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Tools first, 100%. People learn concrete things, and then they learn the abstractions. The abstractions are nearly useless by themselves. It's the reason that people learn addition before algebra before group theory. The people that say learn the "concept" first are just flat wrong.

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The problem is a) that observation shows that many people don't learn the abstractions after being taught the application (and thus can never teach themselves more applications) and b) that (perhaps) unlike in mathematics, an understanding of the concept makes the application a lot easier...

I agree but I would say mix the tool teaching with fundamentals. Let them bang away for an hour trying to make some simple change to their tool script, and then show them the principle that had they known about they could have solved their problem in 30 seconds.

Stoke in them the desire to invest regular time learning the fundamentals.

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