Tutorials

Quarles Table Lamp
Add farmhouse style to your home with this Quarles Table Lamp.

Is it a trend? Is it the latest fashion on how things should be made? What are tutorials? You probably heard about them, you probably even used them, but never thought of them as such.

Exaggerating of course, we could say even a food recipe is a tutorial. In common language a tutorial is something that teaches you how to do something, explaining all the steps of the process to you. In educational terms, a tutorial is a class made up of few students, in which a professor provides individual attention and information to them.

You must remember at school all those get together with other colleagues in which were you supposed to learn all sorts of things? Yes, that are tutorials. They can be groups from one or up to 20 students that supplement the information provided in class with the purpose of obtaining better information about something.

But lets be serious, nowadays this kind of tutorials are rather out of fashion. Since we all live in the internet and communication age, we can easily talk about a new kind of tutorials. Yes, the internet ones. They are documents or softwares, or any other media created for instructional purposes for a variety of tasks.

Tutorials have the next characteristics:

1. They are a presentation of the content of something, usually containing one or more examples, divided into sections, chapters and sub chapters to confirm a better understanding and organization of the content.
2. We can say they are methods of reviewing. They have the purpose of reinforcing or facilitating the understanding of the content in a specific section.
3. Next we can state that they are a transition to other modules and they are build on the instructions and information already provided.

It is important to know that not all tutorials are the same. They can organize information in different ways. Either linear or branched.

Now let us jump to computer education. In this field, a tutorial is a program made with the purpose of assisting users in the process of learning how to a software product or other applications, operating the system interface, learning how to use the programming tools or how to play a game. Yes, there are tutorials on games to, teaching you how to play. They are small peaces of the game in which someone tells you how to move, fight, drive or do whatever the game is about.

We can divide them into two kinds of tutorials: movie tutorials and interactive tutorials.the first are the tutorials you just watch and the second are those where you fallow instructions that appear on screen.

Now I bet you know what tutorials are, no?