Priming¶

Priming is a central aspect of all warm-up techniques. It is a neuropsychological concept where a stimulus influences the response to a subsequent stimulus (see Priming on Wikipedia). Priming can be expressed as: “directing the attention of people to a particular field.” Priming helps your participants understand a concept or complete a task because the area of their brain responsible for that kind of problem is already active.

For instance, if you see a picture of a bicycle, and two minutes later someone asks you to name a vehicle, the response “bicycle” is a lot more likely. Your brain has already heated up its “bicycle” area.

What does that mean for teaching? Instead of using the first warm-up method that you come across, you can deliberately prime your participants towards the concept that you want to get across. Priming can be achieved by a rich variety of activities: questions, quizzes, practical examples, stories, videos and many more.

Priming Activities¶

Here are a few easy and fun activities that work for priming:

share short stories
show a brief video in the beginning of your lesson
show a cartoon, ask students to explain it. See xkcd.com or phdcomics.com
hand out a short program that does something impressive and ask people to run it
ask an open question and let participants chat with each other before collecting answers

In general, you can prime both on the theme (e.g. “bicycles”) and the topic (e.g. “time series forecasting”) of a lesson. I recommend priming the theme when introducing a longer project, and prime for the topic for a shorter lesson. The activities remain the same.