Simply

I’m going through the parts of CSC 212 that completely crashed and burned on my first attempt, and which I didn’t get to when I reworked things on my own — it’s the sending of data from one Activity to Another, and soon the Saving Of STuff From One Session To Another.   Yea, it’s pretty much the difference between a Cute Exercise in How To Make an App and something that just *might* be usable by a person more than once to figure out these integer thigns.

I’m noticing a word showing up a lot in the bullet-point directions… might just do a count to see if it’s just a perception thing, or if the word’s being stuck in there more often.  The word is “simply.”

I’ve watched for that word for years — it’s a pet word of math teachers who think math is so so so exciting and awesome that it is beautiful and “simply.”

It’s oft applied to things that reveal themselves like water displacement to Archimedes — where ideas connect and *now* they’re simple… but … might not be, really.

What’s the fine line to guided “discovery”?   If I tell students that they “simply” have to invert the second fraction and multiply, I’ve just dumped the whole concept thing. The trick is to set up the brain to comprehend the conflict and the problem — create that “cognitive dissonance” — and then nuke it elegantly creating an improved model in the brain (so, with the fractions, bridging from “half of” being the same as “dividing by two” and making the connections between simple fraction concepts and more complicated ones).

Mainly, though, I’ve seen “simply” enough times to be nervous enough to want to go make a blog post … but now to get back to that.   Three more lessons until I’m basically *done* the app as far as the course goes… half a dozen other things I want to figure out…

… well, that — like the last time — just. didn’t. work.  I have a feeling it’s getting its name right — because it says “getClass().getSimpleName()”  and …  when I read other stuff about this, I just had to give it a name.

… why “listView” flops is either becasue it’s not getting any of that stuff … or something else… but I don’t need a ListView.   Going to go back to my app…

 

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