Learning and Pattern Recognition

The Observation

Recently, Apple released Flow Free on their Apple Arcade. I remember playing this game when I was younger, and decided to download it. Fast forward a few days, I find myself sitting for 30 minutes finishing level after level. My girlfriend (hi, thanks for reading) has played this game for a while, and she said "that doesn't look right" while I was playing. That comment started a cascade of thoughts in my head which I thought interesting enough to write about.

Patterns

By saying "that doesn't look right" without being able to articulate what looked wrong, means she either didn't recognize a pattern she expected to see, or she recognized a pattern that usually leads to needing to restart. I started to think about the power of pattern recognition and how it, ironically, leads to flow state. I can spend 30 minutes playing this game, and not put much thought into the 5x5 to 9x9 packs at the beginning of the game. I was curious, when I started playing this game I would get stuck and take a while to figure out the solution, but now a level takes me no more than 30 seconds in these packs. I slowed down and realized I play the game in a very particular way. I first look for colors to fill around the border and start working my way in. I also look out for a dot in the middle of a 3x3 grid, which usually indicates another color will loop around it. A color will loop around it if its direct path would intersect, which is not allowed. So, in under a second my brain is able to notice which colors will intersect and will need to loop around another, then accurately fill the board. As I move on to other packs with larger boards or different rules, I find that this pattern either transfers, or I get stuck for a long time.

Flow State

I am highly interested in flow state because there are a few times in my life I noticed I can get into a flow state, but I'm not sure exactly what causes it. Ideally, I would be able to flip a switch and enter such state to complete all sorts of tasks, ranging from school assignments to projects at work, to chores at home. Flow Free puts me in a flow state, I used to get into this state playing Nonogram (a.k.a. Picross), and I get into this state when I'm writing blog posts like this. I also get into a flow state when I have a hard deadline that I am about to meet, like when my school assignments would score a 0 if not turned in that night. I can spend all week looking at my screen and its impossible for my fingers to type out the essay, but at 10:00pm on a Sunday, I become the most efficient researcher and writer you've ever seen. So I thought about these 3 environments, 2 games with pattern recognition and 1 situation with enough stress and no way around it, and I tried to understand how its so easy to get lost for long periods of time.

Learning and Application

Learning is hard. Objectively speaking, learning a new thing requires active focus and attention. When I started playing Flow Free and Nonogram, I would get stuck, think through a problem, fail, think again, fail, think some more, find the solution. The next time, I would fail but I would find the solution a little faster. Then on average, I would get faster and faster until I reached a point where this speed increase plateaus. Once it plateaus, I enjoy the game for a little longer and eventually I stop playing it. There's a point right before the plateau where I find a sweet spot; the patterns I've learned and automated in my brain can be applied extremely quickly, but there are still times where I am in a situation that either the patterns don't apply, or the patterns actually cause me to head in the wrong direction, which requires me to tune the existing pattern. The more I think about it, the more I realize this is true. I enjoyed playing Factorio, but I restarted the game over and over. I started a world, then I started another world without enemies so I could just focus on the base, then I started another world with infinite ore so I could focus on the setup without running out of materials, then I started a new save with default settings again. Each time I restarted I got faster. By the most recent save, I was able to start with my coal snakes, smelting arrays, and start a mini main bus. I had a mall for belts and inserters, I had science automating at their correct ratios, and I had oil, blue science, expanded to new iron and coal deposits, had radars setup around the map, turrets + grenades to handle bugs, all without having any point where I couldn't research anything. In my infinite ore play-through, I spent a lot of time calculating ratios and figuring out mechanics, so I had no research going because I was slower than the game. Now, I found I was able to have my labs constantly running while I progressed my base. This iteration is what interests me, and it reminded me of this video I watched years ago Honers Vs. Innovators. According to this video, I am an honer. I don't come up with new fancy ideas, I build solid fundamentals and push them to their limits.

Teaching

Alright, so far I've rambled about learning patterns, applying them, and getting to the point where this process is almost subconscious in nature. So how can we apply this pattern to teaching? Yes, I am talking about figuring out the pattern and application to help people recognize patterns and apply them. Anyway, there is an element of personal discovery with learning. I can tell you a pan is hot, and I can tell you that you'll burn your mouth when you drink a hot beverage without letting it cool down. So why is it that everyone that I have ever talked to knows how it feels to burn your mouth when you gulp a hot drink, or how it feels when you burn yourself on a hot pan? Well, you can be told something but that doesn't necessarily mean you understand something. I was in a toxic relationship and someone told me that I was. I didn't believe it until I got out of it. That same person then got into a toxic relationship. I told them they were in one and they didn't believe it until they got out of it. Isn't that just the strangest concept? We can see something but we don't understand it for ourselves until we are actually in it? I want to be a strong teacher, ideally some day for my children that I hope to have, but also because I've always enjoyed teaching. I tutored for a long time, and I'm writing a blog post right now because I think it would be interesting for someone to read and learn from my thoughts. Teaching isn't just showing someone a bunch of information, telling them to remember it, then quizzing them on it later. I believe effective teaching is more like mentoring, where you gently nudge someone to follow a path. Think of a river, over time a river bends and curves, an effective mentor helps shape these bends as the river of your learning takes shape. So there's a balance between telling someone a pan is hot so they know a pan is hot, and letting them touch a hot pan so they understand what a hot pan feels like. In other words, it takes patience and a level of allowing for mistakes to happen. After all, if we learn best from mistakes then why are people so adamant on preventing them? Let people lose, let people fail, let people learn.