Mike Clark

While teaching my Test-Driven Development with JUnit workshop, I hand out red and green pipe cleaners. One of their purposes goes with the JUnit red and green bar theme: You can hold up a green one to let me know that something I said really touched an area deep inside your brain or a red one to let me know that I need to backtrack so I don't lose you. It has proven to be a fun way to get feedback.

Another purpose of the pipe cleaners is to keep the hands of the kinesthetic learners engaged while the auditory learners are listening and the visual learners are watching. The workshop includes lots of hands-on exercises (it's a workshop) so that everyone learns by doing, but as a kinesthetic learner I know how important it is to fidget with something during the lecture parts of training. Indeed, although it may appear that they're not paying attention, making shapes out of pipe cleaners actually heightens the concentration of kinesthetic learners.

Just before the holidays, I had an opportunity to teach TDD to a great group of folks at Lands' End. When the last question had been answered at the end of two days, Ann had brought many of our names to life in red and green. The final touch was a Christmas tree and candy canes. She had also completed all of the hands-on exercises, usually before anybody else. It became a running joke that Ann couldn't sit still without those pipe cleaners, and I suspect she wouldn't have learned as much either.