"a well-known fact"
Actually this is a fairly subjective finding, and it is not
a bad idea to work out the difference between a 'fact'
(as in "this concrete is hard, as you will see if you hit it with your
first")
and widely held beliefs which may later prove to be erroneous.
"Cognitive Load" is a theory, and NOT a collection of facts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_load
" Evidence has been found that individuals systematically differ in
their processing capacity."
So, while one might have a modal workload the categorical boundaries are
had to define
and largely unquantifiable.
Smaller MAY, generally be better, but NOT always; this very much depends
on the person who is working
with something.
There is a tendency to treat the human brain as a super-computer, but
this is, in all probability, a confusion
of kinds which may lead to a complete misreading of both how minds work
and how computers work.
"7 bits/sec"
So, you would reduce the human brain/mind to the level of a binary
computer: I wonder how those
"bits" were measured.
"so the less cognitive load is needed by step 1 above, the more remains
available for the other steps..."
Well that rests on an unproven presupposition that the human brain/mid
works in steps (again because of the
odd equation brain= fancy computer); while it may not; it may work
holistically, assessing a whole situation all at once.
I find that teaching children (7-14) LiveCode produces rapid results, as
does teaching them BBC BASIC (they love my BBC Micro
computer). Supposedly LiveCode should present less of a cognitive load
than BASIC: well it would if the two methods of
GETTING COMPUTERS TO DO SOMETHING allowed one to GET THE COMPUTERS TO DO
THE SAME THING, but they don't,
they are two totally different ways of interacting with computers that
were developed at different historical periods for
rather different jobs, so comparing them is probably a waste of time.
Oddly enough, children generally find this exercise:
Get the computer to produce a table of the first 10 digits, their
squares and their cubes on-screen.
considerably easier in BBC BASIC than in LiveCode. It generally takes
them 5 to 10 minutes with BASIC,
with LiveCode they find that the GUI "gets in the way".
While (not oddly at all) they wouldn't know how to begin (and nor would
I) how to do this with BASIC:
Produce a blue square, 200 x 200 pixels, with a button titled "Press Me"
in the middle.
Mason, Cooper, et al. attempt 'Assessing Cognitive Load in Mobile App
Development Environments' which is,
after all, very much a subset of computer-programming.
They compare 5 programming "environments" (I'm using those quotation
marks to point out that they are
NOT comparing GUI-based IDEs with more 'traditional' programming
methods, such as BASIC) that all, to a lesser or greater
extent provide the programmer with a toolbox of premade objects, thereby
cutting out a very large part of any cognitive
apprenticeship that has, historically been required to attain competence
in programming.
I would argue that LiveCode, at least, does require quite a bit of
cognitive effort, at least at the start,
for programmers to understand how each of the premade controls/objects
functions, and how each of them
can be addressed to do what the end-user wants them to do. While
LiveCode allows programmers to bypass
a lot of 'stuff' that PASCAL. C++ and so on require a programmer to
know, it presents them with another
lot of 'stuff' which they have to know instead. The only thing that may
make LiveCode easier to acquire some
initial level of competence in is that the object-oriented visual
metaphor adopted by LiveCode is, in some ways, nearer
to the real world that what other, more traditional programming
languages present.
However, you will notice that I "argue", I don't present my subjective
experience working with school children as
'facts'.
Until about 1600 is was a "well-known fact" that the world was flat: but
I have a funny feeling that it wasn't and
that the world did not suddenly change shape when people started
believing it was vaguely spherical. Now that
people have gone up into space with rockets and taken photos of the
earth the argument seems to be over whether
the world "is" a sphere or an "oblate spheroid", and only nutty
fruitcakes believe otherwise:
https://www.tfes.org/
"So, Listen, I drive from coast to coast, and this shit is flat to me."
Dr. Shaquille O'Neal.
Anyone else wanting a doctorate can mail me $100 to the usual address
and with a week they will recieve a doctoral diploma
lovingly printed out from my laser printer :)
Well, I enjoyed myself this weeked; hope you all did :)
Richmond.
On 4/23/17 3:36 pm, jbv via use-livecode wrote:
On Sun, April 23, 2017 9:55 am, Richmond Mathewson via use-livecode wrote:
I'm not sure why smaller should necessarily be better.
It is actually, and the cognitive load approach, especially for
programmers newbies, is quite relevant.
Newbies have to deal with 2 or 3 things simultaneously :
1- the language itself
2- the programming "rules" (variables, loops...)
3- the program itself they're attempting to write.
It is a well-known fact that the workload that human minds can
process per unit of time is limited (AFAIR 7 bits/sec), so the
less cognitive load is needed by step 1 above, the more remains
available for the other steps...
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