The effectiveness of an explicit instruction first approach is rooted in the need to lower the cognitive load on student working memory to enable information transfer to the long-term memory for automatic access. For instance, understanding spin qubits (Supplementary Note 4) urgently needs pedagogically sound quantum computing instruction . Performing inquirybased learning first followed by explicit instruction has been found to overload the working memory of students as it requires answers to questions that are inaccessible to the student .