Building to learn with Dorai Thodla

This is part 2 of a repeat episode of one of my conversations, first published in 2019. Since then, we have crossed 200 episodes and the listenership has also grown.

Some of you have been asking how you can know more about some of the topics covered in recent episodes.

We felt that there could be related points shared by other guests in earlier episodes, but for new subscribers, it may not be easily discoverable.

So, we thought that we would bring you select past episodes from time to time, to discover more people and their stories.

Also, over time, the formats of the intro and show notes have also changed.

This conversation with Dorai Thodla is the second of two parts. The first part was published last week and Dorai spoke about his serial entrepreneurship experience and how he innovatively finds problems to solve etc. In this part he continues to share his thoughts and experience on:

• Helping students learn to code by starting with coding
• The joy of achievement when creating software that works
• And how reuse and other software engineering concepts may be introduced gradually to build larger solutions
• How a solution such as a bookstore can be used as an example to learn breaking the larger solution to smaller pieces that can be implemented incrementally
• Using the KWAC architecture - essentially, learning by watching someone - as an apprentice, where the instructor also shares the thought process behind what is being done
• Leveraging learning patterns among students, to learn in groups and each person guiding others
• About his experience from organizing hackathons and activating communities
• How he finds and manages time to do so many things and where he derives his energy and inspiration from

Dorai is the founder and CTO of Technology Strategies LLC, based in the United States. He is a mentor at KCG College of Technology Chennai. He is passionate about teaching students and mentors product startups. Dorai also gives talks on emerging technologies and their impact while consulting with companies on how to build tech communities. He believes in the paradigm of “building to learn” by encouraging teaching via “doing” so students see their learning transform into a product that extends around a complete stack.

Dorai lives in Chennai and spends time in the Bay Area and Seattle outside of India. He is currently involved with the following initiatives : 

Build2Learn ( http://www.build2learn.in/ )  and

InfoAssitants ( http://infoassistants.com/ ) – a set of tools for collecting and analyzing information.

Dorai can be reached via

[LinkedIn]( https://www.linkedin.com/in/doraithodla/ )

[@dorait]( https://twitter.com/dorait )