Keep Learning to Feel Happy

Shaan Miranda, Year 4

Shaan Miranda, a Year 4 student, is an enthusiastic learner who believes that the potential of the human brain is limitless, and you can teach yourself anything if you’re focused and passionate about it. In this article, Shaan explains how learning something new can act as a great boosting factor for happiness and wellbeing.

Learning a new skill

In Year 3, I got introduced to something really interesting. It was this exciting new coding language called Scratch! This language was like magic! Using this we could do things like create new objects, change the colour of that object and moving them left, right, up and down. I was totally fascinated by this new found knowledge and I found myself exploring it more and more everyday making use of most of my free time. I taught myself so many new things. By the end of the year, I had learned more than the teachers had taught me and guess what? I actually made my own small games on Scratch! Eventually, I was invited to a competition related to coding. One of the topics was to create something to spread awareness about pollution which I found really interesting. I needed a target audience and who better than children who are the future of the world and who play a big role in saving the world we live in. Children love to play games and love superheroes. With this I thought I could build an interesting game using Scratch to convey the message. I came up with a simple concept where the game player becomes the Superhero who cleans the all the oceans to free them from pollution. I was proud of myself that I could achieve this using all the knowledge I had gained by learning Scratch.

Being my own teacher

Learning = Happiness

So think about it, in the span of a few months I taught myself about something which was totally new to me and in the process had this sense of satisfaction. I felt good about myself and became aware of the endless potential of the human brain. You can learn anything that you set your heart on.

And here's something elselearning new things has been shown in the research to help improve and maintain our wellbeing. It can boost self-confidence and self-esteem, help build a sense of purpose, and foster connection with others. So I want to say that if a new activity or learning a new skill makes you happy, pursue it further and see the joy, satisfaction and sense of wellbeing it brings to you.