I didn’t have much time during the week to do anything Flutter related, just because work and school have both been pretty intense lately. I’ve shared my struggle video with students, though, and I’m seeing some relief from them when they find out that I’m going through some of the same frustrations that they deal with during their learning process. If there’s one thing I know from repeated experience it’s that being open about our own struggles and failures is a gift to our students because it doesn’t leave them thinking that learning should be easy, or that struggling is the same thing as not being good enough.
I knew I could go back through the videos to work my way through the assignment, but I’ve always found that there’s a lot of value in doing things the “hard way”. So instead of looking for help immediately, I used my notes and went through the app I’d built step by step with the online course (Learn Flutter & Dart to Build iOS & Android Apps, my Maximilian Schwarzmüller), wrote up a quick plan for how I thought things needed to work and link up, and then sat with it, and struggled along making progress, fixing one problem and creating 5 more in its place, and spinning my wheels more than just a little. That’s what you can see in the video.
But as I struggled, and consulted Google, and probably gave myself a few new forehead creases, I identified the things that I didn’t understand yet. Once I realized where the gaps in my understanding were, I went to other sources to look for more information, and I found another tutorial to work through a different project (Write Your First Flutter App, Part 1), this one text based.
It may have taken me less time to build this assignment if I’d just gone straight back to the videos, but I think fighting with the code a bit helps you retain the information you use to break it down and understand it better. In this specific case, I found that the time I spent trying to solve the problems myself made the videos make a lot more sense to me the second time, and help me to understand the parts that I’d just accepted as necessary the first time around. In short, I now understand why each step in following the step-by-step app was important, and I think this is very valuable for me in terms of building on what I’ve now learned.
And I even got a bit creative! The requirements for this first “assignment” in the Udemy course were simple:
- Create an app with an app bar (the colored bar at the top of the screen), a text region, and a button that makes the text change when it’s clicked.
- Separate this into three separate files, one for the main app, one for the text box, and one for the function that changes the text when the button is pressed.
When I finished, I took it a bit farther and did a little digging to find out how to add a photo to the app, and then how to style the text in the various widgets to make it look more interesting. In the end, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I feel more confident about my ability to tackle the next difficult step in the process!