Introduction

cThink is a multisensory learning tool that uses a learning assessment and the D.A.B. method — Draw ✏️, Act 🎭, Build 🔧 — to help learners simplify technical concepts and retain them through association building. Inspired by real classroom experiences in the South Bronx and lessons with his young son Elijah 👶, Software Engineer and former Technical Instructor Heriberto Roman set out to address a common challenge: learners at every age struggling to process and retain abstract programming ideas. cThink answers that challenge by making the learning process visual, auditory, and kinesthetic — which accelerates understanding and boosts memory retention.

How It Works

• 🧠 Assess it – learners complete a short, low-stakes learning assessment that gauges their prior knowledge and surfaces misconceptions. This helps tailor the D.A.B. experience to their needs. Our learning assessment uses Bloom’s Taxonomy (Revised Version) to quickly diagnose conceptual gaps and VARK-style prompts to identify learning preferences — allowing us to tailor the Draw, Act, Build experience to each user’s needs.
• ✏️ Draw it – Learners create visual representations of a concept, focusing on key parts rather than syntax. This simplifies complexity — a core abstraction skill.
• 🎭 Act it – Embodying or role-playing a technical idea forces learners to identify what matters most in a process. It encourages simplified, real-world analogies.
• 🔧 Build it – After conceptualizing and simplifying, students implement a solution — just like how abstraction leads into writing code or building models.

This step-by-step approach activates the brain’s hippocampus — the region responsible for long-term memory — by combining context, repetition, and multisensory engagement. Rather than relying on rote memorization, learners build personalized mental anchors that help transfer knowledge from short-term to long-term memory.

Key Points

• 🧠 Built on the science of memory retention
• 🎨 Supports Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic learners
• 🧒 Perfect for both young coders and adult beginners
• 📚 Based on the abstraction principle of computational thinking
• 💻 Reinforces coding concepts with real-world connections