“Where do I even begin?
People often get stuck on the question: “Where do I even begin?” In better cases, they talk about their studies or work; in worse cases, they start with kindergarten and launch into endless reminiscing.
My situation is different. I have a separate menu section about my schools, experiences, and work — that’s my resume. And naturally, there’s another one about my life. These are those short stories — my fragments — through which I tell everything about myself — yes, the darker parts, too. Because everyone has that side as well, it just doesn’t usually look good in an “about me” section.
So what do I want to talk about here? My future. Something almost no one talks about when introducing themselves.
Learning effortlessly
I always loved learning, but I just never had to study. I’d read something, and it would stick. I’d hear something and could recall it precisely later. I’d go somewhere and could find my way back without any trouble. (At ten years old, in a city of two million, this wasn’t exactly a small feat.) My anatomy professor at university was the first to say this was a gift, that I should live with it. He told me about a former classmate who would flip through the textbook before an exam and just say: “I’m taking photos.” It worked similarly for me. Sometimes I could literally see the textbook page in front of me, even the page number, and I just had to “copy it down.” But only if the topic interested me, though even so, this helped tremendously during my school years.
Perhaps thanks to this lucky gift, I saw early on how terrible the methods were that they tried to teach us with. And how much it matters what kind of teacher you have. A good teacher can work miracles, even with a flawed curriculum. One of my favourite teachers — a laid-back, funny guy who spent his summers playing piano in bars — taught literature so well that even the weakest student looked forward to his classes. I had a young English teacher with whom we translated song lyrics and played role-playing games. What did they have in common? Playfulness, entertaining delivery. They didn’t explain — they led us to what we needed to know.
And of course, there was the other extreme too: the English teacher retrained from Russian, who imagined exam preparation as rules and charts written on the blackboard. The biology teacher who recited the book word for word, and if we asked questions, repeated the book’s sentences.
Would e-learning be the solution?
In the early 2000s, I first encountered online education. At the time, I was working as a Flash developer — I wasn’t moving pictures around, I was writing ActionScript code. We created animations for Sulinet. The math and physics exercises we created had professional knowledge in them, but they were boring. Still, working on them was interesting. They showed that you “could teach differently” too.
Later, when I moved to Malaysia, I got a job at an e-learning company. There, I first came into direct contact with teachers (Subject Matter Experts — SME), and we argued a lot about what was feasible from a programming perspective and what wasn’t. I saw tons of ideas, and experienced firsthand what actually works and what doesn’t. This was when I first heard the word “gamification” too. And though I didn’t engage with it enough then (which was a mistake), I made up for it later.
Those years fundamentally influenced my future. At the time, my English was still mainly limited to reading and writing, like many people who learned the language in school. That’s why I created my first educational application for myself. It wasn’t special, and it was missing exactly what could have made it truly useful: enjoyment, playfulness. During development, though, I stumbled upon a new term: “microlearning.”
I started an Instagram and YouTube channel called As Easy As PIE. I presented English idioms through sitcom scenes, analysing short 10-30 second clips. The YouTube channel is still up and running today, though I haven’t posted in years. But I lost my Instagram page in 2021. I can’t log in, so I can’t upload new posts either. The follower base was 110 thousand at that point — by now it’s dropped to about 80 thousand.
And now?
Over the years, I’ve completed a few books about English idioms, and I’m currently writing about a new approach to teaching verb tenses. In early 2025, I completed a 3-month Digital Content Creator training. That’s when I decided to stake my future on curriculum development. I obtained an English teaching certificate and also enrolled in a teacher training course (PG Diploma in Pre and Primary Teacher Training Course, Asian College of Teachers), and in the future, I want to teach mathematics and robotics, while also building my own courses.
My goal is to show that you can teach a child more in a few weeks than they currently learn in an entire school year.
Learning playfully, imperceptibly
Let’s look at how English is taught in schools today. On the appropriate textbook page, there are pictures of different colored objects with the English words next to them. Students listen to the pronunciation, then repeat the colours. The teacher writes the words on the board, and the kids write them in their vocabulary notebooks. Later, come practice exercises: colouring, line drawing, matching. The goal is for children to recognise the words, learn to write them, and associate them with the corresponding Hungarian word. Learning is centred on recitation and memorisation, not on experience and usage.
In contrast, an experience-based digital learning situation works completely differently. A colourful, cluttered room appears on screen — toys, furniture, clothes, food and animals everywhere. The task seems simple: find something that’s red. The program both writes and says this: “Find something red!” The child doesn’t yet understand what “red” means, but this isn’t an obstacle. First, they click on something — let’s say a green ball. Wrong. Then a blue toy. Wrong again. The program’s feedback is playful and encouraging, not fault-finding. After many attempts, they finally find a red apple. This time, the feedback is positive: joy, sound, animation. Something happens then: the word “red” becomes associated with a feeling, an experience, a visual pattern. The child didn’t translate it. They understood it.
At the next similar task, they react faster. With each attempt, they become more confident. They know the situation. They recognise the sound. The meaning of the word becomes more firmly rooted — not as a word, but as experience. Not just “red” — other words also slip in without notice: “find,” “something,” “good,” “try again.” They didn’t learn them — they used them.
There was no need to explain the word’s meaning. No need to write it in a vocabulary notebook. No need to memorise. This learning isn’t external coercion, but internal construction. Not a direct explanation, but a gradual realisation. Learning happened through trial and error, at their own pace, through experience and play.
This mechanism — reward-based learning — might be familiar from elsewhere, too. In artificial intelligence, we call this “reinforcement learning,” and we know it can be more effective than supervised, rule-based learning. This is how we teach robots to walk, how we teach systems to create strategy. Yet when it comes to humans, we seem to forget this principle. Why don’t we teach them this way, too?”