I love teaching

Posted on October 8 at 19:10 (UTC)

pic somewhat related (I thought it had different text before I looked it up)

I just had another class with kids from Moscow. I was harassing one of them about the nature of variables in Gamemaker and why some of them are highlighted green and some of them are green and some of them are purple (see screenshot for example)

the reason is that some (green ones) are the properties that objects in gamemaker naturally have, while others (purple ones) are defined in code by the developer.

However, he had trouble remembering that ! and instead of saying that ! he made a mistake and said that it's the purple ones that are gamemaker's own, cause they are actually real (rus. "реальные"), unlike the green ones !

and like immediately I knew what it was about. I asked him if he had hovered his cursor over one of them before and if it said "real" when he did that. Here is what I'm talking about:

And he confessed that he did!! I knew it!!!! I can't blame him though, it would be easy for him to assume that "real" meant more of an "existing" variable because real numbers in english are not etymologically related to real numbers in russian at all!!! and of course he has never heard about real numbers in the first place he's like 12 come on

but anyway that gave me something to chuckle lightly at (no offense to him though he's doing so well in my classes!!!) and an opportunity to yap to him about the types of numbers and what "real" actually means

so there's that :)