I successfully completed my week 2 basketball challenge. I practiced three days for 3 drills. After accomplished my tasks, I had a great feeling of sense of achievement. Here is the data about the results of my each drill.
| 3-pointers | Jump Shots | Layups | |
| Day 1 | 31/80 | 36/80 | 68/80 |
| Day 2 | 50/80 | 52/80 | 70/80 |
| Day 3 | 48/80 | 41/80 | 71/80 |
I had the lowest performance in the first day. It is understandable since I haven’t touch basketball for quite a long time. But the second day, my score for each of the drills were improved significantly. However, for the third day, the number of shots made went down slightly. After a week, I found that the best time for me to practice in a day is starting at 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM. This is because having lunch right after 2 hours of training can make me feel good. Also, during that period in the summer, there are few people in CARSA basketball court. So I can execute my training plan mostly without other players’ interference. The most difficult part of my training is shooting both Jump shots and 3-pointers. Performing layups is relatively easy as the success rate is obviously higher than other two. I am considering if I need to increase the difficulty level of layups in my training.
Here is one of the videos I watched that teaches shooting 3-pointers.
Changing habit is hard
“Learning is changing your mind about something”. When I was practicing shooting jump shots, I found that my hands’ gesture were wrong comparing to what the coach taught in the video. But I already had a habit to shoot in the wrong way. This reminds me of the riding-a-backward-bike example. The guy tried to learn how to ride a backward bike for approximately 8 months. After he mastered riding a backward bike, he surprisingly failed to ride a normal bike. The guy in the video says that ‘truth is truth, no matter what [people] think about it’. He wants us to learn that we should be careful about how we interpret things, as we are looking at the world with bias. It also shows that the way of integrating new knowledge to old knowledge is a very difficult process. Changing my style of shooting is much more difficult than learning a new shooting skill. This is the reason why learning is difficult as I have to change my previous shooting form to a better one in order to increase my rate. Moreover, this requires lots of self-awareness as I was practicing basketball alone. No one can point out the mistakes I made.
Misconception
Before the guy started learning the backward bike, he had felt riding that bike should had been easy. He had felt that just thinking in the opposite way theoretically would make him able to ride that bike. However, it actually took him 8 months to learn how to ride that backward bike. He made an misconception between what he thought and what actually was. I also had misconceptions about basketball shooting. One of the misconceptions I made in shooting basketball is that if players jump off hard, they can shoot well. This is because when I watch NBA players shoot, Almost all the good shooters jump very high. However, when I was actually shooting, I found that jumping off hard doesn’t really matter. The most important thing for shooting well is balance.
Combination of teachings methods is useful
After reading Bate’s chapter 3, I think that I need to combine a variety of teaching methods to apply to my basketball learning. it is necessary to provide “a rich enough learning environment for a full range of skills to be developed within the subject area” (Bates, 3). However, being a basketball learner, I basically self-teach all the skills. So providing myself with a rich enough learning environment can help me improve much faster. I will not merely watch YouTube video to learn basketball. I am planning to read basketball skill online articles, watch YouTube videos, and ask some better players how to play better. I will try to talk to people on the basketball court to ask them for advice. In this way, I will practice, watch videos, read articles, discuss with other players, and constantly give my self feedback, by using media, social, and conceptual knowledge. I think this can be a decent learning style in current digital age.
Apply agile to learning
One of the ideas mentioned in Chapter 4 about agile design also inspired me for planning my basketball challenge. The main point of being agile is being able to handle changes in this “volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world” (Bates, 4). In order to apply the idea of agile to my basketball learning, I need to respond rapidly to the environmental changes. For examples, if my legs get injured one day, I am not able to attend normal training. Instead, I can do some other workout to train my arm muscle and wrist muscle, which enhances my shooting strength. Also, since my normal training location is on the second floor in CARSA building, if the basketball court is used for other activities that are conflicted with my training time, my schedule was forced to change. To cope with this situation, I can go to other basketball courts to train myself. Lastly, if I find the current 80-shots schedule is too easy for me at some time in the future, I can increase the difficulty of my drills by turning them to 120-shots drills. Therefore, I will be constantly changing the content of my drill if environment force me to do, but the core skill should remain constant, which is improving both my shooting and layup skills.
An interaction way of learning basketball
The definition of interaction that Ellen Wagner proposed inspired me a lot. I come up with an idea to create interaction learning between me and YouTubers in playing basketball. There are lots of basketball coaches using YouTube to promote their teaching through videos. When I watch a shooting tutorial on YouTube, if I have any questions about the topic, I can leave a comment beneath that video asking the coach some questions. If the coach found my question is worth thinking about and he replies me with his answer (hopefully). The interactions of learning formed between me and the coaches. Also, if other people watch the same video, seeing my comments, they can give feedback to my comments by replying me. In this way, the interactions between the coach, other people, and me are formed. It is certainly reciprocal and having more than two objects and more than two actions. We are also mutually influencing others in this way.
References:
Erik Yu 
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