Last night, my sister asked me to help her with her homework. Of course i said okay because it is sixth grade homework. So we sat down and i looked at her homework. She had to color all of these shapes that represented fossils. They were different shapes and diffrent colors. The directions said that there were 5 different shapes and then there were a ton of pieces for each color (red, green, yellow, and blue). She was then asked to put them in order from simplest to most complex by shape. As i sat there for ages with my dad and sister for what seems like forever we were still stumped on what to do. My sister kept telling me that one shape, that was a diamond with a square inside was simpler than the figure 8 shape. I kept saying the figure 8 shape was the simplist. Then i said to my dad, ok i'm goin TOK on you but who says what is simple. I told my sister that we could argue forever but we would need to come up with a definition for simple. This was when i thought to put this on the boards. How do you know what is simple versus what is complex? For this project, what should be called simple, something that my 6th grade sisters says or somthing i say is overall simple? How can we define simple?

School Trinity High School

I guess our perception of what's "simple" and "complex" changes according to the more knowledge that we acquire. As we learn more, things that used to be considered complex can later be simple. However, things that we would define as simple could be initially considered complex. An example of this would be "over-analyzing." Being high school students, we have more knowledge and we're used to challenging questions that demand analyzing and solving based on the facts. But if we're confronted with a problem or a question that we could do with the knowledge we had as 5th graders, what we would now consider "simple," a lot of students would just reject and try to figure out why it "seems easy, but really isn't."

This reminds me of all of the experiment that was conducted where children were asked hypothetical questions like "how do you put a giraffe into a refrigerator?" and they answered "open the refrigerator, insert the giraffe, and close the door." The first time I was asked that question, I was thinking of some kind of punch-line that would match it when all along the answer was completely straight-forward.

Regarding the shapes, personally I would just judge them based on how easy each one is to draw, but that's based on my perception of whether it is easy to draw or not. I don't know if the way I would organize them today would match the way I would organize them 8 years ago. However, 8 years ago, I never would have thought that what makes a shape easily draw-able(?)would vary from person to person and that in some cases, the accuracy of your drawing of the shape plays into the decision. You could say a circle is a simple shape because it'a basic shape that anyone can draw, but someone else could argue that it's complex because it's hard to draw a perfect circle, that all the points on the line around the point are an equal distance away from the it

banana

I agree with hammy, although this comment may seem stupid in your eyes, it actually symbolizes a deep thought of uttermost simplicity and innocents from a child’s eyes. Although you might think that “banana” is a childish comment, this comment is from a person trying to act as from a child’s perspective of life. What the child may think as being complex you might think is simple.
Going back to your question, the reason why your sister chose the slightly more complex shape is because she is not blinded by what teachers and the world has told her to be the simplest shape. Just like the banana…. It’s just like the complex shape, everything is different for every one because people have been exposed to various things in life. ok.

School Isk