initially taken.

To my mind it would be more helpful to state what the exercise is intended to teach up-front, so that the student can use that approach/method/library/etc from the outset and not waste time going down a dead-end, or using an alternate technique which won’t provide the intended benefit of the lesson.

Make of this what you will, but I figured it’s worth pointing out regardless.

[mk-mxp]

Hi @shebang,

looks like you are doing the “learning exercises” without using the “learning mode”. In “learning mode”:

a graph helps learning concepts of the language and suggests exercises to practice those concepts:

These concepts are the things you get shown after the exercise is finished. And so you should be introduced to the concept before doing the exercise.

But as much in Exercism is optional, you can also just select exercise after exercise from the “Overview” oder “Practice” tabs…

[IsaacG]

I believe Word Search is a practice exercise, not a concept/learning exercise. The topics associated with practice exercises are … very loosely coupled. The practice exercises aren’t intended to teach anything. Specific topics link to then as exercises where you might be able to practice a topic. But, as you mentioned, practice exercises can be solved many ways and the topics associated with the exercise aren’t necessary to solve the exercise.