I’ve been thinking about curiosity, because for me it’s a powerful driver for learning. It gives a clear “why” to start with something, in the pursuit of understanding or of the novel ideas that show up along the way into the unknown.

In his book Curious, Ian Leslie highlights three things that shape how curious we feel about a subject: knowledge, surprise, and confidence. Each has a sweet spot. Take knowledge. If you know nothing about a subject, you can’t engage with it. But the more you know, the more intense your curiosity gets about what you don’t know yet, especially if you sense the gap is worth filling. And if you already feel you know everything worth knowing, curiosity disappears. Surprise and confidence work the same way. Too little of either and you check out. Too much and you stop looking.

This is why I keep coming back to analogies. I used them constantly when I was learning for myself and when I was teaching students who were becoming software testers. A good analogy taps into something the learner already knows, which is exactly what Leslie’s knowledge variable needs to fire.

My go-to was the car. Most people have some relationship with one, even if it’s just sitting in the passenger seat. It became a running joke in the classroom, because I’m not particularly interested in cars myself.

But it works. Think about how you’d quality check a car during manufacturing. You test the small parts in isolation first. Then you test parts integrated with each other. Later in the process you evaluate the car as a whole against different quality characteristics. That’s almost the entire shape of how you test a software system. You can stretch the same analogy to explain front-end versus back-end, regression versus exploratory testing etc.

What I think was actually happening, in Leslie’s terms, is that the analogy moved students into the sweet spot on all three variables at once. The car gave them enough knowledge to engage. The mapping from car to software surprised them a little. And recognizing the parallel gave them just enough confidence to keep going.

That’s the part I want to remember as a teacher and a learner. A good analogy isn’t a teaching trick. It’s a way of placing someone in the exact spot where they’re most likely to want to know more.