This post is not about the raw quantities of documentation I’ve been reading or how cool the technology is… it’s about a long-held interest of mine in how learning happens.
The iPhone Application Programming Guide does not explain the language, the framework, the device, or tools. However, it assumes knowledge of the aforementioned topics and stitches them together into high level concepts. I spent the past week cramming on all the other tedious details leading up to this point, and now I’m flying through the rest of the iPhone documentation.
Cocoa belongs to a family of object-oriented GUI frameworks that trace their lineage back to Smalltalk. This family includes older frameworks like Swing, Morphic, WinForms, and more recent frameworks such as Flex and Silverlight/WPF. Henry Sowizral taught me this; and, for several years, I’ve paid attention to the common inflection point in these frameworks where “play time”, or “getting into the flow” begins. Preconditions for a playful experience seem to require…
- Memorizing a few basic rules and internalizing them into a mental model
- Practiced ability to iterate quickly without conscious thought: feedback loop + muscle memory + internalized mental model
- Immediate contextual information that fills in gaps in the mental model during active learning: code sense, tooltips, contextual documentation, quick jump to reference documentation
My brain wants to barf up all the information crammed into it over the past few days, but the memorization bottleneck has receded. We’re entering “play time” now.
There’s a particular movie scene from The Matrix that I associate with the feeling of getting over the tedious hump of *memorizing* and finally reaching that inflection point of *doing*. It’s quite a rush when you can slot a new model into your reality and start using it.
More to come…
[...] Wan writes about preconditions for a playful experience or how to prepare to “get in the flow.” He highlights 3 related [...]
Great post Sam! I’m so glad to see you blogging again. I love the Matrix reference.. it presents well how it feels to apply new-found knowledge. Neo seems to delight in his first time application of his kung fu skills; while Morpheus displays the confidence and ease that comes with experience. Morpheus points out how Neo shows adaptation and improvisation — Neo’s skills are heightened, not only by his own experience, but by the experience of learning from interacting with a master.
I’ve written up a few reflections about preparing to get into the flow here: http://www.ultrasaurus.com/sarahblog/2009/02/preparing-to-get-in-the-flow/